The night before I boarded my flight, he handed me a stack of books. Still, before I left for Europe, my father, who taught African-American literature at a community college, linked me forever to the exiled writer. Jim Crow was a bad American memory by then, and there was overtly nothing to flee.
I was raised middle class and comfortable in a white St. My family never understood why I wanted to go to France, though there was a history of African-American intellectuals expatriating there during the Jim Crow years. I first became aware of Baldwin during my junior year abroad, years after his urgent usefulness as a civil rights figure had passed. I felt implicated when Baldwin said in the film, "I was in some way in those years, without entirely realizing it, the Great Black Hope of the great white father." In my reverent memory of him, had I, too, made him into the "Negro," the "Great Black Hope," who would save America from itself? Had I, too, leaned too heavily for optimism on the man loving friends called "Jimmy"? The Baldwin of my father's books We were headed to Saint-Paul de Vence, where I'd heard Baldwin lived. That must have been why, on a spring day in 1983, I jumped into a little red convertible MG, top down, driven by an insane Corsican friend a good-timing lady's man who proceeded to burn rubber around the kind of narrow, twisted, South-of-France mountain roads that had just killed Princess Grace of Monaco. He was the first writer to help me see clearly that race was a sickness that devoured both the racist and racism's victims. I wanted to meet James Baldwin, the mandarin prophet and former boy preacher the African-American expatriate writer who once used his European exile to explore, defy, and decry the delusional fiction of race that has organized our minds, our possibilities, our world, and now leads us toward the precipice of self-annihilation.īaldwin changed the way I saw the world and who I thought I was as an African-American within it. In 1983, I was studying abroad in Nice, France, and while other exchange students were flitting from city to city, checking off items on their bucket lists, I craved only one European cultural experience: Writer James Baldwin at home in Saint Paul de Vence, South of France, in 1985.
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