Notes on The

Christina 1

Author:

James Baldwin Christina 2 Chronology

 Born the first of nine children of a clergyman and a factory worker, David and mother, Berdis (Jones) Baldwin in Harlem.

 1938-1942 - Was a store front preacher from age fourteen to age seventeen. He started writing primarily as a way to be loved. He attended Frederick Douglass Junior High School and DeWitt Clinton High School (co-edited the Magpie.)

 1942 - Graduated from high school and moved to New Jersey to begin working as a railroad hand.

 1944 - Moved to Greenwich Village where he met Richard Wright and began his first novel, In My Father's House.

 1948 - Began receiving awards and fellowships for his writings and published his first essay, The Harlem Ghetto. Became disgusted with race relations in the United States and made his home in Paris for nearly ten years.

 1953 - Finished his important novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain which stands as a partially autobiographical account of his youth.

 1954 - Completed the play, The Amen Corner and won the Guggenheim Fellowship.

 1955 - Wrote the novel, Giovanni's Room and received fellowships rewards.

 1960 - Returned to the United States and became politically active in support of civil rights.

 1961 - His best-selling essay collection, Nobody Knows My Name won numerous recognitions to include one of the outstanding books of the year.

 1964 - Published the plays The Amen Corner and Blues for Mr. Charlie. The Amen Corner opened first at Howard University under the direction of Owen Dodson.

 1968 - Published the novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone as a bitterly incisive account of American racism.

 1985 - Wrote The Evidence of Things Not Seen which was an analysis of the Atlanta child murders of 1979 and 1980.

 Baldwin wrote novels, poetry, essays and a screenplay in the later years of his life. He died of stomach cancer in December 1987 at his home in St. Paul de Vence, France.

BLUES FOR MR. CHARLIE Christina 3

 Produced by the Actor's Studio and opened at the ANTA Theatre on Broadway on April 23, 1964. The play simultaneously called the black man to battle and sang the blues for the white man.

 The story is loosely based on the murder of the black youth, Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. The murderer, who was white, was acquitted.

 The play deals with the murder of a young black man, Richard, by a white shop owner, Lyle Britten. Richard is a bitter busted musician returning home. His expression of hatred for whites, we learn, leads to his death.

 Later, the pastor, Meridian, Richard's father and civil rights leader, expresses his faith in Parnell, a friend and white liberal, to help.

 The style of the production was impressionistic through the use of special lighting and a skeletal set. The dome of the courthouse and the American flag dominate the first and second acts, and the steeple and cross dominate the last act. Baldwin has written a morality play on the racial conflict and contrast in the American twentieth-century.

 Baldwin says in the introduction, "The play takes place in Plaguetown, U.S.A., now. The plague is race, the plague is our concept of Christianity: and this raging plague has the power to destroy every human relationship."

 Meridian is a kind of Martin Luther King, Jr. figure who is forced to wonder if his urging his people to nonviolence is wrong. The conclusion combines confrontations in the courtroom scene with the flashback of the actual murder.

 The conflict exists between the bitterly divided Whitetown and Blacktown. In the third act, the courtroom, whites and blacks move across the dividing aisle, suggesting hope for integration. Whites are also seen as victims of racism. Lyle is seen as an ignorant white, Parnell as a tortured white walking the color line. Critics attacked the "stereotypical" white characters.

CRITICS

 Received mixed reviews from critics. Many thought of it as a flawed work in terms of structure. Walter Meserve wrote in The Black American Writer: Poetry and Drama, Vol. II, "Baldwin tries to use theatre as a pulpit for his ideas. Mainly his plays are thesis plays-- talky, over-written and cliché dialogue and some stereotypes, preachy and argumentative. Essentially, Baldwin is not particularly dramatic, but he can be extremely eloquent, compelling, and sometimes irritating as a playwright committed to his approach to life."

 Baldwin claimed, "I'm not concerned with the success or failure of the play. I want to shock people; I want to wake them up; I want to make them think; I want to trick them into an experience which I think is important.

 Some critics accused Baldwin of advocating hatred of all whites. But in the end of the play, hope for integration is expressed. That is probably more accurately his point of view. In another work, Baldwin wrote, "Integration means that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality, and begin to change it." But black anger is certainly a part of Blues for Mr. Charlie. Christina 4

 The play's overall significance not only relates to race relations in the South, but in the entire country. The contemporary significance may be evident in the O.J. Simpson outcome and the Million Man March.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Hatch, James V. Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans, 1847 to Today, Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: The Free Press, 1974, 1996. Metzger, Linda. Black Writers. Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1989. Nossiter, Adam. "Civil Rights Slaying Raises Speedy-Trial Issue." New York Times, (May 27, 1994): B, 18:1. Oliver, Clinton F. Contemporary Black Drama. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons., 1971. Pratt, Louis H. James Baldwin. Boston: G. K. Hall & Company, 1978. Woll, Allen. Dictionary of the Black Theatre. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983. _____ . "Justice at Last in Mississippi." St. Louis Post-Dispatch, (February 10, 1994): B, 6:1. Christina 5 Biographical Information

