The City on the Hill From Below: The Crisis of Prophetic Black Politics

4. (Making) Love in the Dishonorable City: The Civic Poetry of James Baldwin

4 (Making) Love in the Dishonorable City The Civic Poetry of James Baldwin The trembling he had known in darkness had been the echo of their joyful feet these feet blood stained forever, with no continuing city but seeking one to come: a city out of time, not made with human hands, but eternal in the heavens.1 There it was, the great, unfinished city, with all its towers blazing in the sun.2 Indeed, I had conquered the city: but the city was stricken with plague.3 Ah. What is he doing on the floor in a basement of that historical city? That city built on the principle that he would have the grace to live, and, certainly to die, somewhere outside the gates?4 James Baldwin concluded his best-known work, The Fire Next Time (hereafter, Fire), with an extraordinary provocation that is arguably the most famous of his entire corpus. After boldly proclaiming that nothing less than the entire fate of the American polity was in the reader’s hands, Baldwin exhorted, “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create , the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our (making) love in the dishonorable city  129 country, and change the history of the world.”5 All of the elements of the civil religion of America are present in this dense, hyphenated, and complex provocation. Baldwin’s call to “relatively conscious” whites and blacks resembled traditional constructions of American election. His insistence that this favored group might change the history of the world resembled the notion of American mission, the red herring so central to traditional invocations of American exceptionalism. Finally, Baldwin fused these two ideas—American election and American mission—in a conception of civic duty that looked a lot like the civil religionist’s signature construction of political obligation as sacred duty. Were it not for Baldwin’s metaphorical rendering of political agency in the image of erotic love, one might mistake his concluding provocation for a rather conservative restatement of John Winthrop’s old faith. Explicating the theory behind this metaphor is one of my principal concerns in this chapter. For now, I offer the caution that to interpret Baldwin’s concluding provocation as a simple restatement of the old faith would be an egregious error. On the other hand, we must not understand it to be an unqualified repudiation either. Precisely what, then, does Baldwin attempt to achieve with this unwieldy provocation? What is the status of this extraordinary provocation within the larger theoretical project of Fire, and what is the status of this project within Baldwin’s political thought as a whole? Addressing these two questions leads us back to one of the central concerns of this book: to describe the shape and contours of a tradition of African American political-theoretical reflection about America. It also raises other questions: Can Baldwin, a preeminently literary artist, be said to have formulated something resembling a political theory?6 If so, where does Baldwin’s theory stand in relation to the respective interventions of his predecessors within this tradition? There are two parts to Baldwin’s provocation, one outside the hyphens and the other inside. Outside the hyphens, Baldwin identifies, or calls into being, the association of persons who had been chosen to achieve the country , and he locates himself within this association.7 He describes the success of this association as the achievement of the country and links this founding to transformation of the world. Baldwin insists that solving America’s oldest and most vexing problem of race would help the polity to avert the creeping danger of disintegrative racial violence. If the country were able to do this, Baldwin suggests, Americans might gain a greater depth and breadth of experience, a reorientation of purpose from the frivolous to the weighty, and an enlargement and refinement of civic judgment. In other words, they would acquire the practical wisdom and existential maturity that would enable the polity to model political excellence for the benefit of 130 chapter 4 the world. Inside the hyphens, Baldwin is just as ambitious. He deconstructs racial essentialism and insists that the proper aim to be pursued by those he called to serve is political...