James Baldwin

It was 1948, in New York.

A young man of twenty-four left for Paris. His name was James Baldwin. In the United States, racial and sexual discrimination was stifling him.

He was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem. He was the grandson of a slave. He was the eldest of nine children, and the family was poor.

He was raised by his mother and his stepfather, David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher from New Orleans. The man was strict. Between them, things were hard.

At fourteen, James spent hours in libraries. There he discovered his passion: writing.

In junior high, he had a French teacher. It was Countee Cullen, a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. He became his mentor.

As a teenager, James stepped into the pulpit himself. For about three years, he preached in a Pentecostal church. Later, he would say that this is what turned him into a writer.

He knew he was Black. He also knew he was smart.

At eighteen, he worked for the railroad, in New Jersey. Then he moved to Greenwich Village. He wrote book reviews. The novelist Richard Wright helped him get a grant.

Then came Paris.

He said that once you find yourself in another civilization, you are forced to examine your own.

In 1953, his first novel came out, Go Tell It on the Mountain. He had finished it in a small village in Switzerland. Other books followed, novels and essays.

He never cut the tie. He kept crossing back and forth over the Atlantic.

In the early 1960s, he returned to the United States. He traveled through the South. The country was fighting for civil rights.

In 1963, he published The Fire Next Time. The book became a bestseller. His face appeared on the cover of TIME magazine.

In that book, he wrote that if the concept of God has any validity or any use,

That same year, he marched on Washington. In 1965, he marched from Selma to Montgomery.

His friends were Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Nina Simone, Lorraine Hansberry. Their deaths marked his writing.

In 1971, he settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. He kept writing: If Beale Street Could Talk came out in 1974. He also taught at universities in Massachusetts.

James Baldwin died at home, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, on December 1, 1987. He was sixty-three.

He left an unfinished text, Remember This House. In 2016, it became a film: I Am Not Your Negro.

His voice did not come from Ubuntu, but it echoes it: we only come to know ourselves by looking at the other.

He said he knew a story which America denies. He spent his life telling it.

What remains is the image of a boy from Harlem, bent over a book in a library. And of a world that, little by little, began to listen to him.