Biography from 1959 Copyright Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved. Article Heading Baldwin, James Aug. 2, 1924-Dec. 1, 1987 Author Publication Statement 1959 Biography from Current Biography Full Text In characterizing the work of James Baldwin, critics have noted his poetic sensitivity, his narrative skill, his eloquence, his intensity of feeling. These qualities, which distinguish his novels, short stories, and essays, have won him recognition as one of today's outstanding young writers. James Arthur Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924 in New York City, the eldest of nine children of David Baldwin, a clergyman, and Berdis Emma (Jones) Baldwin. "Grim" is his terse summary of the poverty and discrimination he experienced as a child in Harlem. Reared entirely in New York, he was graduated in 1942 from DeWitt Clinton High School, where he served as a student judge and magazine editor. After high school Baldwin held a number of jobs, helping to support his family. His only real interest, however, was writing -- he can "scarcely remember ever wanting to be anything but a writer." Even in elementary school he had written plays, songs, stories, and poems. In 1945 a Eugene Saxton Fellowship enabled him to devote himself to literary work. His first professional publication was a Nation book review in 1946. Since then his articles and stories have appeared in many periodicals (including Partisan Review, American Mercury, Commentary, Mademoiselle, Reporter, Harper's Magazine and New Leader), and his play The Amen Corner has been produced at Howard University. His first book was Go Tell It on the Mountain (Knopf, 1953), a realistic yet poetic story of religious experience in Harlem. Welcomed for its exceptional promise, the novel was one of 350 books chosen by the Carnegie Corporation to represent the United States in Britain. Paul Pickrel, writing in the Yale Review, called it "an extraordinarily powerful study," a work of "great force and vigor." Probably Baldwin's most widely acclaimed book has been Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Press, 1955), a collection of personal essays termed "brilliant" by Anthony West in the New Yorker and lauded by Time for its "bitter clarity and uncommon grace." Ranging from unsparing comments on the novel of protest and the film Carmen Jones to acid sketches of the Harlem ghetto and encounters in Europe, the essays probe--to quote Dachine Rainer's Commonweal review -- "the peculiar dilemma of Northern Negro intellectuals who can legitimately claim neither Western nor African heritage as their own." Baldwin, the same review stresses, "has been enraged into a style; the harshness of his lot, his racial sensitivity, and the sense of alienation and displacement ... [have] Christina 6 moved him to ... lyrical, passionate, sometimes violent prose." Giovanni's Room, his second novel (Dial Press, 1956), the story of an American student in Paris and his involvement with a young Italian barman, received mixed reactions. Several critics were irritated by the appearance of still another new book on the theme of homosexuality; others agreed with Granville Hicks, who, in his New York Times review, deplored the "grotesque and repulsive" characters, but affirmed that "even as one is dismayed by Mr. Baldwin's materials, one rejoices in the skill with which he renders them. Nor is there any suspicion that he is ... [using them] merely for the sake of shocking the reader. On the contrary, his intent is most serious." Baldwin has traveled in England and on the Continent. Having lived for a long while in France, he hopes to visit the country again. (Paris he calls "the city I love.") He enjoys reading (Dostoevski, Henry James, Dickens, and Proust are his favorites); acting lessons; horseback riding, paddling around the Mediterranean; jazz, live and recorded, and "especially the people who create it." Baldwin is a resident of Greenwich Village. Recently, he spent some time at the MacDowell Colony in Peterboro, New Hampshire, working on his forthcoming novel, "Another Country." Baldwin is also the author of a play, Bobo's Blues. The organizations to which he belongs are the P.E.N. Club, the Dramatists Guild, and the Actors Studio. Many prizes have followed his first literary award. Among his honors are Rosenwald and Guggenheim fellowships (1948 and 1954) and awards from Partisan Review and the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1956). Conflicting judgments have come, too. A number of critics, without denying the impact of his masterful style, have been saddened by the sense of hopelessness revealed in his books--books they find unleavened by humor and filled, as Charles H. Nichols, Jr., (writing in Commentary, January 1957) put it, with a Calvinistic, deterministic view of human depravity and doom. But in these very traits others discern the artist impelled by righteous anger--that "savage indignation" roused by cruelty and injustice. Speaking for himself, Baldwin says: "Some people feel that I make too much of being a Negro and others that I do not make enough. My effort is to make real that rare common ground where the differences between human beings do not matter. Sometimes this can only be done by describing the differences, the warfare, and the blood." And of his career as a writer he remarked: "My father, who opposed it most bitterly, ... taught me something of what it means to have a vocation. I still try to write as he preached, that is, in the sight of God." Works about subject Lib J 78:364 F 15 '53; N Y Herald Tribune Bk R p3 My 31 '53; N Y Times p8 My 24 '53 Additional citations Pinckney, Darryl. The magic of James Baldwin; The New York Review of Books (ISSN: 0028-7504) v45 no18 64-74 N 19 1998 Als, Hilton. The enemy within; The New Yorker (ISSN: 0028-792X) v74 72-80 F 16 1998 Baldwin, James. Whose Harlem is this, anyway?; Essence (ISSN: 0014-0880) v27 112+ N 1996 Van Leer, David. The fire last time; The New Republic (ISSN: 0028-6583) v212 36-9 F 13 1995 Watkins, Mel. The relentless prophet; The New York Times Book Review (ISSN: 0028- 7806) 30 My 15 1994 Christina 7 Dailey, Peter. Jimmy; The American Scholar (ISSN: 0003-0937) v63 102-10 Wint 1994 Humanitarians and reformers; Macmillan Lib. Ref. USA 1999 African-American history; selections from the five-volume Macmillan encyclopedia of African-American culture and history. Macmillan Lib. Ref. USA 1998 Contemporary African American novelists; a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook. Greenwood Press 1999 The Scribner encyclopedia of American lives; Scribner 1999 Gates, Henry Louis. The fire last time; The New Republic (ISSN: 0028-6583) v206 37- 8+ Je 1 1992 Gottfried, Ted. James Baldwin; voice from Harlem. Watts 1997 Freund, David M. Biographical supplement and index; Oxford Univ. Press 1997 Bawer, Bruce. Race and art: the career of James Baldwin; The New Criterion (ISSN: 0734-0222) v10 16-26 N 1991 Greene, Meg. 'I choose exile': African American writers and artists in postwar France; Cobblestone (ISSN: 0199-5197) v15 30-3 D 1994 Rediger, Pat. Great African Americans in literature; Crabtree 1996 Hamalian, Leo. God's angry man; Black American Literature Forum (ISSN: 0148-6179) v25 417-20 Summ 1991 Biography today: author series, v2, 1996; profiles of people of interest to young readers. Omnigraphics 1996 Leeming, David Adams. James Baldwin; a biography. Holt & Co. 1995 Bredeson, Carmen. American writers of the 20th century; Enslow Pubs. 1996 Guthrie, Robert. A letter to James Baldwin; Chicago Review (ISSN: 0009-3696) v42 no1 59-62 1996 Conger, Lesley. Jimmy on East 15th Street; African American Review (ISSN: 1062- 4783) v29 557-66 Wint 1995 Campbell, James. Black boys and the FBI; The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN: 0307- 661X) vno4574 1290+ N 30-D 6 1990 Miller, Neil. Out of the past; gay and lesbian history from 1869 to the present. Vintage Bks. 1995 Russell, Paul. The gay 100; a ranking of the most influential gay men and lesbians, past and present. Carol Pub. Group 1994

