James Baldwin’s Readers: White Innocence and the Reception of “Letter from a Region in My Mind”

In 1962, James Baldwin became the second Black contributor to The New Yorker, appearing at a crossroads in his career and the magazine’s history. This article reconstructs the editorial development and critical afterlife of “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” arguing that the essay’s reception by white readers is already present in its gestation. A conversion tale, “Letter” attempts to extricate its audience from the American tradition of willful white innocence. Baldwin’s readers, from William Shawn to the author’s recent revival, set in motion the essay’s machinery of reciprocal reflection—its chiasmus of style and substance—with imperfect but enduring results.

The earliest readers of the November 17, 1962 issue of The New Yorker would have opened its pages with no warning of the piece stretching across its vast middle. That it would act like a hinge, a genuine pivot, in the life of the writer and the history of the magazine—selling out the issue’s run within weeks and participating “in a historic process of civil rupture and civil repair” (Forde 573)—was not to be foreseen. It would have taken a regular reader to spot the truncated Table of Contents, surrounded by the paragraph reviews of “Goings On About Town” and a less-than-enthusiastic notice of Edward Albee’s new play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Those who did consult the Contents, moreover, would not find this particular article listed among them. It was the first personal essay The New Yorker had ever published (Yagoda 315); the old categories of humor and reportage, fiction and criticism, could not accommodate it. One might have perused “The Talk of the Town,” a story by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and a poem by W. H. Auden—considering or ignoring the many cartoons and many more ads typical of the magazine’s layout—before reaching page fifty-nine and finding the title “Letter from a Region in My Mind” blazoned over three columns of densely packed type. Eighty-five more pages would pass until the author’s name was revealed: “—JAMES BALDWIN.”

The letter unfolds a conversion tale that is refracted and compounded in three parts. Baldwin proceeds from his own religious transformation in the summer of his fourteenth year, to an account of his meeting with Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, to a naked appeal to his readers to wake up and “end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world” (144). It was this letter, officially unaddressed but implicitly aimed at the largely white audience of The New Yorker, that vaulted Baldwin into the position of “intellectual written voice . . . of black America,” reporting not just from a region in his mind but from the vanguard of the civil rights movement (Gates and West 237). Here, I chart the widening circle of the essay’s readers and recover their reactions, beginning with William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker; encompassing the many who saw it in its initial context and recorded their thoughts in letters to the editor; progressing to those who encountered it in new form, as the second and much longer part The Fire Next Time (1963); including the first crop of critical responses and reaching into a “recent flurry of reappraisal” (Rich). In analyzing the reception of Baldwin’s essay by its white readers, and comparing the written evidence of their interpretations to those of Black readers, this article engages in the ongoing scholarly effort to integrate two disciplines, “book history and critical race studies,” which “[t]hus far . . . have been two very different scholarly activities” (Spiller 1).¹ Their academic disjunction belies basic points of connection. For as Elizabeth Spiller points out, “reading is an identity practice” (19), an activity that “changes who we are” (9), and whose history therefore continually contributes to constructing, revealing, and questioning racial categories. The testimonies of James Baldwin’s readers allow us to measure how, and how much, a white public responded to an essay that dared them to confront the American “racial nightmare” and follow the text’s own movement from innocence to maturity.

To reconstruct their reading is to pay attention to perspective and, having registered its shifts, to ask what force of conversion literature can actually exert. That one offers an answer to the other becomes clear only as Baldwin’s theme expands, as the essay gradually reveals a chiastic pattern of dualities undermined and solitudes merged: Muslims considered in the light of Christianity, whiteness unmasked by blackness, innocence revealed as guilt. “Innocence,” a term that Baldwin uses with profound irony to capture the willful white ignorance of racial realities, has become one of the central concepts in his current academic revival and emerges as the principal target of his letter. Drawing deeply on “Baldwin’s idea of innocence,” political scientist Naomi Murakawa has recently defined “racial innocence [as] the dominant US epistemology,” a “way of knowing” which is, in fact, a form of “unknowing” (474–75). Her explication rightly stresses the need for sweeping structural reform, but it leaves unexplored the specific mechanics— beyond general appeals to the value of education—by which reading itself might help to undermine this long-cultivated incomprehension. I argue that Baldwin builds in prose a structure of mutual reflection that challenges his white readers to surmount their innocence, overcoming an ignorance of the other that is also, at root, an ignorance of the self: from the pronoun, a protean “we”; to the sentence, shaped by chiasmus; to the paragraph, its length and complexity containing an orchestration of perspective. Thus, the process of reading, of inhabiting and expanding what I call Baldwin’s first-person multiple, becomes its own political effect, explicitly named by the author as the effort of “the relatively conscious” to “insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others” (“Letter” 144).

