updating the myth1
The Legacy of James Baldwin and Richard Wright
Gordon Heath, Julia Wright, Ernest Gaines, James Emanuel, Jake Lamar
“The tradition of Richard Wright and Baldwin is obvious, but it is not just that. One day you simply say: Ah! That’s Paris.”
—jake lamar,
Village Voice reading, January 15, 1995.
I met James Baldwin in the spring of 1986 at a conference of American and French writers in Aix-en-Provence. The adopted son of the region of Provence,2 Baldwin was the guest of honor, with its roll call also including a number of other American friends and writers: Grace Paley, Robert Coover, Jerome Charyn, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti . . . all of whom had read or would do so at the Village Voice.
I had been invited to this conference by Kenton Keith, the American cultural attaché in Paris and a close friend of Baldwin’s from the 1960s in Turkey. It was in this capacity that Keith had collaborated with him on various theater projects. One of them was a play based on Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. A young Turkish actor, whom the author had befriended at the Actors Studio in New York, took on the central role. Sexually explicit, in line with the spirit of the times, the piece was quite daring for a Muslim country. As it was received with enthusiasm, Kenton later commented that “Turkey was ready for Baldwin and needed his message. The place was bursting at the seams with cultural fervor . . . there was music, there was jazz, there was theater.”3
Now, one late afternoon, after a day of roundtables and debates, Keith invited me to meet his friend “Jimmy,” as he called Baldwin. It was a delightfully privileged moment to be sitting with them on the terrace of the hotel rooftop, overlooking the old city of Aix and its surrounding hills in the dimming light. The two friends called up memories of their past in Istanbul, regularly breaking out into loud laughter. Trying to follow their conversation, but feeling intimidated, I did not say much. I just managed to ask Baldwin about his stay in Amherst where he had taught the year before at the University of Massachusetts, invited by Mike Thelwell, already the head of the Department of African American Studies back in 1969-1970, the year I lived in Amherst.
The next day, Baldwin closed the conference with a talk on the Atlanta child murders that involved twenty-eight African American boys and young men who had disappeared or been killed between 1979 and 1981. On stage, he was not the relaxed and jovial man I had previously met; he looked tired and grief-stricken as he recollected his recent trip to Atlanta to further investigate those crimes left unpunished. He had just published a book-long essay, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, a revised and enlarged version of his original 1981 coverage of the subject in Playboy magazine.
James Baldwin had arrived in Paris in 1948, two years after his mentor and friend Richard Wright. His postwar city had little to do with the bright lights of the Paris of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Natalie Barney, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In fact, Nazi-occupied Paris had chased many Americans away, but after the war, the liberated city once again welcomed a wave of expatriates from the US. Among them were African American victims of continued racial discrimination at home and often pursued by Senator McCarthy’s witch hunts at the onset of the Cold War. They formed part of a community that Baldwin called “the New Lost Generation.”4
More than thirty years later, when the Village Voice opened, Baldwin was still part of the collective memory in Paris, but I met only one man who actually remembered him. It was Gordon Heath: tall and handsome with a charismatic presence, he used to drop by the bookshop, silently browse in the quiet opening hours, and then leave. Little by little, we got to know this mysterious visitor who had also arrived in Paris in 1948, and whom Baldwin referred to in his “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown”: “Gordon Heath, who will be remembered for his performances in Broadway’s Deep Are the Roots some seasons back, sings ballads nightly in his own nightclub on the Rue de l’Abbaye.”5 Commenting on a superb recording of Baldwin’s I had given him, Heath praised his style in this way”: Jimmy’s mastery of the language, his nuance, his musicality makes everyone else sound illiterate.”6
Heath gave three major readings at the Village Voice: the first one on February 12, 1986, was an homage to Langston Hughes, the African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His poems were recited by Heath himself, the jazz poet Ted Joans, and James Emanuel, an African American poet living in Paris and author of a book on Langston Hughes. Yet, it was Heath’s stage reading of Shakespeare’s Macbeth with five other actors on March 9, 1987, that gave the full measure of his acting talent and awe-inspiring presence. His last evening at the Village Voice was a warmly applauded concert of folksongs and spirituals from his Abbaye repertoire on New Year’s Day, 1989. He sadly died in August 1991, the month his book, Deep Are the Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate, came out in the States, somewhat bringing new life to his eventful and artistic career, long ignored in his native country.