Biography from 1964 Copyright Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved. Article Heading Baldwin, James Aug. 2, 1924-Dec. 1, 1987 Writer Publication Statement 1964 Biography from Current Biography Sequence Note NOTE: This biography supersedes the article that appeared in Current Biography in 1959. Full Text Christina 8 The American Negro revolution claims as perhaps its most articulate spokesman the writer James Baldwin, whose essays, novels, and plays have insisted over the past dozen years that "Negroes want to be treated like men" and that the civil rights issue is not a Negro problem, but a white man's illness. Escaping from America to Paris in the late 1940's so that he would not become "merely a Negro writer," Baldwin won literary fame with his novels Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room. Since his homecoming in 1957 he has committed his talent with increasing devotion to the civil rights movement and has helped arouse world concern for his cause with his polemic The Fire Next Time and his play Blues for Mister Charlie, which shared with Arthur Miller's After the Fall the Foreign Press Association's dramatic award for the 1963-64 season. New York's Harlem, the ghetto James Arthur Baldwin has said that he knows the way he knows his own hand, is his birthplace and was his home for the first seventeen years of his life. He was born in Harlem Hospital on August 2, 1924 to David and Berdis Emma (Jones) Baldwin, who raised him in accordance with the moral standards of their own essentially Southern rural background, in close relationship with the church. He has described his father, a clergyman from New Orleans, as a proud, bitter, and rigid man whom his children were never glad to see come home. When he died in 1943, Baldwin later wrote in his autobiographical Notes of a Native Son, "we had not known that he was being eaten up by paranoia, and the discovery that his cruelty, to our bodies and our minds, had been one of the symptoms of his illness was not, then, enough to enable us to forgive him." Some twenty years later, in an interview with Kenneth B. Clark, Baldwin explained, "Part of his problem was he couldn't feed his kids, but I was a kid and I didn't know that." As the oldest in a family of nine children, James Baldwin had the responsibility of looking after his brothers and sisters. Holding a baby with one hand and a book with the other, he read and reread Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Tale of Two Cities. Pupils and teachers who remember him at school--P.S. 24 and the Frederick Douglass Junior High School--picture a small, bright, sad-looking boy. When he was fourteen years old he became a Holy Roller preacher in the Fireside Pentecostal Church in Harlem. "For three hysteria-tinged years," Fern Marja Eckman wrote in the New York Post (January 15, 1964), "he preached 'the Word,' reveling in a most unholy fashion over his superiority to his father as a ministerial drawing card." Meanwhile, Baldwin attended the De Witt Clinton High School, where he was editor of the literary magazine. He spent much of his free time writing and discovered that he would rather be a writer than a preacher. After his graduation from high school in 1942, he went to work on defense projects in Belle Meade, New Jersey; and, in the racial tension generated by shifts in population to meet the demands of the World War II labor market, he suffered his first direct experience of jim crowism. Harlem, however, remained his home, more or less, until the death of his father, when he realized that to become a writer he would have to leave his family. During the next five years Baldwin lived in Greenwich Village, earning his way as a handyman, office boy, factory worker, dishwasher, and waiter. He spent his evenings writing. The Nation and the New Leader bought his reviews of books about the Negro problem, on which he was assumed to be an expert, and Commentary bought an essay on Harlem. While working on the novel that was to become Go Tell It on the Mountain, he met Richard Wright, the author of Native Son, who read part of his manuscript and Christina 9 helped him to obtain a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Award in 1945. Another literary award, a Rosenwald fellowship granted him in 1948, enabled Baldwin to go to Europe to develop as a writer in the more congenial atmosphere of Paris, free of the racial discrimination that in his native land had made him feel like an alien. Except for occasional visits to the United States for business reasons, in connection with the publication of his books, he spent nearly ten years in France, with sojourns in other parts of Europe. In Paris he sometimes lived on the verge of starvation and suffered loneliness, but he made friends with James Jones, Norman Mailer, and other writers. He also had time to read Henry James, whose writings gave him the sense of form that he felt he needed. If Paris was not a wholly enchanting city at all times, he at least found there the courage to complete and see published his first three books. Go Tell It on the Mountain (Knopf, 1952; Dial, 1963), which Baldwin completed after a ten-year apprenticeship, is a partly autobiographical novel about the religious conversion of a fourteen-year-old Harlem boy, told with flashbacks that dramatize the sins and sufferings of his forebears. In his comments for the Saturday Review (May 16, 1953) H. C. Webster said, "Mr. Baldwin's novel is written as skillfully as many a man's fifth essay in fiction." Other critics praised it as a sensitive, poetic, brutal, realistic book, a work of distinctive dignity. In Notes of a Native Son (Beacon, 1955; Dial, 1963) Baldwin brought together ten essays that had earlier appeared in Harper's Magazine, the Reporter, and other periodicals. Chiefly autobiographical, they analyze his feelings about Negro-white relationships in the United States and abroad, in subjects that range from the failings of the "protest novel" (including both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Richard Wright) to his own experiences in Harlem and in a remote village in Switzerland. "He is certainly the most perceptive Negro writing today," Dachine Rainer commented in Commonweal (January 13, 1956), "and, quite possibly, even granting Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison their very generous due, the most eloquent." For his third book, a novel set in France, Giovanni's Room (Dial, 1956), Baldwin chose the subject of homosexuality, which involves another form of persecution of a minority group. While many readers were impressed by his narrative skill and his poetic and subtle treatment of a difficult theme, Anthony West, the critic for the New Yorker (November 10, 1956) had doubts: "Mr. Baldwin's story is told with solemnity, as if it went to the very core of things, although in fact it describes a passade, a riffle on the surface of life, that completely lacks the validity of actual experience." Validity was questioned also in the New Yorker (August 4, 1962) review of Baldwin's next novel, Another Country (Dial, 1961), set in Harlem and Greenwich Village. "Many of the relationships are halting," Whitney Balliett wrote, "and not because they happen to be between Negroes and whites. They just don't make sense; they just don't ring properly." Another Country was described in the Catholic World (February 1964) as "a nightmarish round of miscegenation and sexual deviation." Baldwin's reply to criticism of Another Country is that Americans do not want to realize how disastrously they are living. His novel did not miss its mark. Reviewing it in the Christian Science Monitor (July 19, 1962), Roderick Nordell pointed out that it represented "an extreme mood of outrage against whatever demeans the black man in a predominantly white society--and thereby demeans the white." Baldwin's thesis is that what happens to the Negro, happens also to everyone else in a Christina 10 society and that the victims of segregation are the white people because the myth of white supremacy prevents them from facing their own weaknesses. "What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it is necessary to have a nigger in the first place," he told Kenneth B. Clark (The Negro Protest; Beacon, 1963). "...I'm not a nigger, I am a man, but if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it." This central idea also runs through his essays. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (Dial, 1961) is largely a collection of magazine articles written over a period of six years. They deal with literary subjects and with his experiences and observations during the crucial period of his last months in Europe and his return to the United States in 1957. One essay describes his much-dreaded first visit to the South, when he was deeply impressed by the Negro crusade in behalf of civil rights. "I suppose," he later said in an interview for the New York Post (January 19, 1964), "the depth of my involvement began then." His function as a writer, he came to believe, was to act as "a kind of conduit"--to speak for inarticulate people. The two essays of his best-selling The Fire Next Time (Dial, 1963) had also been published previously in magazines. One of them, which first appeared in the New Yorker, is an explosive summing-up of his views on the racial problem in the United States and includes a section on the Black Muslim movement. "Perhaps no other Negro writer," Geoffrey Godsell noted in the Christian Science Monitor (February 21, 1963) "is as successful as Mr. Baldwin in telling society just what it feels like to be a Negro in the United States." Baldwin's ability to put the white man in the shoes of the colored man had been recognized as one of the merits of his novels and was soon to be appreciated also in his plays. Baldwin wrote his first play, The Amen Corner, in Paris in the early 1950's. Like much of his work, it concerns man's search for his identity, his need to discover his own being, the individuality of his salvation. It was produced at Howard University in Washington, D.C. in the 1954-55 season and then was forgotten until March 1964, when it was well received in a production directed by Frank Silvera at the Robertson Playhouse in Beverly Hills, California. The following month, on April 23, 1964, Baldwin's second play, Blues for Mister Charlie, opened on Broadway at the ANTA Theater in an Actors Studio production staged by Burgess Meredith. The cast included the playwright's brother, David Baldwin. Dedicating his drama to the memory of the victims of racial violence in the South--to Medgar Evers and to the dead children of Birmingham--Baldwin told a story of racial murder based remotely on the killing of Emmett Till. Again Baldwin treated racial discrimination as a disease of the white society: the "Mister Charlie" of the title is the name that the Negro has given the white man. Again some critics raised the question, previously asked from time to time regarding his novels, of a possible conflict between his function as an artist and his role as a spokesman for American Negroes. Almost all reviewers were moved by the compelling intensity of Baldwin's anger. The comment of David Boroff in the National Observer (April 27, 1964) reflects both the enthusiasm and reservations of many notices of Blues for Mister Charlie: "Mr. Baldwin has mustered all his pamphleteering skill and has written a raw, stinging denunciation of racial oppression. The play is as much a civil-rights pageant as a drama--militantly propagandistic in intent, often crudely oversimplified, but unfailingly vivid, moving, and powerful." Blues for Mr. Charlie closed on August 29, 1964. Christina 11 For James Baldwin, writing is a slow, laborious undertaking. He had begun thinking about his play soon after his return home from paris, when he was working as personal assistant to Elia Kazan, who was then directing the Broadway productions of J. B. and Sweet Bird of Youth. He actually wrote the play some five years later, for the most part while riding on buses and trains to and from civil rights engagements. During 1963 Baldwin, who is a member of the national advisory board of the Congress of Racial Equality, gave fifteen lectures on the West Coast and in Harlem for the benefit of CORE. In Paris in August 1963 he opened a civil rights appeal at the American Church to demonstrate support of Americans abroad for the march on Washington movement. He has conferred with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy on the question of civil rights and has often discussed the racial conflict on radio and television. On one of his visits to Africa, in December 1963, he was a guest of honor at the celebration of Kenya's independence. He is also active on behalf of the National Committee For a Sane Nuclear Policy. Baldwin's books have brought him many awards: a Guggenheim fellowship (1954), a Partisan Review fellowship (1956), a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1956), and a Ford Foundation grant-in-aid (1959). Nobody Knows My Name was selected as one of the outstanding books of 1961 by the notable books council of the American Library Association and also was honored with a certificate of recognition from the National Conference of Christians and Jews. When Baldwin came back from Paris, he did not return to Harlem. His home is an apartment on the western edge of Greenwich Village, not far from the Hudson River. Descriptions of what the writer is really like vary with his interviewer, but few would disagree with Kenneth B. Clark, who wrote in The Negro Protest, "James Baldwin is a little man, physically, with tremendous emotional and intellectual power. He radiates a nervous, sensitive involvement with all aspects of his environment.... In his conversations he is the essence of spontaneity and one has the impression that he is incapable of communicating anything other than the total truth which he feels and thinks at that particular time." In 1964 Baldwin was working on two books of nonfiction about American life. He wrote and narrated a television documentary on his childhood that was presented over metropolitan Broadcasting stations on June 1, 1964. Works about subject Ebony 16:23+ O '61 pors; N Y Post Ja 13-19 '64 pors; Nat Observer p8 Ja 13 '64 por; Time 81:26+ My 17 '63 por; Toronto Globe and Mail Globe Mag p9 Ag 3 '63 por; Who's Who in America, 1964-65 Additional citations Pinckney, Darryl. The magic of James Baldwin; The New York Review of Books (ISSN: 0028-7504) v45 no18 64-74 N 19 1998 Als, Hilton. The enemy within; The New Yorker (ISSN: 0028-792X) v74 72-80 F 16 1998 Baldwin, James. Whose Harlem is this, anyway?; Essence (ISSN: 0014-0880) v27 112+ N 1996 Van Leer, David. The fire last time; The New Republic (ISSN: 0028-6583) v212 36-9 F 13 1995 Watkins, Mel. The relentless prophet; The New York Times Book Review (ISSN: 0028- 7806) 30 My 15 1994 Christina 12 Dailey, Peter. Jimmy; The American Scholar (ISSN: 0003-0937) v63 102-10 Wint 1994 Humanitarians and reformers; Macmillan Lib. Ref. USA 1999 African-American history; selections from the five-volume Macmillan encyclopedia of African-American culture and history. Macmillan Lib. Ref. USA 1998 Contemporary African American novelists; a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook. Greenwood Press 1999 The Scribner encyclopedia of American lives; Scribner 1999 Gates, Henry Louis. The fire last time; The New Republic (ISSN: 0028-6583) v206 37- 8+ Je 1 1992 Gottfried, Ted. James Baldwin; voice from Harlem. Watts 1997 Freund, David M. Biographical supplement and index; Oxford Univ. Press 1997 Bawer, Bruce. Race and art: the career of James Baldwin; The New Criterion (ISSN: 0734-0222) v10 16-26 N 1991 Greene, Meg. 'I choose exile': African American writers and artists in postwar France; Cobblestone (ISSN: 0199-5197) v15 30-3 D 1994 Rediger, Pat. Great African Americans in literature; Crabtree 1996 Hamalian, Leo. God's angry man; Black American Literature Forum (ISSN: 0148-6179) v25 417-20 Summ 1991 Biography today: author series, v2, 1996; profiles of people of interest to young readers. Omnigraphics 1996 Leeming, David Adams. James Baldwin; a biography. Holt & Co. 1995 Bredeson, Carmen. American writers of the 20th century; Enslow Pubs. 1996 Guthrie, Robert. A letter to James Baldwin; Chicago Review (ISSN: 0009-3696) v42 no1 59-62 1996 Conger, Lesley. Jimmy on East 15th Street; African American Review (ISSN: 1062- 4783) v29 557-66 Wint 1995 Campbell, James. Black boys and the FBI; The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN: 0307- 661X) vno4574 1290+ N 30-D 6 1990 Miller, Neil. Out of the past; gay and lesbian history from 1869 to the present. Vintage Bks. 1995 Russell, Paul. The gay 100; a ranking of the most influential gay men and lesbians, past and present. Carol Pub. Group 1994