This structure is the “protocol inscribed within the text” against which we can compare the surviving responses of “the actual readers of the past,” as Robert Darnton proposes in his “First Steps Toward a History of Reading” (181–82).² Proceeding chronologically, a reception analysis reveals both these formal qualities of the essay as they act on readers, and their limits, as readers act on them. The twofold operation of each reader—developing and narrowing the text to fit an interpretation—sets in motion an unpredictable reaction between the perspectives they bring to the text and the perspectives they bring out in it. While “Letter from a Region in My Mind” begins to move both The New Yorker and its audience out of the tradition of white innocence, its attempt to create the relatively mature consciousness of others can only be called a relative success—one which Baldwin himself increasingly came to see as a failure.³ Yet the need to understand even the partial progress that reading can make is ever more pressing as its work continues, from Baldwin’s era of racial emergency to our own, from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter.⁴

The First Reader

Editors are readers with power—the power to work reading back into writing, to amplify or reduce a draft to match their vision of it. Some operate by sympathy, offering their educated ears to what is potential in the text, helping the author to see and bridge the gap between what the work is and what it may yet be. Others use writers to achieve their own aesthetic ends, refusing the subordinate role their profession seems, by custom, to dictate. The border between these positions is more permeable than commonplace notions of solitary authorship allow.⁵ William Shawn was the sole editor of “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” The evidence of his labor on Baldwin’s manuscript provides a case study in the dual action of reading, drawing out certain aspects of a work to the diminishment of others, and demonstrates that the white reception of “Letter” is already present in its gestation.

One typescript, dated October 15, 1962, is preserved in The New Yorker’s records at the New York Public Library.⁶ No correspondence between Baldwin and Shawn appears to have been kept; any conversations vanished into thin air long ago. The editor spoke after the fact, but only to offer a late-life, and essentially unrevealing, appraisal of the piece’s impact: “I would say that it was one of only two or three things that really caused a sensation during my time at the magazine” (Campbell 160). For the process of editing, therefore, we have no access to intentions. Only the effects of Shawn’s reading can be observed—the single typescript and his penciled alterations, nearly all of which are incorporated into the final version. And at first glance, in contrast to The New Yorker’s “celebrated nit-pickiness” (Gill 9), “Letter” appears only to have been lightly edited. Whole pages pass without so much as a mark from Shawn. Many changes are minor and designed merely to bring Baldwin into line with the magazine’s house style: “which” is the heaviest casualty, scored out repeatedly for “that.” Others reflect the well-known prudery of the editor-in-chief. “Urine” replaces “piss,” and references to “orgasms” are twice cut (“Magazine Make-Up” 113, 19, 34). Further modifications are cosmetic in nature, anticipating the final magazine layout. For example, Shawn removes the Roman numerals by which Baldwin demarcates the three sections of his manuscript, stipulating white lines instead.

One might look no closer but for a striking instance of editorial independence— the title. A wavy line runs through Baldwin’s “Down at the Cross.” In its place, Shawn has scrawled in blue pencil the words “Letter From a Region in My Mind” (1). This shift is radical; the revision seems to owe nothing to the original, and the primary explanation is not entirely satisfying. Ben Yagoda, a historian of the magazine, argues that the novelty of the article forced Shawn’s hand. It “broke with the New Yorker tradition” of never publishing “any essays” (315). In order to “domesticate the essay” (xii) as the current editor, David Remnick, puts it, Shawn stamped an unconventional piece of writing with a familiar rubric: the letter.⁷ Yet reasons do not always account for results. Shawn’s act of naming amounts to a reader’s redescription, an interpretation which enforces, and thus alters, certain qualities of the text. The new title is longer than the old. Its length, moreover, permits the two prepositions to perform the movement into recesses, the series of subtle discriminations that “region” evokes. The possessive determiner “my” roots the essay in personal experience. “Letter,” lastly, establishes an explicitly direct relationship between the writer and his readers, since the unaddressed essay could only be a letter to them. None of these elements, which are nevertheless already present or potential in the piece, shine through the single image of Christian trial in “Down at the Cross.” In seven words, Shawn illustrates that the dynamic of reading—at once insight and imposition, accentuating and fastening—is double.

With an eye taught by the title, we can observe this productive tension at work in unexpected corners. Two small marks make frequent appearances across the manuscript: a line with an “m” underneath, indicating that an em dash should be inserted, and an upward arrow eliminating a paragraph break. Both changes follow the first function of the title, which is to say, they lengthen. Like the title, moreover, they deepen and develop existing characteristics of the text. The published version of “Letter” contains 264 dashes; forty-six of them are Shawn’s doing. The roughly 20,000 words are apportioned to only fifty-eight paragraphs; that total would have been ninety-nine but for the editor’s insistent extensions of already prolonged segments. In the wrong hands, length may be merely the form of formlessness. In the right ones, it offers the space for greater architectural intricacy: for addition, refinement, clarification, contradiction, emphasis, and changes of direction. The effect of the editing is to increase the complexity of Baldwin’s sentences and paragraphs—and to draw together diverging perspectives.

