“In Paris, I began to see the sky for what seemed to be the first time. It was borne in on me and it did not make me feel melancholy that this sky was there before I was born and would be there when I was dead. And it was up to me to make of my brief opportunity the most that could be made.”
-James Baldwin, Nobody Knows my Name
Last August, I had the honor of being featured by It Gets Better as a young activist fight for change. Along with the featurette interview, a production team accompanied me to the 57th anniversary of Martin’s March on Washington for jobs and freedom. Al Sharpton’s organization — The National Action Network — convened us to one of our nation’s grandest stages to demand an end to police violence. Before the majesty of the Lincoln Memorial — thousands gathered with masks on and Black lives matter signs in hand — we demanded they get their knee off our necks. In the awkwardness of being followed by a camera crew, uncomfortable by the August humidity, and worry of being in a crowded space during a health pandemic, I could only think of James Baldwin. I said to myself, “I wonder what he would say if he knew we were back again?” It was a sobering feeling to reckon with, as Baldwin had, that we could “march and march until we wore ourselves out… and it would change nobody’s fate.” Looking over the swaths of people of all kinds, I was filled with hope the size of a mustard seed, thinking of King’s beloved community was possible after all. As a young Black girl took to the podium, I thought our inheritance was in our grasp. Demanding that we reach out and seize the opportunity to build God’s kingdom — that maybe it was all more than a crazy dream.
Over the last year, I’ve grown an uncontainable fascination with James Baldwin — his life, writing, drinking habits, everything. I digest his words like hot fries — a feat all my friends will attest — determined to understand the importance of every semicolon, comma, continuation. Similarly, to Rachel Kaazdi Ghansah — who wrote, Baldwin is “ the high priest in charge of [her] prayer of being a Black person who wanted to exist by books and words alone.” Unearthing him revealed in me something I’d always noticed but rarely wanted to acknowledge. A burning contempt for America — and white people — that ebbed and flowed but never disappeared from my consciousness. Almost every space I encountered was a reminder of this growing contempt that only strengthened as the days went past. It was the desire of people to use God’s name but not invite His Spirit into the room — to be pro-life while sanctioning or explaining away Black death — was the greatest of sins.
Quickly after reading his work, I began to understand, what Baldwin meant, proclaiming people, in action, weren’t very much and yet, “every human being an unprecedented miracle.” As I began to discover, my task was to understand our current condition as a long struggle to hand back the identity of the Nigger to the people who created it. My politics and policy class — taught by a former Jeff Sessions staffer — would force me to reckon with the sincerity of my beliefs, which held all worthy of transformation. For years I’d preached an almost religious observance to the teaching of bell hooks. Wherein we can hold people accountable for wrongdoing while believing in their capacity to be transformed. But sitting screen to screen with classmates and professors, so intent on misunderstanding was a test it took time to work through.
Week after week, in the face of white privilege and centricity, my resolve for building a beloved community tempered yet, I knew I had no choice but show to show up. I remember an interview I’d watched in the early morning hours where Baldwin was detailing his reasons for leaving America ending up on the streets of Paris. Among them, a building bitterness, rage, anger (that consumed his father) rose inside. He knew soon enough, one has to do something with all that rage, or it will destroy you. “Kill or be Killed,” I’d hear between the sentence from his baritone voice and delicate cadence. Plus, hate is too heavy a burden — a distraction from the real business of life — that Baldwin or I can carry. Through almost every interaction, I began to vaguely understand why, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Stamp Paid asked Jesus, “what are these people?” Why did people hate, lynch, violate, kill us? Why do they discount our witness and throw our fears back in our face? Why create our misery and demand we work ourselves out of it? My class became this place where I had to witness — where that became the rebellion. Unapologetically centering Black people and shifting the room from viewing their existence in terms of passive viewership of injustice to active participation in destroying the problem their forefathers created and benefited from.
In Down at the Cross, Baldwin contextualizes creating a resilient Black culture through, and without glamorizing, immense suffering. This is a generational struggle to — as Ta-Nehisi Coates would write to his son decades after Baldwin lived — make ourselves into a people, outside the perimeters of whiteness, through equal parts of rage and hope. Misery, almost, when I think of how much for us hasn’t changed. Reliving the same loop of carceral violence toward our communities has changed our psyche in similar ways, enslavement and Jim crow had in their times. Still, I don’t think it can ever shrink our resolve or stray us from a determination to be free. Witness is the marrow-deep reminder of what your grandparents, parents endured and believed past so that we could live. I am not one who believes our ancestors died for us, for they deserved their lives for themselves. Still, they struggled so fiercely for those they’d never know.