Biography from 1987 Copyright Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved. Article Heading Baldwin, James Aug. 2, 1924-Dec. 1, 1987 Publication Statement 1975 Biography from WORLD AUTHORS 1950-1970 Full Text BALDWIN, JAMES (ARTHUR) (August 2, 1924-- ), black American novelist, essayist, and dramatist, was born in Harlem Hospital, the son of Berdis (Jones) Baldwin. His stepfather, David Baldwin, was a pastor from New Orleans, a bitter and paranoid man Christina 13 who raised his children in an atmosphere of bigotry, fear, and religious fanaticism. James Baldwin has himself attributed his sense of alienation and rejection to this man (who called him ugly to his face) rather than simply to his race. Baldwin began his education at P.S. 24 and went on to the Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he is remembered as "a small, bright, sadlooking boy." He was an avid reader, even though his position as the oldest of nine children meant that he often had to hold his book with one hand, a baby with the other. At fourteen he became a Holy Roller preacher at the Fireside Pentecostal Church in Harlem; he was a success and, delighted by his ability to attract bigger congregations than his stepfather, preached in neighborhood storefront churches for the next three years, until his religious faith was gone. In a sense, Baldwin has been a secular preacher ever since: a prophet, a witness, and an orator. He completed his education at De Witt Clinton High School, where he edited the literary magazine, and graduated in 1942. His first job was on a defense project in New Jersey. When his stepfather died in 1943, Baldwin, by then determined on a literary career, left home and settled in Greenwich Village. During the next five years he earned his living as an office boy, dishwasher, factory worker, and waiter, writing in the evenings. He sold a few essays and reviews to magazines like Nation and Commentary, and began work on his first novel. In 1945, thanks to the intercession of Richard Wright, he received a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Award. Three years later a Rosenwald Fellowship paid his way to Paris. There he lived for most of the next decade, sometimes in great poverty, but safe from the grosser kinds of racial discrimination, and able to travel all over Europe. He continued to write and to read (learning most, he says, from Henry James), and in 1952 published the novel he had begun ten years earlier in Greenwich Village. This was Go Tell It on the Mountain, a powerful, lyrical, and heavily autobiographical account of the religious conversion of a fourteen-year-old Harlem boy. John Grimes's terrifying stepfather is a deacon of the Temple of the Fire Baptized, and John himself faces a choice, as his mother puts it, between the church and the jail. A sensitive and gentle youth, much troubled by his recent discovery of sex, he eventually embraces the church, impelled partly by religious excitement, partly by emotional panic, partly by an intuitive realization that he can in this way vanquish his stepfather on the latter's own ground. His conversion is the climax of a brilliant account of a long late-night service, during which flashbacks reveal the past lives of John and his parents; these flashbacks throw great light on the relationship between black recial experience and black religion, and immeasurably increase the scope and density of the novel. Stanley Edgar Hyman, who regarded Baldwin as a writer of symbolist fantasy, believed that the novel "disguised its story of a boy's conversion to homosexuality as a religious conversion." Most critics have been content to take the book at its face value, and to admire the elegance of its structure, the power and economy of its language, and its authenticity as a portrayal of a way of life. Some regard it as Baldwin's best novel. Critical hopes that a major new talent was emerging were confirmed three years later, when Notes of a Native Son appeared. These ten essays, first published in such magazines as Harper's and the Reporter, were unfashionably personal reflections on black-white relationships in America and abroad, centering on the special dilemma of the northern black intellectual, inheritor of no culture, Western or African. Despairing as many of these pieces are, the best of them have an unflinching honesty combined with a Christina 14 grace of style that is more exhilarating than depressing. Robert F. Sayre, writing in Contemporary American Novelists, pointed out that "invisibly connected to this tough sincerity and delicate elegance is a quality of exact distance from his subject, whether himself, books, his society, or whatever. One of the reasons Baldwin can handle violence so smoothly is that he seems to know the emotions and hidden prejudices of his audience so well ... he now evokes, now balances, and now hushes the response of his audience so that it provides the energy while he fingers the keys. This is the real source of Baldwin's power--his finesse and his control of his audience." In his second novel, Giovanni's Room, Baldwin seems deliberately to have put aside the problem of race and turned to his other principal theme, homosexuality. The story is narrated in flashback by David, a white American student who has an affair in Paris with a young Italian bartender. David has deserted Giovanni in favor of his American fiancee and respectability, and Giovanni, in desperation, has murdered his former patron. Now, on the eve of Giovanni's execution, David spends the night in ruthless self-examination. It is, as reviewers remarked, a frank and a brave book, skillfully narrated and subtle in its perceptions, though it does not escape melodrama or self-pity. Having published his first three books as an expatriate, Baldwin returned in 1957 to the United States. On a visit (his first) to the South he was deeply impressed by what he saw of the civil rights campaign and thereafter became fully involved in that cause. Baldwin, who has served on the national advisory board of the Congress of Racial Equality, is a compelling lecturer and television speaker, a small man giving an impression of extraordinary emotional and intellectual power. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, through his public appearances and his writings, he did as much as anyone in America to bring home to his compatriots, white and black, the full moral, historical, and personal significance of the race issue. Another Country, the first of his novels to be completed in the United States, is his most ambitious book. It is much less perfectly shaped than Go Tell It on the Mountain and is seriously flawed in other ways, but it comes closest of all his novels to a full working out of his sexual and racial ideas, in particular his belief that racial discrimination is a sickness of the whites, a symptom of thwarted love and displaced self-hatred. It begins with the suicide of Rufus Scott, a gifted black jazz musician who has been embittered and finally overwhelmed by racial hatred and frustration. The rest of the book centers on the sexual and racial encounters of his sister Ida, his white friend Vivaldo Moore, and Eric, a bisexual white Southerner who had been Rufus's lover. All of them are struggling for love but are denied it by the aridity and unreality of American life. Eric discovers and frees himself through an affair with Yves, a street boy in the south of France, and is able to pass on what he has learned to some of the others. In the end Ida and Vivaldo are together with some hope of happiness. There is some very bad writing in the novel--vulgar, unconvincing, and boring. On the other hand it takes enormous risks, and contains passages that are as perfectly achieved as anything Baldwin has ever written. The short stories collected in Going to Meet the Man and the subsequent novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone were even more roughly handled by most critics--found mechanical, artificial, or violently polemical, without the largeness of vision that distinguished Another Country. Blues for Mister Charlie, the first of Baldwin's plays to reach Broadway, is a story of racial murder based loosely on the killing of Emmett Till. "Mister Charlie" is the white Christina 15 man and, as the title suggests, the play embodies Baldwin's conception of racial discrimination as a diseae of white society. David Boroff wrote that Baldwin "has mustered all his pamphleteering skill and has written a raw, stinging denunciation of racial