Status Updates From Baldwin: A Love Story

we are all androgynous, not only because we are born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

Baldwin was asked whether he had any advice for a young man struggling with his sexuality, he replied: “Best advice I ever got was from an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t have any life at all. That’s the only advice you can give anybody. And it’s not advice. It’s an observation.”

...“though black had been described to me as the absence of light, it became very clear to me that if this were true, we would never have been able to see the colour; black.”

...and the spectrum of colors that word actually contains, echoes Baldwin’s description of the lessons passed down by Delaney in their Village years when his mentor used the example of learning to stare at a leaf long enough to “discover many colors in it,” and how, in doing so,...

Elsewhere it is noted that other characters are “the color of tea after you put in the milk,” “the color of chocolate cake with no icing on it,” and the “color of peaches and brown sugar.” Significantly, TJ’s dawning realization of the problem defining the color “black,”...

In this monumental moment, he implicitly answers his own question by going on to describe exactly what he was going to do, which was what he always did: transmute his psychological and emotional wounds into writing.

“Once locked out,” he goes on, “one will never again be forced to encounter in the eyes of a stranger who loves him the impenetrable truth concerning the stranger, oneself, who is loved. And yet—one would prefer, after all, not to be locked out. One would prefer, merely, that the key unlocked a less stunningly unusual door.”

“Everyone wishes to be loved, but, in the event, nearly no one can bear it,”

The America of my experience has worshipped and nourished violence for as long as I have been on earth. The violence has been perpetrated mainly against black men, though—the strangers; and so it didn’t count. But, if a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.”

understanding the human psychology behind white racism, and laying its dynamics bare for all Americans—white and Black—would be one of the keys to real social change.

Or as Clark later summarized the complex politics of it all, “The seeming inability to communicate the passionate insistence of Mr. Baldwin that the Attorney General had to understand the sense of urgency of the Negro people, and the need for the Attorney General to protect the image of liberal concern within the context of political realism, had contributed to an excruciating sense of impasse.”

This phrase—“both present and not present”—perfectly captures the intimacy and distance Baldwin required to create his art, which also happens to be characteristic of the kind of “melancholy that is communal rather than private” that Orhan Pamuk describes as “the hüzün of Istanbul … something the entire city feels together and affirms as one,” despite their urban atomization.