Take, for instance, a moment of dramatic climax in the first section of the essay. Recounting the youthful summer during which he “underwent . . . a prolonged religious crisis” (1), Baldwin charts his own ambiguous path toward Christian deliverance through a panorama of Harlem’s hardships and an oppression summed up by the synecdoche of “ ‘the man’—the white man” (5). Driven to the church by “all the fears with which I had grown up” (15), the fourteen-year-old Baldwin is “saved” (19), his awakening consciousness gaining a glimpse of its own depth and variousness in a moment of unexpected transformation. One paragraph conveys the long night’s journey from falling on the church floor in emotional torment, down at the cross, to being raised up in the morning. Several epiphanies are compressed into this one experience; the single paragraph which expresses them is structured by a shifting internal perspective, at once observing itself in the moment and incorporating the retrospective interpretations of the later writing self. Six of its sentences contain dashes. The success of the paragraph lies not in its final formulations, but in how it contains turns of thought and experience which do not ultimately arrive at completion. Far from finding his salvation in Christianity, and “[i]n spite of all I said thereafter” as a child preacher, “I found no answer on the floor—not that answer, anyway—and I was on the floor all night” (19). The dashes modulate declarative certainty, hinting that the valuable answer might have been uncertainty all along—not the simplicity of redemption but the complication of knowledge. Perspective within the sentence, though projected through a single viewpoint, is thus folded and deepened. The paragraph itself achieves density through juxtaposition, depth through distance traveled—it offers a revelatory lack of single answers and single-mindedness.

Not all of Shawn’s editorial actions can be construed as unobjectionable developments of Baldwin’s own tendencies, however. Throughout the draft, there is a visible effort to clarify certain aspects of the writing for a particular audience. Shawn cuts the debatable claim that “Germany could never have achieved so monumental a crime [the Shoah] without the tacit support of the Western nations” (46); he also deletes a parenthetical elaboration on the view the Nation of Islam takes toward “the Jew,” which could, in a fit of obtuseness, be taken as the author’s own (74).⁸ Furthermore, Shawn mounts a sustained campaign on a particular semantic field. Baldwin uses the word “American” eighty-one times during the course of the essay. Half of those instances are modified, in roughly equal proportions, by the noun “Negro” or the adjective “white.” Shawn is responsible for eleven of the “white” additions, despite context usually supplying what the editor enforces. Baldwin often employs “American” as shorthand for “white,” and so implies that in a crucial sense America has never been inclusive of those of another color. But by making the implicit explicit, Shawn possibly betrays a concern that the white American liberals who constitute “much of the magazine’s readership” would be offended by the insinuation that “American” is as much corrupt reality as innocent ideal (Remnick xii).

Intentions unknown, however, all that can be safely observed is that Shawn’s desire for greater clarity partly impedes a protean flow of pronouns. The flexibility of Baldwin’s first-person plural—a “we” that ranges across referents, moving between “a particular African American ‘we’ and a general, inclusive American ‘we’ ” (DeKoven 234)—has long preoccupied his academic commentators, who see a clear strategy in “[t]his slippage in subjectivity” (237). A collective pronoun solicits the audience’s identification, even as that collective shifts and expands. Yet in Shawn’s edits, both the potential and the limits of this rhetorical enterprise are exposed. As a reader, he sometimes seeks orderliness at the expense of a more interesting, and ambiguous, chain of identifications. Not only does he impose “white” on occasionally equivocal uses of “American,” he also replaces several instances of “we” with “they,” closing down the writer’s open invitations to cross racial borders. The most striking instance of original intermingling and edited division occurs deep into the third and final section of “Letter.” Baldwin declares that the freedom of Black Americans is the essential condition for the freedom of all Americans, since oppression imprisons even the oppressors. This is how the passage looks in draft form:

The Negro can precipitate this abdication because we [white Americans] have never, in all our [their] long history, been able to look on him as a man like ourselves [themselves]. This point need not be labored, [;] it is prove n[d] over and over again by the Negro’s continuing position here, and his indescribable struggle to defeat the strategems we [white Americans] have used, and use, to deny him his humanity. We [Americans] could have used this very same energy in other ways.

(99–100)

A stunning act of imaginative generosity is lost in the editing. Baldwin had put himself in the place of the very people who “have never . . . been able to look on [the Negro] as a man,” and drawn them into his own ambit by use of the first-person plural. The mingling of these solitudes is not entirely coherent, and so Shawn’s decision to simplify matters is understandable, if regrettable. Ultimately, he mostly maintains the essay’s fluidity of standpoint, its interplay of perspectives. At the levels of pronoun, sentence, and paragraph—sometimes enhanced and sometimes occluded by The New Yorker’s editing—we begin to see how the first-person singular of Baldwin’s supple prose broadens into a first-person multiple, occupying and connecting different points of view. Other readers follow in Shawn’s pencil-marks.