oppression. The play is as much a civil-rights pageant as a drama--militantly propagandistic in intent, often crudely oversimplified, but unfailingly vivid, moving, and powerful." (But a less sympathetic critic concluded that the author was in process of "exchanging creative writing for demagogic oratory.") It ran for four months in New York in 1964 and shared the Foreign Press Association's drama award for the season. The Amen Corner, written in Paris in the early 1950s, did not reach the New York stage until 1968. It is for the most part a pleasantly nostalgic reminiscence of a boyhood spent in and around a Harlem storefront chapel. The critics generally enjoyed the portrait of the congregation and the chapel scenes, though once again many felt that the play was marred by too many long didactic speeches. It seems increasingly clear that the artist in Baldwin has been murdered by the prophet in him, or by racial hatred itself, an implacable enemy of artistic detachment. Many now consider that, for all the brilliant promise of his novels, none of them (except perhaps the first) represents as large an achievement as his essays. His friend Norman Mailer has said that "Maybe the [novel] form is not for him. He knows what he wants to say, and that is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew. Baldwin's experience has shaped his tongue toward directness, for urgency." In Nobody Knows My Name, this directness and urgency is embodied in fifteen magazine articles and lectures dealing partly with books and writers, partly with Baldwin's return to the United States, his rediscovery of Harlem, his discovery of the South and the civil rights movement. Three of these pieces deal with Richard Wright, Baldwin's "spiritual father," whose literary and personal failings he attacks with a harshness never extended to writers who mean less to him. The Fire Next Time is the appropriate title of a later collection containing only two pieces, one of them the dark minatory summation of his racial views originally published in the New Yorker as "Letter From a Region of My Mind," perhaps the most powerful and moving of all his essays. In this form, Mailer says, "on the long continuing line of poetic fire in his essays, one knows he has become one of the few writers of our time.... Nobody has more elegance than Baldwin as an essayist, not one of us hasn't learned something about the art of the essay from him." For nearly ten years Baldwin was the inspired spokesman of the silent black masses, teaching white America how it felt to be black. He preached love and understanding between the races, prophesying holocaust if the dialogue failed. Even in The Fire Next Time, where he cannot keep the hatred and bitterness from his own voice, his insistent theme is that "we, the black and white, deeply need each other if we are really to become a nation." After the murder of Martin Luther King, which for him marked the death of the civil rights movement, Baldwin returned to Europe, living in Paris and Istanbul. Interviewed in 1970, he still insisted that black and white Americans are, literally, blood-brothers, and still thought it possible that racial conflict might be ended by reason and understanding. But, he said, the possibility was fading: "White people have simply raised the price, and raised it so high that fewer and fewer black people will be willing to pay it.... I'm Christina 16 optimistic about the future, but not about the future of this civilization. I'm optimistic about the civilization which will replace this one." These are very much the views he expressed also in A Rap on Race, a long taperecorded conversation with the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and in No Name in the Street, a loosely constructed two- part autobiographical essay. One Day, When I Was Lost is a film script based on Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Works by subject Selected Works: Fiction--Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953; Giovanni's Room, 1956; Another Country, 1962; Going to Meet the Man (short stories) 1965; Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, 1968. Plays--Blues for Mister Charlie, 1964; The Amen Corner, 1968. Essays--Notes of a Native Son, 1955; Nobody Knows My Name, 1961; The Fire Next Time, 1963; Nothing Personal, 1964; No Name in the Street, 1972. Miscellaneous-- (with Margaret Mead) A Rap on Race, 1971; One Day, When I Was Lost (film script) 1972; (with Nikki Giovanni) A Dialogue, 1973. Works about subject Suggested Reading: Atlas March 1967; British Journal of Sociology June 1966; Christian Century August 28, 1963; March 24, 1965; Commonweal July 26, 1963; October 11, 1963; May 29, 1964; May 7, 1965; Critique Winter 1964-1965; Ebony October 1961; December 1961; June 1964; March 1970; Encounter August 1963; July 1965; Guardian July 3, 1970; Hudson Review Autumn 1964; Nation May 11, 1964; May 10, 1965; June 10, 1968; National Review May 21, 1963; June 18, 1963; July 16, 1963; December 17, 1963; September 8, 1964; April 6, 1965; Negro History Bulletin April 1967; New Republic August 7, 1961; August 27, 1962; May 16, 1964; November 27, 1965; New Statesman February 8, 1963; July 19, 1963; May 1, 1964; May 6, 1965; New York Times Book Review May 24, 1953; September 15, 1963; New Yorker November 25, 1961; April 24, 1965; Partisan Review Summer 1964; Spectator July 12, 1963; Times (London) May 4, 1965; May 17, 1965; August 24, 1965; Times Literary Supplement September 6, 1963; June 6, 1968; July 4, 1968; Tri-Quarterly Winter 1965; Twentieth Century Literature April 1967; Wilson Library Bulletin February 1959; Yale Review October 1966. Current Biography, 1964; Eckman, F. M. The Furious Passage of James Baldwin, 1967; Gross, T. L. (ed.) Representative Man, 1970; Harper, H. M. Desperate Faith, 1967; Harte, B. and Riley, C. (eds.) 200 Contemporary Authors, 1969; Hyman, S. E. Standards, 1966; Ludwig, J. Recent American Novelists, 1962; Margolies, E. Native Sons, 1968; Moore, H. T. (ed.) Contemporary American Novelists, 1964; Who's Who, 1972; Who's Who in America, 1970-1971 Additional citations Pinckney, Darryl. The magic of James Baldwin; The New York Review of Books (ISSN: 0028-7504) v45 no18 64-74 N 19 1998 Als, Hilton. The enemy within; The New Yorker (ISSN: 0028-792X) v74 72-80 F 16 1998 Baldwin, James. Whose Harlem is this, anyway?; Essence (ISSN: 0014-0880) v27 112+ N 1996 Van Leer, David. The fire last time; The New Republic (ISSN: 0028-6583) v212 36-9 F 13 1995 Watkins, Mel. The relentless prophet; The New York Times Book Review (ISSN: 0028- 7806) 30 My 15 1994 Christina 17 Dailey, Peter. Jimmy; The American Scholar (ISSN: 0003-0937) v63 102-10 Wint 1994 Humanitarians and reformers; Macmillan Lib. Ref. USA 1999 African-American history; selections from the five-volume Macmillan encyclopedia of African-American culture and history. Macmillan Lib. Ref. USA 1998 Contemporary African American novelists; a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook. Greenwood Press 1999 The Scribner encyclopedia of American lives; Scribner 1999 Gates, Henry Louis. The fire last time; The New Republic (ISSN: 0028-6583) v206 37- 8+ Je 1 1992 Gottfried, Ted. James Baldwin; voice from Harlem. Watts 1997 Freund, David M. Biographical supplement and index; Oxford Univ. Press 1997 Bawer, Bruce. Race and art: the career of James Baldwin; The New Criterion (ISSN: 0734-0222) v10 16-26 N 1991 Greene, Meg. 'I choose exile': African American writers and artists in postwar France; Cobblestone (ISSN: 0199-5197) v15 30-3 D 1994 Rediger, Pat. Great African Americans in literature; Crabtree 1996 Hamalian, Leo. God's angry man; Black American Literature Forum (ISSN: 0148-6179) v25 417-20 Summ 1991 Biography today: author series, v2, 1996; profiles of people of interest to young readers. Omnigraphics 1996 Leeming, David Adams. James Baldwin; a biography. Holt & Co. 1995 Bredeson, Carmen. American writers of the 20th century; Enslow Pubs. 1996 Guthrie, Robert. A letter to James Baldwin; Chicago Review (ISSN: 0009-3696) v42 no1 59-62 1996 Conger, Lesley. Jimmy on East 15th Street; African American Review (ISSN: 1062- 4783) v29 557-66 Wint 1995 Campbell, James. Black boys and the FBI; The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN: 0307- 661X) vno4574 1290+ N 30-D 6 1990 Miller, Neil. Out of the past; gay and lesbian history from 1869 to the present. Vintage Bks. 1995 Russell, Paul. The gay 100; a ranking of the most influential gay men and lesbians, past and present. Carol Pub. Group 1994