In January 1986, Paris Passion published an article on this burgeoning community in Paris, featuring a dozen portraits of African Americans interviewed on their choice of a new home, their activities, and their concerns while living here. Their answers varied widely, but most of them agreed that they had come “not in a spirit of protest like their elders, but as people eager to try their hand at making a living and expressing their capabilities abroad.” They were not the New Lost Generation of Baldwin, but a post–civil rights movement youth who belonged to the third wave of expatriates who had moved to Paris to enlarge their horizons and enjoy the experience of a different culture in an unfamiliar country.
The front cover of the magazine featured Ted Joans, the seasoned and still emblematic figure of this new generation, though he had been around since the 1960s. He described himself as a Beat and jazz poet, having played jazz with John Coltrane, and, in the early ’60s, joined his Beat friends—Ginsberg, Corso, Orlovsky—in their Paris haunt on rue Gît-le-Cœur, just around the corner from the student quarter of the Place Saint-Michel. After getting to know the surrealist poet André Breton, Joans made collages in this fashionable vein and loved to call himself “the Black Surrealist.” An eternal nomad, he would disappear for months at a time, roaming the world—he had friends everywhere. Once back in Paris, he would show up at the bookshop to perform a reading that would turn into a jazz session, “swinging” the words of his poems. His tenor voice filled up the space, chanting his trademark poem: “If you should see / a man / walking down a crowded street / talking to himself / don’t run / in the opposite direction / but run toward him / for he is a poet! You have nothing to fear / from the poet / but the truth.”7
Julia Wright
The daughter of Richard Wright,* the legendary author who revolutionized African American literature with Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), Julia organized several readings at the Village Voice. We had a friendly relationship, but she never brought up anything personal about her life, much less about her father. Our casual conversations with Julia always seemed to concern him—new publications, conferences, reprints, translations, all endeavors to keep his memory alive.
One day, she dropped by the bookstore and handed me a small paperback entitled Rites of Passage, a story by her father about a Black child taken in and then abandoned by his foster family. He eventually runs away, trying to survive on his own. Somewhat amazed by her gift, I opened the book and read Julia’s entry: “If my father were still alive, your bookshop—a haven for writers like him—would be one of his favorite haunts, Paris, March 29/96.” Seeming to have a personal resonance for her, these words were all the more precious to me.
Out of loyalty to her father, but also stemming from strong personal conviction, in the early 1990s, she had taken to heart the plight of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the African American journalist and political activist caught in a melee of shots during which he was accused of killing a white Philadelphia policeman. His death sentence in 1982 gave rise to controversial investigations, and in 1995, Julia invited Mumia’s defense lawyer, Leonard Weinglass, to speak at our bookstore. He was to present his defense conclusions detailed in his work Race for Justice: Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Fight against the Death Penalty.8
That same year, Mumia Abu Jamal’s first book Live from Death Row,9 was published in the US and in French translation with a foreword by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, making the Mumia case a cause célèbre in France. To highlight this double success, Julia set up a second reading with two eminent American literary figures, Ernest Gaines and James Emanuel. The former is the author of A Lesson Before Dying,10 a novel set in the Deep South during Jim Crow. It tells the story of a young man with the symbolic name of Jefferson, sentenced to death for a crime he has not committed. Waiting in his cell to be executed, he learns how to read and write to prove his own lawyer wrong for describing him as “an animal without words.” Jefferson gains his dignity as a full human being, able to speak for himself in court and thus nobly face the death sentence imposed on him by a white judge. We had often recommended this book to French school teachers who, reading it with their students, brought up a topic rarely discussed in class at the time.
