Elegant Despair: Mourning Clothes and the Sartorial Conscience of James Baldwin's No Name in the Street

"I could not put it on without a bleak, pale, cold wonder about the future. I could not, in short, live with it: it was too heavy a garment. Yet—it was only a suit, worn, at most, three times. It was not a very expensive suit, but it was still more expensive than any my friend could buy. He could not afford to have suits in his closet which he didn't wear, he couldn't afford to throw suits away—he couldn't, in short, afford my elegant despair."

No Name in the Street opens with the tactile memory of black velvet. Recalling vividly, a singular moment in which his mother Berdis handled this scrap of cloth, Baldwin bestows upon the fabric a kind of power, intelligence, and magic:

"That is a good idea," I heard my mother say. She was staring at a wad of black velvet, which she held in her hand, and she carefully placed this bit of cloth in a closet. We can guess how old I must have been from the fact that for years afterward I thought that an "idea" was a piece of black velvet.

(3)

The scrap of velvet is a talisman of maternal wisdom equally precious and dangerous enough to be thoughtfully stowed away in both physical and psychological cupboards. Recalling Gaston Bachelard's notion that drawers, wardrobes and closets are the containers, and "veritable organs" of secret psychological life (Poetics of Space, 78), this early inherited "connection between ideas and velvet" (No Name, 3) fuses the page, the skin, and the cloth together as vital surfaces of witnessing, storytelling, and shared remembrance. Appearing with remarkable persistence throughout the length of the book is a sensuous, evolving language of fabric and attire with which Baldwin seeks to mend the often threadbare garment of identity, to acknowledge his debt to the black women "responsible for his first lessons in figurative meaning" (Zaborowska, 20) and the female voices often occluded in Civil Rights and Black Power discourse, and finally, to undress the many disguises of "pretended humanism" (No Name, 85) permeating with the designs of Western liberal democratic society. Throughout the "bewildering and untrustworthy flashes" (3) of No Name's stream of consciousness narration, the language of concealment and revelation, performance and camaraderie through dress—what Joanne Entwistle might call Baldwin's "sartorial conscience"—allows him to grapple materially with a range of subjects and cultural objects that are both personal and political. In the essay, Baldwin employs fabric—a structure of feeling and thought—as an improvisational narrative technique to fashion in intimate terms, his promises and failures as a black intellectual, artist, and leader amidst the global terror of the sixties and the promises and failures of Civil Rights amidst countless "trials, assassinations, funerals, and despair" (196).

In more ways than one, James Baldwin is a man "of the cloth"—of deeply spiritual vocation, and of sensuous and intricate storytelling for which the tapestry is a fitting metaphor. It is in light of critics such as Brooke Allen, who view No Name in the Street as a reckless, almost "mad" platform through which Baldwin could "spew whatever fashionable radical opinion was currently most fashionable and most radical" (Zaborowska, 46), that this essay examines Baldwin's dexterous reading of the rich intersections between fashion and radicalism, and their political consequences. Such a reading requires the spinning, weaving, and unloosening of many contrasting, overlapping, and at times contradictory interpretive threads. Still, throughout his essays and interviews, Baldwin returns consistently to the textiles and garments that adorn and reveal the story of his becoming: a lover, a man, a brother, son, artist, voice, and witness to history. More often than not, Baldwin is a witness to loss and to the unraveling of his sense of self in the process. A significant continuity in No Name's sartorial design is that of mourning, which runs against the grain of the narrative like the trace of fingers on black velvet, bruising its surface momentarily and disappearing into its smooth planes...