Biography from 1997 Copyright (c) Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd Article Heading Baldwin, James Arthur 1924-87 Publication Statement 1997 Biography from Chambers Biographical Dictionary 1997 Full Text US writer. Born in Harlem, New York City, into a strongly religious African-American family, he was preaching in churches at the age of 14, an experience that inspired his novel Go Tell it on the Mountain (1954). He moved to Europe, living mainly in Paris Christina 18 from 1948 to 1957, in a conscious rejection of US society and its racism, before returning to the USA as a civil rights activist. His novels are often strongly auto-biographical but marked by a Flaubertian attention to form. Giovanni's Room (1957) is a study of gay relationships, and Another Country (1963) examines the sexual dynamics of US racism. He also wrote Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone (1968) and Just Above My Head (1979). His journalism has been extremely influential and controversial. Notes of a Native Son (1955) is an ironic response to cultural and racial politics. Other works include The Fire Next Time (1963), and the plays The Amen Corner (1955), Blues for Mr Charlie (1964) and The Women at the Well (1972). Works about subject Bibliography: J Campbell, Talking at the Gates: a life of James Baldwin (1991); W J Weatherby, James Baldwin: artist on fire (1989) Christina 19 Maps and Things of Interest

Subway map from 1924 http://www.nycsubway.org/maps/historical/bmt1924.gif

James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was at once a major twentieth century American author, a Civil Rights activist and, for two crucial decades, a prophetic voice calling Americans, black and white, to confront their shared racial tragedy. James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket captures on film the passionate intellect and courageous writing of a man who was born black, impoverished, gay and gifted.

James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket uses striking archival footage to evoke the atmosphere of Baldwin's formative years - the Harlem of the 30s, his father's fundamentalist church and the émigré demimonde of postwar Paris. Newsreel clips from the '60's record Baldwin's running commentary on the drama of the Civil Rights movement. The film also explores his quiet retreats in Paris, the South of Franc, Istanbul and Switzerland - places where Baldwin was able to write away from the racial tensions of America.

Writers Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, William Styron and biographer David Leeming place Bladwin's work in the African-American literary tradition - from slave narratives and black preaching to their own contemporary work. The film skillfully links excerpts from Baldwin's major books - Go Tell it on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, Blues for Mister Charlie, If Beale Street Could Talk - to different stages in black-white dialogue and conflict.

Towards the end of his life, as America turned its back on the challenge of racial justice, Baldwin became frustrated but rarely bitter. He kept writing and reaching in the strengthened belief that : "All men are brothers - That's the bottom line." Christina 20 List of Works

Go Tell It On The Mountain (1953) Notes of a Native Son (1955) Giovanni's Room (1956) Nobody Knows My Name (1961) Another Country (1962) The Fire Next Time (1963) With Richard Avedon: Nothing Personal (1964) Blues For Mister Charlie (1964) Going To Meet The Man (1965) Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968) The Amen Corner (1968) With Margaret Mead: A Rap on Race (1971) One Day if I Was Lost (1972) No Name in the Street (1972) If Beale Street Could Talk (1973) With Nikki Giovanni: A Dialogue (1973) The Devil Finds Work (1976) Little Man, Little Man (1976) Just Above My Head (1979) The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) Jimmy's Blues (1985) The Price of the Ticket (1985) Christina 21 Sonny’s Blues Christina 22 Excerpt from “Sonny’s Blues”

Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only tale we've got in all this darkness.

And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation. Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny's blues. He made the little black man on the drums know it, and the bright, brown man on the horn. Creole wasn't trying any longer to get Sonny in the water. He was wishing him Godspeed. Then he stepped back, very slowly, filling the air with the immense suggestion that Sonny speak for himself.

Then they all gathered round Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It wasvery beautiful because it was no longer hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now. I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live for ever. I saw my mother's face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father's brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it, I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel's tears again, and felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was aware that this was only a moment, that the world Christina 23 waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

Then it was over. Creole and Sonny let out their breath, both soaking wet, and grinning. There was a lot of applause and some of it was real. In the dark, the girl came by and I asked her to take drinks to the bandstand. There was a long pause, while they talked up there in the indigo light and after a while I saw the girl put a Scotch and milk on top of the piano for Sonny. He didn't seem to notice it, but just before they started playing again, he sipped from it and looked towards me, and nodded. Then he put it back on top of the piano. For me, then, as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brother's head like the very cup of trembling. Christina 24 Article: The Jazz-Blues Motif in James Baldwin's 'Sonny's Blues

