No Name in the Street

I can't talk about the book.

His father arrived on the scene when James was two. His mother stood between the children and the father. When King died, Baldwin was working on a screen version of the Malcolm X story. James Baldwin appeared with Martin Luther King at Carnegie Hall in a newly purchased black suit, and wore the black suit to the funeral two weeks later. Then he gave the barely worn suit to a friend. Baldwin observes that the French did not dare to think that the Algerian situation could be existentialist. When he went to France he went there to escape racism. He could live with Africans in Paris in comparative peace. Baldwin went to Paris with no money. He frequented Arab cafes. Baldwin could not undertand why Camus produced William Faulkner's REQUIEM FOR A NUN. James Baldwin claims that Faulkner is attempting to exorcise a history which is also a curse in his work. He argues that the cultural pretensions of history are nothing more than a mask for power. He knew by 1956 when he saw a picture of a school child being jeered by a crowd while seeking to integrate her school that he would be leaving Europe to return to America to take up the cause. Returning in 19576 he saw New York in a different way and went to the South. James Baldwin relates that he has always been struck in America by an emotional poverty. He says he really didn't know much about terror until he went to the South. In large ways and small Baldwin found the people in the Civil Rights Movement, facing Southern terror, heroic. Before his trip to the South the author had never seen the horror or the poverty. Malcolm X, unlike Frantz Fanon, operated in the Afro-American idiom. In 1968 James Baldwin was sharing a flat with is sister Paula and his brother David in London. He learned there of Malcolm's death. A former resident of Harlem, he distrusted the legend of Malcolm X until he had the opportunity to meet him. Uncomfortably, Baldwin came to realize later that in those years, in the fifties and sixties, he was a sort of great black hope of the great white father. Malcolm X considered himself to be the spiritual property of those who produced him. He was dangerous because he apprehended the horror of the black condition. Writing an epilogue in 1971 Baldwin noted that the book had been delayed by trials, assassinations, and funerals.

It seems strange that this crisp and concise essay is less known and less read than Baldwin's earlier collections. True, he is angrier, rawer, less forgiving here, and his earlier diplomatic hopefulness has given way to a deeply cynical and contemptuous view of American society. Yet, given the atrocities Baldwin, along with his friends and colleagues, personally witnessed and underwent during the years immediately preceding this book, his fury is, at the very least, understandable. Baldwin's recollections of the 1950s and 60s are not presented as linear narrative. Instead, he intertwines, among other topics: the cowardice of liberals during the McCarthy era; the French-Algerian conflict; his investigations and travels in the South; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (and his own reminiscences of them); his experiences in Hollywood with commercial filmmakers; his encounters with Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and the Black Panthers; his bemused reaction to the flower children in San Francisco; and his four-year battle to rescue his former assistant, Tony Maynard, from an arrest and conviction for a murder he didn't commit. (Maynard's conviction was overturned after this book was published.) The supporting cast of his friends and adversaries in these personal and societal struggles is a veritable who's who: Elia Kazan, William Styron, Fred Shuttlewsorth, Andrew Young, Harry Belafonte, Billy Dee Williams, Marlon Brando, Robert Kennedy. Baldwin's self-effacing willingness to reopen old wounds and expose the evidence of his own folly is still on hand here. He opens with an anecdote about a visit with a childhood friend in the south Bronx: his humorous and humiliating arrival in a limousine, the all-too-apparent difference between his own prosperity and his friend's meager (but contented) subsistence and his shameful condescension toward his friend's "job at the post office," and their explosive argument over the war in Vietnam. He also recounts his own naivety in a chronicle of his first traumatic exposure to Jim Crow laws in Montgomery: "It is not difficult to be a marked man in the South--all you have to do, in fact, is to go there." Baldwin admits to the impossibility of objectivity in his writing, comparing his task to Shaw's writing "Saint Joan": "he had the immense advantage of having never known her." And his account of two decades of struggle is by no means impartial. But I prefer this version of Baldwin, who no longer seems to care about kowtowing to the mostly white New Yorker readers who made up his audience for his earlier work. "No Name in the Street" is uncomfortably honest--and that bluntness lends the work a faithfulness to the spirit of the times.