New Ways to Kill Your Mother

How are you?

Once more James would have been proud, although it should be added that in his lifetime or in the years after his death he and his followers were not ever fully aware that what he was really doing was singing the blues.)

In 1959 also, in a paper called ‘Mass Culture and the Creative Artist’ given to a symposium, Baldwin concluded:

We are in the middle of an immense metamorphosis here, a metamorphosis which will, it is devoutly to be hoped, rob us of our myths and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our personalities. The mass culture, in the meantime, can only reflect our chaos: and perhaps we had better remember that this chaos contains life — and a great transforming energy.

He was, in these years, moving himself carefully to the centre of the debate, refusing a role, offered to him always, as spokesman for a minority, to be listened to only when that minority grew restive or dangerous or newsworthy.

During the 1960s, the voice Baldwin used in his journalism grew less ambiguous, however, more strident, especially when he was addressing a black audience. In a speech he gave to the Student Co-ordinating Committee in November 1963, after the Kennedy assassination, for example, he began:

Part of the price that Americans have paid for delusion, part of what we have done to ourselves, was given to us in Dallas, Texas. This happened in a civilized nation, the country which is the moral leader of the free world, when some lunatic blew off the President’s head. Now, I want to suggest something, and I don’t want to sound rude, but we all know that it has been many generations and it hasn’t stopped yet that black men’s heads have been blown off — and nobody cared. Because, as I said before, it wasn’t happening to a person, it was happening to a ‘nigger.’

Two years later, in an angry essay about black history, he saw no possibility of change, merely excuses for change.

In the meantime ladies and gentlemen, after a brief intermission — time out for one or two committee reports, time out for an antipoverty pep talk, time out to make a Vietnamese child an orphan and then lovingly raise him to love all our works, time out for a White House conference, time out to brief and augment the police forces, time out to buy some Negroes, jail some, club some, and kill some — after a brief intermission, ladies and gentlemen, the show begins again in the auction room. And you will hear the same old piano, playing the blues.

At other times, he seemed to be amusing himself by preaching to the white population, insisting that whites, in fact, were the group most in need of freedom from tyranny. In 1961 he wrote:

There is a great captive Negro population here, which is well publicized, and what is not known at all, is that there is a great captive white population here too. No one has pointed out yet with any force that if I am not a man here, you are not a man here. You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves.

In Playboy in January 1964 he wrote: ‘What I’m much more concerned about is what white Americans have done to themselves; what has been done to me is irrelevant because there is nothing more you can do to me. But, in doing it, you’ve done something to yourself. In evading my humanity, you have done something to your own humanity.’

In an essay called ‘The White Problem’, also published in 1964, he sneered at the icons of white America, insisting that the difference between white and black in America was close to the difference between foolishness and seriousness, childhood and maturity:

In this country, for a dangerously long time, there have been two levels of experience. One, to put it cruelly, but, I think, quite truthfully, can be summed up in the images of Doris Day and Gary Cooper: two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen. And the other, subterranean, indispensable, and denied, can be summed up in the tone and face of Ray Charles. And there never has been in this country any genuine confrontation between these two levels of experience.

In another essay from 1964, ‘Color and American Civilization’, he had more fun at the expense of the neuroses suffered by his white brothers and sisters:

The white man’s unadmitted — and apparently, to him, unspeakable — private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro’s tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveler’s checks, visits surreptitiously after dark… I cannot accept that proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of American civilization. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now… expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse.

Five years later, writing in The New York Times, he was at his most eloquent, insisting once more that the black population’s burden in the United States could not be changed by legislation but only by something more far-reaching in its implications — the total conversion of the white population, whose moral degeneration and distance from themselves he judged to be abject. ‘I will state flatly,’ he wrote,

that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long; the effect on their personalities, their lives, their grasp of reality, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs, and an intolerable violation of myself.

In his fiction, Baldwin sought a new freedom, a freedom to create characters as he pleased. His black characters did not have to be filled with stoical virtue to be destroyed by white forces. His novel Giovanni’s Room did not even have any black characters at all. Nor did his gay characters have their destiny worked out for them by history; he made them too interesting for that. In his journalism he sought to rewrite history before paying attention to politics. In an address to Harlem teachers in October 1963, he said:

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go some place else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That’s how the country was settled.

By 1979 his version of American history had become more alarmed. In an article for the Los