When he leaps from the George Washington Bridge, named for the supposed father of the country, it suggests one meaning of the novel’s title, that living black in America, you’re existentially in another country. The story opens with the central figure of Rufus, a black man wandering the streets at his final limit, after the accumulated years of racial abuse and sexual pain turn him against his own being. The streets feel racially inhospitable, as nameless figures murmur from benches about the interracial couples walking by, while the police look on with suspicion. Uptown Harlem is the sensual mixing space and downtown Greenwich Village, the refuge for same sex and interracial coupling. The novel’s stage is a Manhattan that brims with intense interracial interaction, the city’s jazz clubs like overheated hives of black-white sexual tension. For contemporary writers who strive to depict interracial relationships with depth and freedom from inhibition, Baldwin can continue to be the wise, guiding elder. Their tense dialogues on race, layered with explorations of gay sexuality, remain radical nearly 60 years later and a reminder of how timid these conversations can be today in spaces of liberal propriety. But the essential and enduring promise for these wounded characters is that, despite their defenses and denials, they speak and they witness each other’s wrenching racial truths. While blacks and whites might feel profoundly alien, Baldwin said, “y own experience proves to me that the connection between American whites and blacks is far deeper and more passionate than any of us like to think.” This precarious but deeply intimate condition is what he portrays with the racially and sexually intersectional cast of Another Country, whose members desire, fear, rage, play, betray, and possibly, do love.Īnother Country does not celebrate interracial love it suggests only its fragile possibility, showing a racial America stripped bare, often literally. Baldwin described this afflicted state in his essay collection Nobody Knows My Name. The drama of severely injured friendships and sexual relationships can be read as an allegory of a brutal struggle within America’s collective racial and sexual psyche. Baldwin was hardly suggesting the naïve idea that shared racial truth-bearing could defeat a centuries-old system of physical and institutional race violence, but instead that such an encounter must lie at the core of any possible reckoning.īaldwin’s Another Country, published in 1962, a year before The Fire Next Time, is the novel that plays out his conflicting visions of interracial intimacy. Just as often, he warned that white supremacy might ultimately undo America, as, historically speaking, it already had. If we - and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others - do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. But Baldwin also wondered whether interracial encounters could redeem the divide between black and white America. Recently, we’ve been reminded of Baldwin’s vision of the redemptive power of black love by Barry Jenkins’s tender screen adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk (2018). By my count, The Fire Next Time contains the word race four times, but love, 55. “In desperation,” she writes, “I sought James Baldwin.”īaldwin has been such a compelling voice on race, we may forget that he was equally searching on love.
Jesmyn Ward titled her 2016 essay anthology of black writers The Fire This Time, where she recounts feeling adrift as she struggles to cope with the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and other young black men.
Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote his memoir Between the World and Me (2015) as a letter to his teenage son, directly invoking Baldwin’s addressing his teenage nephew in The Fire Next Time. His presence is at times almost palpable. JAMES BALDWIN HAS GROWN into the wise, guiding elder of the United States’s fractured racial conversation.
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