Letters to the Editor

The initial audience for Baldwin’s “Letter” was The New Yorker’s readership: generally white, generally comfortable, generally liberal, and totally unprepared by the magazine’s history for such an essay and such a writer. Both staffers and subscribers “often lived in privileged enclaves in a privileged country and rarely interacted as equals with people of color” (Corey 78). The only previous Black contributor had been Langston Hughes, a generation earlier. The editorial personnel were themselves unintegrated: a stain and, following Baldwin, an example of hypocrisy that Shawn soon moved to rectify (Yagoda 318). Moreover, as Mary Corey recounts, the magazine had reacted to the rising movement for racial justice over the course of the 1950s not by confronting the problem, but by practicing “a partial erasure of African-Americans from the magazine’s pages” in ironic pursuit of a “liberal ideal of color-blindness” (79). It is within this particular institutional setting that Shawn alters Baldwin’s text and his magazine’s trajectory.⁹

For The New Yorker’s complacency did not outlast the turn of the decade. “Letter” was published at a turning point—a pivot it helped to provoke—when “the magazine lost its habitual cool, its restraint,” and “attempted to meet the apocalyptic occasion” (Packer 3). A series of momentous pieces followed, and readers were suddenly challenged beyond expectation, since expectations had been set by prior incarnations of the magazine.¹⁰ Written reactions to Baldwin’s “Letter” have been kept among the magazine’s records, filling four bulging manila folders with unnumbered sheets of paper. They reveal the distance, emotional and existential, that separated a typical magazine buyer from the world of Harlem and the Nation of Islam. In doing so, however, they also demonstrate a growing recognition of this gulf, an awareness that division is at once foregrounded and foreshortened both within the essay and across its material layout. Readers always begin as outsiders, working their way to a region of the writer’s mind; the second, posteditorial stage of reception displays the way in which enclosed individuals may follow the magazine’s own path: impelled, through confrontation with other points of view, to move beyond the segregated self.

The letters that “Letter” elicited are easily divided into two categories: those written in high praise and those stemming from vitriolic condemnation, with a few falling somewhat confusedly in between. The first group is by far the largest. Typical of these notes are a statement of appreciation directed at Baldwin, an acknowledgment of a climate of social emergency, a claim to have been moved by the reading, and an expression of surprised gratitude to the magazine for printing the piece.¹¹ Many also request extra copies—so many that by April 4, 1963, the magazine is reduced to answering that “we’re sorry to report that copies of our November 17th issue are no longer available. Our stock was depleted because of the great demand for the Baldwin article you wanted” (Keefe). D. R. Breakstone writes for the majority in December 1962: “I have told everyone who will listen to me to read James Baldwin’s essay in the November 17 issue. . . . To read Baldwin is to experience tragedy. Nothing less. My copy of that issue is on loan for the fourth time already and I wonder if I may purchase another from your reserve?”

A half-articulated sense that the essay was composed for the enlightenment of white people—which is to say, for those writing in—infuses responses both favorable and furious. Even the one self-identified Black respondent, John A. Francis, is keen to place Baldwin in the role of spokesman to a white audience, “brilliantly present[ing] the case for all well meaning and intelligent American Negroes.” Nearly everyone else, however, writes from the perspective of an inter-loper gaining access to a strange world of experience, at once near and utterly far. What is most striking is the frequency with which fear is cited as one of the essay’s constructive qualities. Dorothy Chapin refers to “the frighteningly wonderful article by James Baldwin.” Geoff Conklin is especially concise: “Baldwin—scarifying, superb!” Readers feel that Baldwin is bringing them the truth, and the guarantor of that truth is their alarm. In the comfort zone of their magazine, surrounded by reminders of ease and opulence, they are asked to abandon uncomplicated consolations.

The comparatively few who write in to complain about the piece and attack the writer do so from a position of keenly felt, if not entirely lucid, victimhood. Among other things, it is the work of reading—the tables of point of view being turned—that offends their self-regard. C. R. Browning is affronted by Baldwin’s “recent diatribe against the white race.” B. W. Middlebrook accuses the author of ingratitude, since “if James Meredith [sic] Baldwin had not been born in America of colored people who were brought here as slaves years ago, if he had been born at all, it would have been in Africa. He would know nothing of the English language, be ignorant, disease-ridden, and know nothing of the Gospel of Christ which he now spurns.” Some respondents resort to literary criticism and, interestingly, focus on point of view, charging Baldwin alternately with monotony and incoherence. John A. Morrill finds “Letter” unfair and unbalanced, asserting that “Mr. Baldwin’s fault is that of negro writers and the negro press in general—Chronic abuse of the White Man and never a word of constructive criticism of the Negro.” Taking the opposite tack is Dr. Bessie Kanouse, who diagnoses “Letter” both politically as “a subversive piece of writing” and psychiatrically as “such a ‘schizophrenic tirade.’ ” What she sees as unstable we recognize as a redress of perspective. In this manner, even the readers who resist Baldwin’s orchestration of viewpoints attest to the force of its operation.

