The black man’s author
A short time ago I read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain for the first time, and it prompted me to pick up, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. The first book was a study of black religion in America and the second a study of the black man in America. Baldwin’s novels are experiences that you can’t just dive into, you have to wade around because they’re harsh, and glaring, and awful, yet glorious.
We have a friend whose mother believes all black children should be educated at black colleges so that they pass through the whirling blades of cultural indoctrination into what being black in America truly means. She is not shy to tell us she believes our son needs to know this to know himself.
I have to say I don’t know anyone who doesn’t need to know what Baldwin is peddling. If you want to understand a least part of black culture, African American experience, of the friction and grease that populate the archives of what Black History Month is all about, start here my friend, read Baldwin.
His are not universal novels about other, I can’t look on his characters and see myself in the religiosity, in the other, in the artist, in the homosexual, because every pore of his characters are wrapped in black skin, black experience, and that experience is singular and only universal to blacks.