The poet James Emanuel followed with haikus he had especially written for this occasion, grouped under the title Reaching for Mumia.11 Emanuel’s support of Mumia was all the more moving since his only son had committed suicide in the aftermath of a beating by “three cowardly cops,” in the poet’s words.
Determined never to return to the United States, he had moved to Paris in 1984, leaving behind a prestigious academic career, yet continuing to write and publish poetry and autobiographical essays. The last work he read that evening was “Deadly James,” his exemplary poem dedicated to his son and “to all the victims of police brutality.”12 His Haikus for Mumia recited in the presence of Julia Wright were also a tribute to her father, who had written hundreds of haikus himself in the dark hours of his life. Rejected at the time by his publisher, Wright’s Haikus were now being taught in American classrooms, Julia reminded the audience.
The Mumia evenings had rallied big audiences, but Julia’s most personal and significant event at the Village Voice was the launching of her father’s last, unfinished novel, A Father’s Law, on May 29, 2008.13 After Wright’s sudden death at fifty-two, his publisher had rejected the work, considering it not on par with his previous writings, but Julia felt emotionally closest to it. After her visit to the mortuary, she went to her father’s studio where a page of his unfinished novel lay on his Underwood. She considered it to be her “father’s last letter to her.”14
With Wright’s centennial birthday approaching in 2008, Julia wrote a detailed letter to his publisher, asking him to mark the date with the publishing of A Father’s Law. She told us that evening that this unfinished novel was “sketchy and faulty,” but nevertheless written at a most difficult time when “free to speak out in France, not mincing his words, and openly speaking against the death penalty, he was put back on the US National Security Index.” Those times were over, and Julia saw nothing “provocative” in this novel that could hamper its publication. Finally, she triumphed, and her letter became the introduction to A Father’s Law, published in February 2008 to coincide with Black History Month. “It was the birthday gift to my father,” she told us.15
A thriller with singular interest in the psychology of the murderer, a motif running throughout Wright’s work, A Father’s Law is also about a conflicted relationship between a father, a policeman, and his son, a university graduate who he feared would eventually betray him. Oddly enough, a few weeks before his own death, as he was endorsing his daughter’s university choice, Wright warned her “not to forget or leave behind the world where your father comes from.”16 A sensitive subject to him.
Indeed, Wright’s painful experience of his broken friendship with Baldwin, his young protégé back in New York, had never healed. Upon arriving in Paris, the latter wrote two essays critical of his mentor’s iconic novel Native Son, an act that Wright felt to be a betrayal. The two never came to an understanding.
Yet Julia did not believe that Baldwin’s criticism of her father’s work was the cause of the fallout between these two influential African American writers of the twentieth century. With a few remaining qualms about their quarrel, in 1987, hearing that Baldwin was dying in Saint Paul-de-Vence, she rushed there to see him, hopeful there would be some kind of reconciliation. “That’s where the test took place,” she told us. “Isn’t it true, Jimmy, that there was not enough room for two stars up there?” Lying in pain, he laughed out loud and begged her: “Stop making me laugh, Julia, it hurts.”
Whatever Baldwin’s enigmatic answer meant, in Alas, Poor Richard, his essay written after Wright’s death, he admitted that the older man’s work had been “an immense liberation and revelation,” but to him, then a young man of twenty-six, “a carnivorous age,” Wright had also been “a road-block, the sphinx, really, whose riddles I had to answer before I could become myself.”17
It is also true that they had different approaches to the issue of racism in America and its tenacious roots. The day of the publication of Baldwin’s controversial essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), the confrontation at the famed Brasserie Lipp between the two friends was so “ghastly,” Baldwin recalled that “even though [he] never forgot it, [he] doubted that [he] would ever be able to re-create it.”18 In 2012, more than sixty years after this violent scene that left an indelible trace on the new lost generation,” Jake Lamar, a young African American novelist living in Paris, wrote and staged Brothers in Exile, a vivid evocation of the African American community in the postwar city, fraught with tensions and rivalries among figures caught in the larger context of Cold War ideological dissension.