Critic: Richard N. Albert Source: College Literature, Vol. XI, No. 2, 1984, pp. 178-85. Reproduced by permission Criticism about: James (Arthur) Baldwin (1924-1987), also known as: James Baldwin, James Arthur Baldwin [(essay date 1984) In the following essay, albert discusses the meaning of Baldwin's references to blues and jazz in "Sonny's Blues," suggesting that what appear on first inspection to be inconsistencies that betray Baldwin's incomplete knowledge of the music, may in fact be deliberate "contraries" designed to enhance the inclusive, humanistic closing theme.] James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," a popular selection among editors of anthologies used in introductory college literature courses, is one of his most enduring stories because it is less polemical than many of his latter efforts and because it offers several common literary themes: individualism, alienation, and "Am I my brother's keeper?" The story has also generated some perceptive critical views, some of which emphasize Baldwin's metaphorical use of the blues. However, none of the criticism bothers to look more closely at the significance of the jazz and blues images and allusions in relation to the commonly-agreed-upon basic themes of individualism and alienation. A closer examination of Baldwin's use of jazz and blues forms and of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, the character Creole, and the song, "Am I Blue?" reveals some solid support for the basic themes, as well as some possible important thematic and structural flaws that might cause some readers to question whether Baldwin really understood the nature of the jazz/blues motif that he used. On the other hand, he may have intentionally injected "contraries" that imply an interpretation which emphasizes a coming together in harmony of all people--not just Sonny's brother and his people and culture. The blues, both as a state of being and as music, are basic to the structure of the story. [In his Stouiping the Blues, 1976] Albert Murray says, "The blues as such are synonymous with low spirits," and both the narrator and his brother Sonny have had their share. The narrator's major source of discontent has been his selfish desire to assimilate and lead a "respectable," safe life as a high-school algebra teacher. When he learns of Sonny's troubles with drugs and the law, he feels threatened. Sonny, on the other hand, has a stormy relationship with his father. He is unhappy in Harlem and hates school. He becomes alienated from his brother because of his jazz- oriented life style and his continued attraction to Greenwich Village. Finally, Sonny's using and selling heroin leads to a jail sentence. The blues as music, as opposed to "the blues as such," take into account both form and content. In this story, content (message) is all important. As music, the blues are considered by many blacks to be a reflection of and a release from the suffering they endured through and since the days of slavery. [In The Jazz Book, 1975] Joachim Berendt says, "Everything of importance in the life of the blues singer is contained in these [blues] lyrics: Love and racial discrimination; prison and the law; floods and railroad trains and the fortune told by the gypsy; the evening sun and the hospital . . . Life itself flows into the lyrics of the blues. . . . " When Sonny plays the Christina 25 blues at the end of the story, it is the black heritage reflected in the blues that impresses itself upon Sonny's brother and brings him back into the community of his black brothers and sisters. Beyond this basic use of the blues motif as background for the unhappiness of the narrator and Sonny and their resultant alienation from one another, Baldwin uses the jazz motif to emphasize the theme of individualism. Sonny is clearly Thoreau's "different drummer." He is a piano player who plays jazz, a kind of music noted for individuality because it depends on each musician's ability to improvise his or her own ideas while keeping in harmony with the progression of chords of some tune (often well-known). It has often been described as being able to take one's instrument, maintain an awareness of one's fellow players in the group, and in this context spontaneously "compose a new tune" with perhaps only a hint of the original remaining, except at the beginning and end of the number. [In his Shadow and Act, 1964] Ralph Ellison refers to this as the jazz musician's "achieving that subtle identification between his instrument and his deepest drives which will allow him to express his own unique ideas and his own unique voice. He must achieve, in short, his self-determined identity." One of the greatest jazz improvisers of all time was Charlie Parker, Baldwin's choice as the jazz musician that Sonny idolizes. No better choice could have been made. Parker was one of a group of young musicians in the late 1940s and early 1950s who played what was called bebop, or bop. They developed new and difficult forms-- faster tempos, altered chords, and harmonies that involved greater ranges of notes which were frequently played at blistering speeds. Parker was more inventive and proficient than any of the others. His records are widely collected today, especially by young, aspiring jazz musicians, and he remains an inspiration to many. An individualist beyond compare not only in his music, but also in his life style, he died in 1955 at the age of 34, the victim of over-indulgence in drink, drugs, and sex. That Sonny should have Parker, whose well-known nickname was "Bird," as an idol is important. Parker flew freely and soared to the heights in all aspects of his life. He was one of a kind and he became a legend ("Bird Lives" is a popular slogan in jazz circles even today). Sonny's life begins to parallel Parker's early. [In his The Jazz Book] Joachim Berendt says of Parker: "He lived a dreary, joyless life and became acquainted with narcotics almost simultaneously with music. It is believed that Parker had become a victim of 'the habit' by the time he was 15." So also, it seems, had Sonny. A further reference to Parker is made when the narrator thinks of Sonny when he hears a group of boys outside his classroom window: "One boy was whistling a tune, at once very complicated and very simple, it seemed to be pouring out of him as though he were a bird, and it sounded very cool and moving through all that harsh, bright air, only just holding its own through all those other sounds." The key words in this passage are "complicated,""bird," and "holding its own through all those other sounds," all of which evoke the image of Bird Parker blowing his cool and complicated improvisations over the accompaniment of the other members of a jazz combo. When Sonny tells his brother that he is interested in playing jazz, the essential difference of the two brothers becomes evident. Sonny expresses his admiration for Charlie Parker, whom the older brother had never heard of. For the narrator, jazz means Louis Armstrong. Armstrong certainly was a highly-regarded, popular jazz musician--probably the best known in the world, having become known as Ambassador Satch because of his frequent trips abroad--but among bop musicians he represented the older, more traditional form of jazz. Baldwin's equating Sonny with Parker and his brother with Armstrong is important because it emphasizes the difference between the two brothers with reference to both individualism and knowing oneself. Sonny refers to Armstrong as "old-time" and Christina 26

"down home." There is a strong Uncle Tom implication in this and it is true that Armstrong was viewed this way by many of the young black musicians in the 1940s and 1950s. Had Armstrong become "the white man's nigger"? Had Sonny's brother? Probably so. He had tried, as best he could, to reject his black self through becoming a respectable math teacher and dissociating himself from black culture as much as possible. He was careful not to do those things that he felt whites expected blacks to do. Baldwin understood this attitude, acknowledging that only when he went to Europe could he feel comfortable listening to Bessie Smith, the well-known black blues singer of the 1920s and early 1930s. However, in fairness to Sonny's brother, it must be noted that after World War II bop musicians and their music were the subject of considerable controversy. [In their Jazz: A History of the New York Scene, 1962] Samuel Charters and Leonard Kunstadt observe: "The pathetic attempts of Moslem identification, the open hostility, the use of narcotics--everything was blamed on bop. It was the subject of vicious attacks in the press, the worst since the days of 'Unspeakable Jazz Must Go,' and the musicians were openly ridiculed." It is in this context that we must consider the narrator's concern about Sonny and the life style that he seems to be adopting. Up to the final section of the story, Baldwin uses jazz references, well, but then some surprising "contraries" begin to appear. As Sonny begins to play his blues in the last scene, he struggles with the music, which is indicative of how he struggles with his life: "He and the piano stammered, started one way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started again; then seemed to have found a direction, panicked again, got stuck." As Sonny flounders about, Baldwin brings into play two key references that lead and inspire Sonny to finally find himself through his music: The character of Creole and the playing of the song "Am I Blue?" Baldwin's use of these two elements is, to say the least, unusual. The use of Creole as the leader of the group Sonny plays with in this last and all- important section of the story is paradoxical. Baldwin seems to be emphasizing Sonny's bringing his brother back to a realization of the importance of his roots as epitomized in Sonny's playing of the blues. Why did Baldwin choose a leader who is not strictly representative of the black heritage that can be traced back through the years of slavery to West Africa with its concomitant blues tradition that includes work songs, field hollers, and "African-influenced spirituals"? [According to James Collier in The Making of Jazz, 1979] Creoles were generally regarded as descendants of French and Spanish settlers in Louisiana. Over the years, many Creole men took as mistresses light-skinned girls and produced that class referred to as black Creoles, many of whom passed for white and set themselves above the Negroes. From the early 1800s they were generally well-educated and cultured, some even having gone to Europe to attend school. Music was also an important part of life among the Creoles. According to James Collier (and this is very important for the point I am making),

. . . The black Creole was what was called a "legitimate" musician. He could read music; he did not improvise; and he was familiar with the standard repertory of arias, popular songs, and marches that would have been contained in any white musician's song bag. The point is important: The Creole musician was entirely European in tradition, generally scornful of the blacks from across the tracks who could not read music and who played those "low-down" blues.

