For all who appreciate a master’s rendering of the written word, a new edition of any of James Baldwin’s work is cause for celebration. In this reissue of his 1985 essay on the Atlanta child murders, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Baldwin presents a painfully revealing portrait of a city’s crisis. He lays bare the pervasive presence of race that moved so many to protect the image of the city rather than address the conditions that led to the deaths of many young black people.
Invited back into America’s racial cauldron from his voluntary exile in France, Baldwin enlists fact and faith to try to make sense of what he refers to as a series of murders prosecuted as a mass murder. Applying the template of his own ambivalent and troubling history in America as a black child in a white country, he is able to convey a sense of how such an awful tragedy could happen in a city that had carefully crafted an image as the “city too busy to hate.”
In his role of literary reporter, Baldwin eschews a search for clues and, instead, undertakes an exploration for truths. Once engaged, he follows his own leads, relying on personal perception and a probing intellect. He asks questions that may be unanswerable, and he posits theories that are at once familiar to the African-American experience and frightening in their familiarity. And, in his unique style, he analyzes the effect of pervasive racism on the behavior of all the players in this tense, complex, and unsettling drama.
James Baldwin was not a lawyer, yet his commentary on the Atlanta trial is enlightened by his astute assumption that racism in American law cannot be understood by reading statutes and legal decisions removed from the context of the political, economic, and social concerns that gave rise to them. Utilizing his knowledge and the uncannily accurate insights for which he was famous, Baldwin produced a provocative and powerful work that continues to inform long after the events in Atlanta have been superseded by later and even scarier events.
In recalling the horror of the Atlanta murders—conditioned as we were to expect that racist police or a KKK-type group was responsible—it was deeply disturbing when a young black man, Wayne Williams, was prosecuted and convicted of the crimes. Our and Baldwin’s unease was heightened by the knowledge that Williams seemed more indolent than energetic and that his parents and those who knew him viewed him as spoiled, arrogant, and something of a failure. Williams was not the racist specter we expected, but young black men his age—and far younger—are becoming, ready or not, the specters our society is spawning in ever-increasing numbers.
Our suspicions of a decade ago have been replaced by a weary resignation. Poet Maya Angelou expresses the plight of our most deprived with great poignancy when she writes:
In these bloody days and frightful nights when an urban warrior can find no face more despicable than his own, no ammunition more deadly than self-hate and no target more deserving of his true aim than his brother, we must wonder how we came so late and lonely to this place.1
Reading Baldwin’s ruminations on Atlanta a decade later, we can recognize that he provided us with fearful prophesies about today’s worsening life chances for those born poor and black. Deeply embedded racial beliefs and presumptions doomed the Atlanta children to an environment where all manner of predicaments and perils haunted their days and threatened their lives. Now, those dangers have grown worse in a volatile economic climate in which politicians posture about solutions and settle for scapegoats.
For politicians, “fear of crime” becomes both a readily translatable code for anti-black rhetoric and a convenient cover for the serious domestic issues that they prefer to ignore and for which they present no real solutions. For example, debate over the morality—to say nothing of the deterrent value—of the death penalty is subsumed under the unseemly competition to apply it to more and more crimes. Application of the ultimate penalty, it is assumed without acknowledgment or shame, will condemn a disproportionately large number of blacks.
Where execution is not available, imprisonment has become the social policy of choice. Again, blacks will bear the brunt of politically popular alternatives to addressing seriously the disappearance of jobs. In 1993, 53 percent of black males in the prime working and family-forming years—the ages of twenty-five to thirty-four—were jobless or employed with wages too low to raise a family of four out of poverty. As a direct result of the closing off of access to legal employment, 80 to 85 percent of black men in urban areas will be caught up in the criminal “justice” system, most on drug-related charges, before they reach their thirtieth birthday—if they are lucky enough to live that long. The number of black men in prison now exceeds 800,000, the largest number of any country in the world. That number is expected to reach one million before the year 2000.
Because our society does not view itself in any way responsible for antisocial deviance by blacks that leads to their deaths or incarceration, black crime statistics with all their unhappy ramifications are treated not as a serious political and social problem, but as a challenge to the nation’s commitment to law and order. In the face of massive evidence that it will do little to reduce either the fear or the fact of crime, the Street Crime Act of 1994 provides billions of dollars for new prisons and creates new categories of crime that ensure our ever-growing penal system will be filled with those whom society abandons and betrays.
It is not difficult to believe that Baldwin’s skepticism about virtually every aspect of the Atlanta case is founded in his recognition that as horrible as were the facts of that case, the criminalizing of social problems would become much worse without any reasonable possibility that, at some point, we would see the light. Baldwin maintains that his “soul is a witness,” and the Atlanta case has transcended its time without shedding light as to whether we fail to halt the devastation of black people because we—as a society—are unable to or because we do not want to.
Of course, clairvoyance is not required to predict with certainty how America would have responded in Atlanta had the victims been white boys from “good” homes, the suspects all black, and the murders apparently racially motivated. Similarly, if mainly white suburbs were experiencing the strife that has turned inner-city neighborhoods into battlegrounds, the crisis response would recognize the danger to all that, in fact, exists.
Baldwin, though, doubts whether even tardy recognition that the danger and destruction is not limited to black ghettoes would be sufficient to move America to reconcile the clear need for emergency action with the country’s racial pathologies. He writes: “For the action of the White Republic, in the lives of Black men, has been, and remains, emasculation. Hence, the Republic has absolutely no image, or standard, of masculinity to which any man, Black or White, can honorably aspire.” Reluctant even to try and imagine what whites see when they look at blacks, he knows that “whatever this vision, or nightmare, is, it corrodes the life of the Republic on every level.”
The magic and virtue of Baldwin’s pen is that it rings with what one knows instinctively and from a great depth is truth. There are, of course, harsh challenges and no promise of survival, to say nothing of victory, in that truth. Baldwin’s faith, like that of Paul and the other biblical prophets he so loved to quote, “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
It is thus as prophet urging us on—not as doomsayer—that he defines the terms of black existence in this country, warning:
It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know—which is the price of your performance and survival—you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.
There is in this work—as there is in so much of Baldwin’s literary legacy—a finely balanced cry of despair and a quiet prayer of wonderment. Illustrative of this reflection on a people’s ordeal and salvation, he writes:
A stranger to this planet might find the fact that there are any Black people at all still alive in America something to write home about. I, myself find it remarkable not that so many Black men were forced (and in so many ways!) to leave their families, but that so many remained and aided their issue to grow and flourish.
Baldwin’s work cries out against the contradictions, the delusions—the manipulation of power—while he searches for that elusive love that would illuminate our moral obligation and, therefore, salvage our fragile civilization.
—DERRICK BELL WITH JANET DEWART BELL
October 1994