Struggle. Even if the world was ending tomorrow, I’d still struggle, just in case, it doesn’t. During an interview last week, I got asked, “how do you stay motivated? This stuff is so hard, man, between police and gun violence, what do we do?” It took time before I could answer; retreating into silence, I looked outside my window. There is a tree outside my window — now bare, standing naked, branches swaying in the wind. It, like most greenery, really keeps my life filled with simple joys. The vibrant purple hues — some lavender, some indigo — brought me to 1930s Georgia, in the fields of Alice Walker’s groundbreaking novel. “It pisses God off if you walk by the color purple and don’t notice it” — my reminder that witness, like life, needed to be lived and loved. Through this tree changing colors — slowly from its purples to yellows to brown — in extricate detail illustrated deaths’ active part of life, the bareness it leaves behind, and eventually the life it will soon again bring. So, when he asked this question, I could no longer depend on colors — no more beauty, leaves scattered — and until spring, all I had was my witness to its life.
“Well, as long as Black babies are being born, I have something to fight for.” We paused. I thought about all those times I want to give up, walk away, bend to the weight of a bitter past and an unrelenting present circumstance. I thought of Baldwin’s Letter from a Region in my Mind. What complexities and intention he paid to dissect the burden vengeance places on our existences, a refusal to succumb, a belief that Black is beautiful. I just can’t forget, as he never did, the power of witness to move beyond this — not for white people, but for our very own survival as a people.
My Lyft driver on that August morning headed to the march was a remarkable Black woman. I was her first customer since quarantine. She was in her mid-fifties and was her mother’s primary caregiver. On our drive, we passed swaths of construction projects — eventually, at a stop sign, she finally says, “Why the hell are they kicking us out? Just so they can get a bike lane and another freaking Jamba Juice?” From this point on, I became enthralled with her quick life story. She was born and raised in D.C. Raised her kids in the same neighborhood, sent them to play on the block with cousins, held barbeques for the whole community. Then things started to change, “slowly at first — then, now they lock us away for COVID, give us one check, and build all this up in two months,” she detailed. Riding the rest of the way to meet my two-person crew in silence, I thought: What would change her situation at this march? What about people grandstanding about reforming carceral systems and building trust with police (oh and electing Joe Biden!) would give people back their communities?
Mainly, I wanted to turn around to bury myself in someone else’s words, but when we pulled up to the hotel, she said: “thank you for just listening to me. I had a lot to say.” In all truth, she was all I could think about all day and semester-long — her story and resilience to keeping on for the sake of what she can leave for her children. “I’m never going to stop telling people about this. Someone will do something eventually.” In this, I am whisked into the world of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in The Sun. Speaking of her dead husband, Mama explains, “He, say: Seem like God didn’t see fit to give the Black man nothing but dreams — but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile.” Children become our constant reminder of a world worthy of building. For them, like her, we recall all the truths laid bare before us — thinking of all the dreamers who kept dreaming just so we could. We remember our witness to prepare for our battles. It can be overwhelming to look out into the vastness of life. Standing as David in the midst of what feels like millions of Goliaths — but then you must remember we’ve only got a certain amount of time. Such little time for dreaming.
Months later, on a cold December night, on the precipice of a new year, all I can think about is the fight still to come. If all I can do is share our witness, I will relish every living moment I get to do my part. If all we can pass down is our witness — the story of us living, of being here, of struggling for a future for our children — then we’ve given everything. What I do know, the tide indeed turns — empires do fall, and the beautiful leaves soon return to the trees. Now, I think of Baldwin again, sitting at his typewriter — cigarette and whiskey in hand — writing witness for our survival, then just truths heard in those streets of Paris or the marches in the South. He called us, the relatively conscious Blacks and relatively conscious whites, to not falter in our duty. To end this racial nightmare once and for all — to tell the story of how we got over. Little did he know, little do I, of the vastness ahead.
