James Baldwin, ‘Letter from a Region in my Mind’ (The New Yorker, November 17, 1962)

Recently, I’ve been reading and teaching the essays of James Baldwin. I find myself once again moved, transported, by Baldwin’s rhetoric. I slip into the stream of his argument, what seems to be the flow of his consciousness; I move with him, through his warm, close, intimate voice (even when the material is flaming with fierce anger). How can I stay so close to that anger without being burned? Why can I feel myself pass my fingers through that flame?

It must be something to do with his generosity of spirit, his sharing of voice, warmth, spirit. Baldwin’s writing is so self-assured, so unselfconsciousness, so close to the skin of what I sense as a voice I can touch, if the voice has a body, which of course it does. There is a man in the room next to me speaking. He has just introduced himself as James Baldwin.

But there is more to it than this. Baldwin also understands the force of argument and what pushes that along. I spend a lot of time trying to show my students this; encouraging them to stop hiding behind nonsense-words, to stop prevaricating. In order to do that you have to know what your subject is and then lean into it. The sentence above begins with one simple conjunction: for, For. He leans on this word often. For is self-assured; it assumes that what the speaker says is reasonably and must logically follow on from what has come before. Baldwin’s subject is the young women he grew up with in Harlem; the girls he observed at church and Sunday school turning - as he saw it - into prey for the pimps and racketeers of the neighbourhood. This is the complete sentence:

“For this was the beginning of our burning time, and “It is better,” said St. Paul—who elsewhere, with a most unusual and stunning exactness, described himself as a “wretched man”—“to marry than to burn.”

‘Burning’ here means soul-destruction. Baldwin’s entire epistolary essay is fuelled by this image of young souls turning bad. He means his 14-year-old self, one of the children raised by ‘holy parents;’ the same children he sees messing about on the Avenue, where ‘whores, pimps, and racketeers’ lurked waiting to snatch them. Baldwin’s for is without doubt. One thing is certain, such holy children were destined to burn if they did not find themselves a safe place in the world. For the wages of sin were everywhere, he writes, and so:

‘Just before and then during the Second World War, many of my friends fled into the service, all to be changed there, and rarely for the better, many to be ruined, and many to die. Others fled to other states and cities—that is, to other ghettos. Some went on wine or whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And others, like me, fled into the church.’

For the wages of sin were everywhere. Baldwin’s religious refrain lands as heavily as time itself. For this was the beginning of our burning time. For: because, because of, for this reason, inexorably, without doubt. We listen and we follow because this is a man speaking to us with certainty; and so ‘for’ follows as inexorably as a prophet’s sense of time, which is to say someone who is sure that the end is nigh unless some certain action is taken soon, some decisions are made. ‘For’ maybe a slight conjunction, but it leans heavily towards the next consequence; and so Baldwin leads us on through his own unskinned self-realisation. For when I tried to assess my capabilities, I realized that I had almost none. For, as we realise, is often merciless. For what, the speaker asks himself? What are you for, young man? ‘For’ offers the essayist no sentimental padding, only a direct confrontation with himself and this overwhelming existential question.

For Meseret.