A few letters draw attention less to the piece per se than to the particular experience of reading it in The New Yorker. Most decry a material context in which Baldwin’s essay appears to fight for attention with endless advertisements. The effect is to produce a bitter incongruity between the reporting of racial strife and the surrounding environment of luxurious consumption, to expose the gulf between audience and subject.¹² Ann E. Manly draws the editor’s attention to that issue’s ad for Virginia Gentleman whiskey, featuring a smiling slave serving drinks to two bewigged white aristocrats. Lucien Day writes that Baldwin “is especially vivid knifing thru all the Christmas advertising,” while Anne H. Desmond eloquently describes “the thin, long column of pain” keenly juxtaposed “with the desiderata of the Doomed.” For these readers, the essay is in conflict with its surroundings; sharpness is the quality it most requires and displays. For the ads are, in that sense, curiously appropriate to the essay as it unfolds. Far from distracting a reader from the social and moral disparities Baldwin measures, they illustrate those gulfs both tonally and visually. The lines of text are pressed and squeezed on all sides by a graphic world of commerce, one that literally frames the reader’s experience.

While both layout and content draw our attention to dualities, however, the essay also works to subvert them. The echoes between sections make more of an impression than the single white lines which separate them. Baldwin’s encounter with Elijah Muhammad in the second part of the essay arrives in the wake of his early religious crisis. The implicit comparison between Christianity and Islam, his own conversion and those of the Black Muslims, is made explicit when Baldwin meets the man at his Chicago home and is “carried . . . back nearly twenty-four years, to that moment when the pastor had smiled at me and said, ‘Whose little boy are you?’ ” (106). For a time, the writer ventriloquizes Elijah, setting forth his message that “these monstrous [white] creatures should rule the earth for a certain number of years” (110). But the minister’s method is not the essayist’s, and it is in recounting his host’s table talk that the writer’s difference becomes apparent, that the reader’s role is distinguished from the disciple’s. Baldwin “began to see that Elijah’s power came from his single-mindedness . . . he means every word he says” (108). Baldwin does not mean every word he says, nor is his power single-minded. Rather, his words absorb “Elijah’s mission” as one of several layers of perspective, giving the voice of the essay over to his subject only to reclaim it at a later point, developing a flexible free indirect discourse (108–10). Moreover, when Baldwin’s characteristic voice reemerges, he turns the reader’s newly sharpened skepticism back onto the Christianity, and its “merciless formulation,” with which the essay begins. Elijah’s truth is singular; the essay’s truth is compounded, emerging from multiple perspectives that include even the contrasts generated by the magazine context.

The Fire Next Time

When “Letter” was published in book form by the Dial Press as The Fire Next Time, it lost the ads and gained a companion essay—as well as a multitude of new readers who, in that “pivotal” year of 1963, quickly came to see Baldwin as “one of the most articulate spokesmen for the civil rights movement” (Schultz 37).¹³ The thematic dualities of Black and white, Christian and Muslim, now had a structural counterpart in the relation between “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and the retitled “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind.”¹⁴ Ostensibly written to Baldwin’s nephew James, and taking up a bare eight pages, the additional piece sharpened the sense of historic occasion, making the symmetry between Emancipation and civil rights explicit with its subtitle. It was another editor, The Dial’s James Silberman, who identified the “essential connection” between the two letters, going “[a]gainst the advice of Shawn” to recommend “using the ‘Letter to My Nephew’ as an introduction to the longer essay” (Leeming 212). Following Silberman’s suggestion, “My Dungeon Shook” assumed the position of a preface; the reader who moves from cover to cover will inevitably read the second essay as framed by the more concentrated first.

One word in particular, and the revisionary meaning attributed to it, sets the tone. Writing to warn his young nephew that “the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon” (Fire 24), Baldwin trains his analytical fire on the peculiar complex of “inhumanity and fear” (22) that causes white Americans to treat James as “a worthless human being” (21). Yet the charge he brings is not that which a typical reader of 1963 would expect, and is one that many still find paradoxical today: Whites are guilty of innocence, for “it is the innocence that constitutes the crime” (20). Variations on the word—“innocent,” “innocents,” “innocence”—appear eight times in the course of this short essay, including five instances on a single page. The offence is the desire of white Americans to think of themselves as “innocent and well-meaning people” while yet conspiring in, or at least passively accepting, conditions of immiseration for their fellow citizens. This innocence is inseparable from ignorance; more precisely, it is the willful absence of self-knowledge, a willful disavowal of history. A burning irony lies at the heart of American race relations: Black people know whites, who are “still trapped in a history which they do not understand,” better than whites know themselves. That is why, for integration to work, “the really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them” (22).

