His dad was a preacher and died when his son was 18. This was the Harlem of the projects, extreme poverty and race riots. The Black Church and the Nation of Islamīaldwin’s early years were spent in Harlem in New York City, where young “Jimmy” was born on this date in 1924.
#Discussion question for another country by james baldwin series
He did not, of course, teach me about color through “Giovanni’s Room,” but rather through a series of letters to an America that, for all her toxic obsession with color, he could not help but love. I first connected with Baldwin because he taught me something about love, and that influenced everything that he had to teach me about color. He was both these things, but he was not exclusively these things, and I am convinced that interpreting him through so narrow a lens does a disservice to everything he can teach us about the problem of race and identity in American life. And if I had first found him on one of these lists, I would likely now view him as simply another fierce spokesman for Black America and enemy to white supremacy. He has been quoted on almost every anti-racist reading list in recent months. But I think I would have encountered an altogether different Baldwin if I had first come across his name in a different context. My youthful state of romantic insecurity is not the subject of this essay. Baldwin called “Giovanni’s Room” a book about “what happens if you are so afraid that you finally cannot love anybody,” and that is as true a description of me as a teenager as any I could hope to find. But the story is not, strictly speaking, about being gay. David is gay and Baldwin was gay, so my mother’s response was hardly surprising. The novel’s protagonist, David, is white, and Baldwin once told an interviewer that David could have been white, Black or yellow: “In terms of what happened to him, none of that mattered at all.”īut neither did I realize that my love for the novel might communicate anything about whom I loved. It never crossed my mind that Baldwin might be Black because the novel does not contain a single Black character. She did and thought it was my way of coming out as gay. I loved it so much that I gave it to my mother and asked her to read it.
I loved it-its intensity, its honesty, its moral complexity. I was a skinny 17-year-old Indian boy with braces, and I picked up a slim novel called “Giovanni’s Room” and finished it in a week. The first time I read James Baldwin, I didn’t know he was Black.