We’ve got to try to be better than the world — James Baldwin
Ablution
Was he coerced into preaching by the inversion will and won't, as if being in the mood for love and being in the mood for God are interchangeable? In another stage of contemplation, more confrontational with my own shadow, I wonder if he chose that sabbatical beguilingly, as a manner of patricide that would also appease his minister father. A two-way mercy killing. He could slip into the costume of his spiritual inheritance and displace its former wearer. He could implicate the former wearer as unworthy of the title, exceeded by his heir. Of course the garments would grow heavy with the stench of borrowed thread, burrowed with the ghosts of those who left it to him like a defective magic afraid the trick will work in spite of its defects.
Whatever the motive, Jimmy Baldwin was a preacher by 14, and a retired preacher shortly thereafter. His first novel Go tell it on the Mountain, (1953), autobiographical and lamenting, a vivisection of his adolescent heart, describes this experience and its denouement like a legend riding its hero to the haunted promised land and abandoning him there, where he longed to be abandoned, in the existential desert with the other involuntary mystics. Ablution. Baldwin’s family attended Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist church. When I lived not far from Harlem, in Morningside Heights, I always considered going to a service there, and I invariably intimidated myself out of that play mysticism. The place was a mythic archive of old time religion in my mind and if I went inside and witnessed real people worshiping a real God, the abstraction I cast upon my own father Jimmy and on Jimmy Baldwin would be lifted to reveal a gospel according to them. That spell would be stricter than the rules I lived by then, I was living off the bounty of the dues they’d paid, a Columbia graduate student, aspiring writer apprenticing a New York Times music journalist, apprenticing through friendship. If I attended church on Sunday instead of a show at the Blue Note or Village Vanguard that found me wine-buzzed and getting breakfast at The Coffee Shop with the band at 6 AM, would I fall to my knees and become one of the saved, broken by sermon in a way I couldn’t be by secular song? Why was I any less susceptible than they’d been? In my earliest years, I’d attended small churches with my dad and grandmother where they turned off their own secular songs to moan I wanna be ready over and over. Ready to put on my long white robe. They would stomp-drum up to the pulpit singing these lyrics and lopsided clapping.
This was a double entendre, two modes of whiteness and readiness united. The white world, the white robe, the ready-made help and the eager fugitive. These modes were put on, gilded and burned into the skin as it softened toward amber daughters. You could mistake them for worshiping a white Jesus, however, when they were simply reaching toward a frequency of exegesis, that, once accessed, could be used toward fulfilling any dream sacred or profane. I came in humming the jazz standard “Darn that Dream.” A little sardonically the beneficiary of their triumph in an unannounced frequency war.
Digression / Two Eulogies, or Three
James Baldwin, born in 1924, turns one hundred this year. I realized this on a routine revisitation of Amiri Baraka’s eulogy for him. The funeral was held at St. John the Divine, more integrated the Abyssinian Baptist, and situated between Morningside Heights and Harlem, the university and the neighborhood it upends. I searched for the footage because I’m mapping the black backstage, the impossible-to-spectacularize events that nonetheless occurred in the limbo between spectacle and private life and sometimes, in the shadow of death. Both Jimmys died in 1987. Baraka’s words build a gilded hearse for Jimmy Baldwin, name him champion of the word, and give Baraka a chance to preemptively eulogize himself in honoring his hero-friend. Goodbye to the solace of forefathers and near-accomplices. Baraka is adamant about calling him by his familiar name, Jimmy, sobbing backward, for Jimmy was God’s great Black revolutionary mouth.
He reminds us that he didn’t stop writing. At the end of his life Baldwin was inventing the story of his own last supper as a play entitled The Welcome Table. A phantom menace might have compelled him toward it, to end with a final invitation to a convivial, haunted place in his spirit as much as in the physical world. This confrontational reunion with everybody he loved, hallucinated like when J Dilla, another Jimmy in the vernacular, saw visions of ODB on his deathbed. Break to recall the footage of ODB exiting a stretch limo into a government building from which he would collect his monthly ration of food stamps, ruining the elitism of MTV Cribs. These things are related in that we are trapped in the praise dance of the everyday as those who haunt it with delight and devour it with rhythm both complicit with empire and enjambed with revolutionary yearning. We want to trick the system both into and out of pathos for us. We are doing both better and worse than we let on, at the task.