In the movement from one letter to another, the structure of the longer essay crystallizes. One sees more clearly the trajectory its first and second sections share: from innocence to maturity. Baldwin begins with the loss of security and the entrance of fear into his adolescent Harlem life: “It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them [‘the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue’], but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances” (30). Religion offers a temporary reprieve, until reading triggers “the slow crumbling of my faith” (48) and leaves Baldwin in the state of disillusioned deliverance which he then extends, as necessity, to “America and all the Western nations” (58). The second part of the essay registers the innocence of the Nation of Islam and inexorably exposes its inadequacies. It comes into sharper focus not as moral purity, but as a single-mindedness that reduces reality to its own terms, that misrep-resents complexity as simplicity, and that Elijah exemplifies. Baldwin is sympathetic, but not naïve. He punctures the delusion of a separate country and economy for Black Americans. He observes of the young driver provided by the Nation that “[h]e was held together, in short, by a dream” (94). Such innocence is not a crime, unlike that of the white majority, since it does not depend on the denial of crimes. But it is equally divorced from self-knowledge, from the ineradicable fact “that the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other.” Baldwin ends his second section with a call for acceptance and transcendence, an acceptance of the past—which requires self-recognition—and a “transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars” (96).

The descent of innocence is a story at once biblically infused and deeply ingrained in this country’s self-conception. It issues in two interwoven currents of American intellectual life: one glorifying “a doctrine of original innocence . . . [that] was raced white” (Bernstein 4), the other deconstructing that delusion—and comprising, not coincidentally, a large body of Black writing. For R. W. B. Lewis, surveying the field in 1955, “the Adamic myth” has long since become the “native American mythology,” a now deeply internalized dream of “the authentic American as a figure of heroic innocence” (1). This fantasy of innocence “established the pattern for American fiction” (6)—and an enduring fallacy for James Baldwin to dismantle. From a very early piece, “Preservation of Innocence” (1949), in which he declares that “[t]he recognition of this complexity is the signal of maturity; it marks the death of the child and the birth of the man” (597) and then adds “that it is one of the major American ambitions to shun this metamorphosis” (43), to a late interview, Baldwin keeps up the drumbeat: “And homophobia is simply an extreme example of the American terror that’s concerned with growing up. I never met a people more infantile in my life” (“Go the Way” 178). Innocence itself is guilty; maturity rather than corruption comes to stand as its opposite, while self-awareness emerges as the first step to atonement.

Baldwin’s reversal of the longstanding moral antithesis, which venerates what is lost at the expense of what is gained, represents not only an inversion of “the pattern for American fiction” but also the extension and encapsulation of an equally long tradition of Black critique. The self-congratulatory myth is already turned on its head by slave narratives which “utilize as a structural principle the irony of seeming innocence,” for the “novelty of American innocence is . . . the refusal or failure to recognize evil while participating in that evil” (Gates, Figures 85). W. E. B. Du Bois extends this vein of criticism, skewering the delusions of his white readers in The Souls of Black Folk (1903)—“Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here” (198)—and even more directly in “The Souls of White Folk” (1920), where he lacerates “the extraordinary self-deception of white religion . . . the deliberately educated ignorance of white schools” (930).¹⁵ In 1912, James Weldon Johnson anticipates Baldwin’s analysis of the balance of American racial knowledge with the plain “fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them” (14). One could continue to pile up instances of the Black anatomy of white innocence, among both Baldwin’s forerunners and his contemporaries.¹⁶ Most recently, the philosopher Charles W. Mills made a study of this subject—the “theme of many of the classic fictional and non-fictional works of the African American experience”—calling it not innocence but, with less delicacy and irony than Baldwin, “white ignorance” (53).

But while Baldwin builds on Black predecessors in the context of a combined civil rights and Cold War climate,¹⁷ the power and persistence of his critical language have recast this countertradition in his terms—making his essays the primary intellectual resource of a renewed discourse of racial innocence. American political theorists have begun to pay particular attention to the writer’s dissections of this national illusion, recognizing in Baldwin a serious social thinker. Along with Naomi Murakawa, George Shulman has been instrumental in deepening Baldwin’s analysis of this “motivated blindness (Baldwin says ‘innocence’) about the other, about our conduct, and so about who we think we are” (American Prophecy 20). Susan McWilliams’s edited collection, A Political Companion to James Baldwin (2017), contains no fewer than four essays revolving around Baldwin’s use of the term. And as Baldwin has become the key critic of the “myth of American innocence” (Jackson, Indignant 412), so innocence has emerged as one of the key concepts in contemporary Baldwin criticism, from his death to our present moment. Eulogizing Baldwin in 1987, Toni Morrison draws our attention to the ways in which he “stripped” American English of “fake innocence . . . decolonized it, ‘robbed it of the jewel of its naïveté’ ” (“James Baldwin” 91).¹⁸ In 2020, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. derives the same principal lesson: “Revealing the lie at the heart of the American idea . . . occasions an opportunity to tell a different and better story” (46–47), one in which “innocence is left aside” (344).

Yet if maturity is the opposite of innocence, and “Letter” an attempt to open the eyes of its white readers especially, then how does the essay conceive of this quality of mature awareness—and how might the act of reading instill it? The writer’s, and by uneven extension the reader’s, attentiveness to multiple perspectives produces a form of knowledge that Baldwin associates with love, a word he did not shy away from using in the final section of his essay and for which he received substantial criticism at the time.

