(This material comes from a seven-hour conversation that Mr. Baldwin had with Dr. Mead. It was both recorded and published as a book. Only Mr. Baldwin is performed for the purposes of this play. Musician is onstage and playing music as Baldwin speaks.)
(To the musician.) If I may interrupt you for a moment. Luckily, I’m not fifteen, but if I were, how in the world would I find any respect for human life, or any sense of history? And history is a concept that exists in almost nobody’s mind. (To the musician.) Go on, go on. According to the West, I have no history. I’ve had to wrest my identity out of the jaws of the West. What I’m trying to say is that if I were young, I would find myself with no models. And that’s a very crucial situation. Because what we’ve done, the world we created. If I were fifteen, I would feel hopeless, too. So you see what we gotta try to, what we gotta try to face…
I read a little book called The Way It Spozed to Be. And it was poetry and things written by little black children, Mexican, Puerto Rican children. Land of the free, home of the brave. And the teacher had made a compilation of the poems these kids wrote. And he respected them. And he dealt with them as if they were—as a fact, all children are. As a fact, all human beings are…some kind of a miracle! And so something wonderful happened.
And so for me, that very tiny book, it’s only thirty pages long, one boy wrote a poem. Sixteen years old, he was in prison. It ended, four lines I never will forget: “Walk on water / Walk on a leaf / Hardest of all / Is walk in grief.”
So what I’m trying to get at, I hope, is that there is a tremendous national global moral waste. And the question is: How can it be arrested?
That’s an enormous question. Look. You and I, we’ve become whatever we become. The curtain will come down eventually. But what should we do about the children? We are responsible, in so far as we’re responsible for anything at all, we are responsible for the future of this world.