Jake Lamar
Lamar arrived in Paris in 1993, the rising author of Bourgeois Blues, published in the United States to critical acclaim two years beforehand.19 It is a memoir that tells the story of the writer born at the beginning of the civil rights movement, who grew up in a lower middle-class Black family and emerged as a Harvard graduate and journalist for Time magazine. In it he recognized that he belonged to the first generation of African Americans able to reap the rewards of the struggles of their parents and other elders.
Jake’s recollections are not so much about his accomplishments as about his bitter disenchantment with the failed promises of this protest era in the States. Blatant racism was not as open as before, but stealthily continued to hold sway under cover of the politically correct, facilitating the apparition of more subtle and pernicious forms, such as “power-plays,” “innuendoes,” “disguised humiliations,” often encountered in his own professional experience and personal life.
An endearing person with a contagious laugh and big heart, Jake became the darling of the eclectic crowd gravitating around the Village Voice and part of the circle of writers at the forefront of its literary life, among them Diane Johnson, Edmund White, Mavis Gallant, Ellen Hinsey, Denis Hirson, and the poet C. K. Williams, whom he considered a mentor.
Through his fiction, he would continue his reflections on race relations, but not just in the States. Living in the eighteenth arrondissement, one of the city’s ebullient multicultural neighborhoods at the foot of Montmartre, he had just the right material to animate his two works in progress that centered on African American characters: Rendezvous Eighteenth20 and Ghosts of Saint-Michel.21
In the first novel, which came out in 2003, the central protagonist, Ricky Jenks, is an African American jazz pianist in Montmartre who shares his life with a Muslim woman of Moroccan descent. Suddenly, he finds himself under investigation for two crimes he has nothing to do with. At a loss and looking for some comfort, he turns to his community of African American compatriots “who feel the need to seek each other out to share their lives and experiences in ways that they couldn’t with people of other backgrounds.” With him, we penetrate this community, a mix of “old timers” going back to the ’40s and ’50s and the next generations of “all-around nonconformists . . . who saw expatriation to France as one of a variety of alternative lifestyle choices.” Now, in the 1990s, the new generation of expats “tended to be more careerist” with professionals sent to Paris by their corporations back in the States. They were “lawyers, chefs, artists, translators, academics, computer programmers . . .” Whoever they were and whatever they did, hanging together gave them “a powerful sense of inter-connectedness that might be called brotherhood.”22
In Ghosts of Saint-Michel, published in 2006, Lamar continues to focus on the issues of race and identity in a multicultural society. Already present in his novels set in the US, this thorny question, traditionally deemed by the French to be a specifically American issue, had now reared its ugly head in their own society. In the three years separating these two Parisian novels, immigrant riots had erupted in the suburbs, spilling into the very center of the capital. The country was painfully awakened to the reality of the aftermath of its long-ignored colonial past.
Like all of Lamar’s thrillers, this novel, haunted by the ghosts of a recent terrorist attack on Place Saint-Michel, the very heart of Paris, is driven by its characters. Marva Dobbs is a charismatic African American woman who owns a successful soul food restaurant in Montmartre. Her French husband, Loic Rose, embodies the political and social predicament of a sector of France struggling to accept the growing immigrant populations from its former colonies. An ex-communist who, in his youth, fought for the independence of Algeria and the cause of immigrants, Rose becomes a CIA informant.
With malicious delight, the author stirs up even more confusion: Marva seems to have disappeared with her lover who could very well be the Algerian terrorist sought by the police—an ironic turn of events that speaks volumes.
This fast-moving novel, full of details about recent French history, provides pertinent insights into the societal predicament of France, the result, according to the author, of the government’s determination to cling to a unifying approach to the political, historical, cultural, religious, and social problems of its multiethnic populations—an approach inherited from its colonial past. For this keen observer, the old adage “We are all French and One Republic” is a tall challenge in a divided society like France.
Jake Lamar, November 20, 2003. © Dorli Lamar
David Sedaris reading at the Village Voice Bookshop, February 9, 2006, Village Voice Bookshop archive.