The Critics

Critics are readers who reliably write their interpretations down. Like editors, they make visible the activity of reading: the addition of a further perspective that submits to and shapes the text in inconstant proportions, unfolding what may have been hidden even to the author himself. The irony of Baldwin’s initial reception is that, for all the flood of praise which surrounded Fire (Polsgrove 164), the one consistent target for criticism was his own perceived innocence—a naïveté deemed at once political and literary.

On February 1, 1963, two articles are published that make the same shrewd point. F. W. Dupee reviews Fire in the very first installment of The New York Review of Books, while Norman Podhoretz replies to it in Commentary. For Dupee, the author appears as “the Negro in extremis, a virtuoso of ethnic suffering, defiance, and aspiration.” Where the writer’s grip weakens, however, is in his airy, unreachable prescriptions for the problem. To Baldwin’s declaration that Western countries must “discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long” (Fire 64), Dupee coolly replies that “[s]ince whole cultures have never been known to ‘discard nearly all their assumptions’ and yet remain intact, this amounts to saying that any essential improvement in Negro-white relations, and thus in the quality of American life, is unlikely.” He anticipates decades of near critical consensus by identifying the style of this political simplicity as a form of preaching, a decline from complexity in which “to a considerable extent [Baldwin] has exchanged prophecy for criticism, exhortation for analysis, and the results for his mind and style are in part disturbing.”

Meanwhile, Norman Podhoretz’s “My Negro Problem—And Ours” answers “Letter” in kind, matching Baldwin’s personal Harlem history with an account of his Brooklyn childhood and the frank admission that “all whites—all American whites, that is—are sick in their feelings about Negroes” (98). But the unwanted persistence of his own racial hostility convinces Podhoretz that Baldwin has made a category error in thinking that an emotional response can solve a political problem. For “the tragic fact is that love is not the answer to hate—not in the world of politics, at any rate” (100–01). Podhoretz concludes that the only real alternative to the “slow and bitter” way of politics is “the wholesale merging of the two races” in a general program of miscegenation—which, as Dupee might put it, amounts to saying that any solution is unlikely. Other readers agreed privately at the time. Hannah Arendt reaches out to Baldwin by letter, objecting that “what frightened me in your essay was the gospel of love which you begin to preach at the end,” for “in politics, love is a stranger.” John Updike is less delicate: “Baldwin’s piece seemed to me in equal parts fascinating and inept; what the man means when he begins ranting about interracial love, I have no idea. I think he preached too many sermons when he was fifteen” (“Memo”).¹⁹ These critics have a common theme, as well as a common verb—“preach.” The fact that Baldwin tenders love as the remedy reveals his root innocence, however toughened by experience, and leads to a simplicity of rhetoric that overwhelms his previously fine distinctions.

Nor are such white readers alone in resisting Baldwin’s answers. A post-publication letter from his “old mentor” Beauford Delaney “summed up what Baldwin had hoped would be the reaction of black Americans: The work ‘reveals for all of us so much that we feel but cannot put into words’ ” (Leeming 215). Yet other Black readers at the time have their doubts about Baldwin’s insistence on love and his ironic use of innocence—their skepticism sharpened by distrust of the magazine in which the essay first appears, and of its attendant readership. Eldridge Cleaver’s attack on Baldwin, in Soul on Ice (1968), blends a general homophobia with a particular rejection of the writer’s terms, accusing him of “a Martin Luther King-type self-effacing love for his oppressors” (106)—one that amounts to a “racial death-wish” (103)—and declaring that “Bigger [Thomas] would have been completely baffled, as most Negroes are today, at Baldwin’s advice to his nephew” (107). Decades later, Ishmael Reed recalls that Baldwin was “considered a sellout” to younger Black writers, partly “for permitting The Fire Next Time to be published in The New Yorker” (Preface 6); to this day, he finds innocence too “comforting” a word for those “who are unaware of how their racist actions impede the progress of Black Americans” (“Writer”). Cleaver and Reed do not lament a supposed loss of nuance in Baldwin; in a curious echo of the paradox of guilty innocence, however, they identify a naïveté that verges on culpability and trace it to the writer’s compromised relations with a white cultural elite.