At my father’s funeral, I wasn’t there, but I’m told the ululating reached cinematic proportions— hats and pleated fans and fainting and speaking in tongues for the father. I nodded and smiled when I heard, that’s right, absolutely. Walk for me. Don’t wait for me. Too close to “Don’t Explain” level betrayal to discuss further here.
Earlier that Century
In his book Another Country, Jimmy Baldwin writes a eulogy for the character of a lost friend, based on a friend he lost in real life, to suicide, but just as much implicating his own temptations toward suicide, always thwarted one way or another by rescuers and his own brave ego. If the world weren’t so full of dead people maybe those of us trying to live wouldn’t have to suffer so much, Jimmy accuses, through the character of a reverend, another one of his objectified selves. Rufus is the hero-villain who tried, suffered, succumbed. Jimmy Baldwin longed to be abandoned by and to himself this way, Rufus was a muse, and every muse is a threat, a threatening element of you that could seduce you to its side, forever. Jimmy is condemned to live forever, the muse of many, more like Sisyphus than Rufus. He yells I give you your problem black, he warns us we must be witnesses or we become those dead ones walking. Walk for me. Through the valley, he urges, and then turns back and tells somebody of this transfiguration, this radiance on the mountain. The radiance Martin found, the radiance in Malcolm’s eyes as he’s delivered, the radiance that is like a trance of your self-realization and your sacrifice occurring in the exact same moment. The black choice in his day and occupation, between suicide and assassination. The fantasies of faked deaths as petit interventions. Catch this glimpse of their radiance but turn away before it takes you. It’s a monstrous angel, it demonstrates what it knows by moving you to exalt its esoterica with your own spontaneous emanation.
Precious Lord
I imagine that somewhere in the paradise of ruins there’s an archive of the sermons Jimmy Baldwin delivered as a black American teenaged baptist preacher, in Harlem, USA, a prodigal son’s indelible record of the era before he wandered to the work the railroad and odd jobs and finally to Paris to escape philistine sanctification by a fragmented gospel. I’ve hunted for traces of any sermon with millennial entitlement to easy archival gold, and all I’ve found are the speeches, invectives, and tender conversations we all know, an FBI file, some private records, and one gutting song. Jimmy, acapella, singing “Precious Lord.” The recording is mangled and distraught-sounding, his voice phlegmy and raspy somewhere between laughter and really leaving. A humble organ accompaniment makes it more heartbreaking, more vacant. Where is the rest of the band, where are his friends. As his on-the-record tantrums tell us, they’re killing all my friends. His friends have been killed by hired guns. The declassified FBI files might offer us some names for minor solace, fake of course.
Jimmy has been left in the purgatory of the hedonistic prophet, not dangerous enough to kill but too much a threat to ignore. Maybe too useful an intellect to kill, without pay he supplies the state with ideas. He loves beauty as much as he loves truth. One might lose. Someone might lose his life in the fight between honor and glory. Take my hand, walk with me, he whispers to sing, self-soothing as he reassures us we’ll have a guiding star in him. I guess it was like a visitation, by three lost fathers, telling me one of them has been here for one hundred exhilaratingly redundant years. On the eve of this year of the dragon, where killing is so familiar we deliver the news of death like gossip, Jimmy passed me a subtle hint of himself and the others, their cypher of faithful disbelief. The way they’d be across the world on some glamorous segregated mission and hear one note of a Delta blues and collapse into the field to be extracted for hard labor and work chant. I’d like to ask him why we’re so good at praising the gods we abandon. I’d ask as if he wasn’t one of them, as if I wasn’t mastering this skill myself, for selfish reasons, like how it makes the poems more intricate in their beauty when they’re tinged with impossible longing, and the renewal more satisfying when it forgets it ever wanted anything but the light atop the holy mountain.
Only quality writing here. Another literally breath-taking piece...
Thank you. Keep writing!
I read your words and my soul aches. Thank you.