After the Civil War, the advent of Jim Crow laws deeply affected the status of black Creoles. In particular, the passage of Louisiana Legislative Code III was devastating in that it declared that any person "with any black ancestry, however remote, would Christina 27 be considered black." Many Creoles with musical training were hard hit and sought work as musicians. The competition with Negroes was keen and unpleasant, but eventually, Leroy Ostransky notes [in his Jazz City, 1978], both groups "discovered each other's strengths and the resulting synthesis helped bring about the first authentic jazz style, what came to be called the New Orleans style." Though Creoles did contribute to the development of jazz as it is played in Baldwin's story, it must be remembered that the story seems to emphasize the importance of the strictly black experience and tradition, which for most people means the heritage that includes not only post-Emancipation Jim Crow laws, but also the indignities of slavery, the horrors of the middle-passage, and the cruelties of capture and separation from families in West Africa. The black Creoles were not distinctly a part of that culture. The second confusing element in the last section of the story is Baldwin's use of the song "Am I Blue?" It is certainly not an example of the classic 12-bar, 3-lined blues form. However, it might be pointed out that in the context of this story it would not have to be, because Sonny is part of a jazz movement that is characterized by new ideas. Nevertheless, we must not forget the main thrust of the last scene: The narrator's rebirth and acceptance of his heritage. Certainly most musicologists would agree that blues music has a complexity that includes contributions from many sources, but the choice of song is questionable for other reasons. It would have seemed appropriate for Baldwin to have chosen some song that had been done by one of his favorite blues singers, Bessie Smith. In Nobody Knows My Name he says: "It was Bessie Smith, through her tone and her cadence, who helped me dig back to the way I myself must have spoken when I was a pickaninny, and to remember the things I had heard and seen and felt. I had buried them very deep." In relation to the idea of the narrator's rebirth through his experience of hearing Sonny play the blues, choosing a song made famous by Bessie Smith would have been fitting and would have reflected Baldwin's personal experiences. But this is not the case. Why did Baldwin choose "Am I Blue?" a song far-removed from the black experience? It was written in 1929 by composer Harry Akst and lyricist Grant Clarke, who were both white, as far as I can determine. Akst was born on New York's East Side, the son of a classical musician who played violin in various symphony orchestras and wished Harry to become a classical pianist. However, Harry became a composer of popular music and eventually worked with well-known show business personalities like Irving Berlin and Fred Astaire. One of his best-known songs is "Baby Face." Grant Clarke was born in Akron, Ohio, and worked as an actor before going to work for a music publisher. In 1912, his "Ragtime Cowboy Joe" became a hit. Akst and Clarke wrote "Am I Blue?" specifically for Ethel Waters, an extremely popular black singer who had paid her dues and sung her share of the blues through the years, but who had by 1929 achieved fame on the stage and in films. The song was written for the film musical "On With the Show." Ethel Waters received a four- week guarantee in the making of the film at $1,250 per week. Bessie Smith never achieved a comparable fame among general audiences. Ethel Waters seems to have been more in a class with Louis Armstrong in terms of general entertainment value and popularity. The bop musician's point of view was antithetical to the Uncle Tom image they had of Armstrong. Ralph Ellison observes: "The thrust toward respectability exhibited by the Negro jazzmen of Parker's generation drew much of its immediate fire from their understandable rejection of the traditional entertainer's role--a heritage from the minstrel tradition--exemplified by such an outstanding creative musician as Louis Armstrong [Shadow and Act]. Why would Baldwin choose a song made popular by Ethel Waters, rather than one by his favorite, Bessie Smith? Christina 28

All of this is not to say that "Am I Blue?" is not in the blues tradition in terms of message. The lyric expresses the sadness of a lonely woman whose man has left her, not unusual content for all forms of blues songs through the years. But it is what Paul Oliver refers to [in The Meaning of the Blues, 1963] as one of those "synthetic 'blue' compositions of the Broadway show and the commercial confections of 52nd Street that purport to be blues by the inclusion of the word in the titles." Therefore, in view of the song's origin, Baldwin's fondness for Bessie Smith, and the possible intent of Sonny's playing the blues to bring the narrator back to an acknowledgment and affirmation of his roots, the choice of this particular song seems inappropriate. And yet Baldwin may have known what he was doing. Is it possible that in "Sonny's Blues" he is indicating that tradition is very important, but that change is also important (and probably inevitable) and that it bluids on tradition, which is never fully erased but continues to be an integral part of the whole? Ellison is again relevant here: "Perhaps in the swift change of American society in which the meaning of one's origins are so quickly lost, one of the chief values of living with music lies in its power to give us an orientation in time. In doing so, it gives significance to all those indefinable aspects of experience which nevertheless help to make us what we are." Both Ellison and Baldwin seem to be saying that we are an amalgam of many ingredients that have become fused over the centuries. We cannot separate ourselves, all people, from one another. Having Sonny, inspired by Creole, playing "Am I Blue?" for what we must assume is a racially mixed audience in a Greenwich Village club gives credence to these ideas and helps to explain what might otherwise appear to be some inexplicable incongruities. Biographical/Critical Introduction to James Baldwin Source: Richard N. Albert, "The Jazz-Blues Motif in James Baldwin's 'Sonny's Blues," in College Literature, Vol. XI, No. 2, 1984, pp. 178-85. Reproduced by permission. Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism

Christina 29 Helpful Websites

James Baldwin http://www.tstonramp.com/~jpw/ Last Essay and Links http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/baldwin.htm Teacher Resource Guide http://www.africana.com/Utilities/Content.html?&../cgi- bin/banner.pl? banner=Arts&../Articles/tt_099.htm Article http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/baldwin_j.html Article http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/campbell_sp99.html Article http://books.guardian.co.uk/lrb/articles/0,6109,551979,00.html Article http://partners.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin.html Compilation, including sound files http://www.cp-tel.net/miller/BilLee/quotes/Baldwin.html Quotes http://www.georgetown.edu/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/baldwin.html Study Guide http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/pickering/chapter2/custom1/deluxe-content.html Bio, plus quiz and essay questions on “Sonny’s Blues”

“Sonny’s Blues” http://www.english.lsu.edu/dept/fac/instr/mwatson/sonny study questions http://www2.una.edu/wphillip/baldwin.html more study questions http://www.ferrum.edu/thanlon/studyq/baldwin.htm more study questions http://plato.acadiau.ca/courses/engl/lawson/1223c2/as1.htm essay topic http://www.fsu.edu/~CandI/ENGLISH/webquest2/blues.htm an interesting variation Christina A 30 Section Notes and Bibliography

. Photo located at http://www.pathfinder.com/photo/essay/african/cap28.htm . Chronology located at http://www.bridgesweb.com/baldwin.html . Biographies located through Wilson Biographies at WilsonWeb at http://vweb.hwwilsonweb.com/cgi-bin/webspirs.cgi . “Price of the Ticket” from http://www.newsreel.org/films/jamesbal.htm . List of Works compiled from http://www.randomhouse.com . Excerpt taken from http://www.garply.com/harp-l/archives/9601/1021.html . Article taken from http://comp.uark.edu/%7Eblanken/sonny.html . Helpful Websites located through Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com)