More than fifty years later, love and preaching, message and supposed medium, are still at the heart of the critical response to Fire. The terms have largely been recast in an affirmative light, one that nevertheless strips the first of claims to knowledge and preserves the second, although it clashes with the complexity of Baldwin’s style. In Grant Farred’s “Love is Asymmetrical: James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time” (2015), an abstracted concept of love holds center stage while the book itself slips into the wings. Farred presents “Baldwin as a black Christian thinker of love” and ignores any complicating evidence (285). Since theologically “love is founded upon asymmetry” (286)—the love of God for human beings—“what could be more Christian and more ethically hyperbolic than to love those who hate you?” (288). Thus, Baldwin offers his asymmetric love to America, bringing “his gifts as preacher to bear” (287). Placed against the text from which it springs, this interpretation looks less like explication and more like surgery. The personal history that acts as foundation to the essay disappears; it might, perhaps, distract from the critical thesis. Baldwin’s explicit doubts about religion—his rejection of institutional Christianity, his dissection of the false prophet Elijah, his alertness to the dangerous simplicity of sermons—follow by the wayside. Farred’s conclusion, moreover, that Baldwin’s “[a]symmetrical love expects no reciprocation” and “makes no demands on/of the Other” is not the writer’s own (301). The third and final section of “Letter” is full of injunctions to a reader who must, in the main, be considered white. Proclaiming the collective mission to “create one nation” (111), Baldwin goes so far as to declare that the white American needs “to consent, in effect, to become black himself ” (110). Meanwhile, the relation of love to knowledge, the necessary diminution of innocence through self-reckoning, vanishes in Farred’s account, although Baldwin makes sure of their proximity in the programmatic declaration of “My Dungeon Shook”: “that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are” (24).

The “preacherly cadence” (75), which Hilton Als hears in Baldwin’s every sentence, is not the same as the preacherly perspective. The style, its primal Christian imagery and rhythm of repetition, serves a different end, converting readers not to certainty but to doubt. Baldwin pointedly describes both writing and love in terms of knowledge and complexity—as ways of recognizing the complexity of knowledge. “When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about,” he later tells the Paris Review. “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.” Love in “Letter” is not innocent, not a simple-minded solution to an intractable political problem, as his early critics contend. Nor is it a sacrifice made by a stoic, for whom “[a]ll that matters is that the Self behave in a dutiful Christian manner,” as Farred, a later interpreter, argues (301). The love that Baldwin propounds is rather a radical reduction that opens the way to a renewed expansiveness, a stripping away of delusion that “takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within” (Fire 109). To Baldwin, self-knowledge is the opposite of self-absorption, the “tyranny” of the mirror, for knowledge exists in the spaces between people and so “mirrors can only lie.” Unlike mirrors, writing and love are several-sided; like reading, they mediate with imaginative sympathy between points of view in a plural world. True to his word, Baldwin turns his essay into an engine of reflection that surpasses any single-sided mirror.

The Work of Reading

The structure of knowledge, in sentences and social relations, is chiastic for Baldwin. At occasional aphoristic climaxes throughout “Letter,” the reader finds thoughts expressed by way of chiasmus, an inverted parallelism that causes each side of the proposition to be read in the light of the other. A trope of reversal, it has been identified by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as “perhaps the most commonly used rhetorical figure in the slave narratives and throughout subsequent black literature” (Signifying Monkey 140). Nor has Baldwin’s particular penchant for this technique gone unnoticed; Melanie Walsh recently tracked the “combination of Baldwin’s chiasmus and hashtags” that characterizes the online discourse of Black Lives Matter (546). Yet the work of overcoming innocence and the challenge of Baldwin’s syntax have not been acknowledged as mutually entwined. Lawrie Balfour brings our attention to Baldwin’s portrayal of innocence as “a kind of disconnection” (88), but she does not point out the peculiar kind of connection his sentences model and impress. Lisa A. Beard has elaborated a concept of “boundness” to describe how Baldwin “theorizes that white and black people’s lives are co-constituted” (379), but without extending her analysis to the syntactical carrier of that co-constitution. The rhetorical figure and the readerly labor are, however, engaged in the same undertaking: that of reciprocal recognition.

Ignorance of someone else is thus shown to be intimately involved with ignorance of oneself, since “whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves” (Fire 58). Another way of making the same point is to say that oppression redounds to the oppressor, a thought that Baldwin boils down to six words: “Whoever debases others is debasing himself” (97). These distilled dialectics, though penetratingly neat in themselves, also bring into view larger uses of chiastic structure. The contrasting conversion stories of the first two sections may be seen as reverse mirrors of each other, an elegant posture balanced on the shared question of “Whose little boy are you?” More loosely, Baldwin’s vision of Black-white relations hinges on overlap. Just as a syntactical chiasmus presents one line of thought in terms of an antithetical perspective, so the apparent symmetry of social conflicts in the essay reveals the “crossing” from which the word chiasmus is derived. The perceived dualities of Black and white, Muslim and Christian, the guilty and the innocent—the essential material of Baldwin’s piece—are shown in the impure, desegregated reality of their “reciprocal exchanges” (Brogan et al. 225). Furthermore, the final section of “Letter” points the way to social progress in the space uncovered by that moral overlap. The reversal of parallel clauses offers a model for parallel populations, illustrating that “the price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks” (Fire 111). The oneness of the nation, yet to be achieved, turns on the fulcrum that chiasmus articulates not just in its propositions but in its balance. The rhetorical figure sustains, but does not resolve, its inner tension. That equilibrium is the product of two syntactical wings, and it offers the reader an elevated vantage point, a heightened plane of perspective beholden to neither side and constructed by the very act of reading. For the conversion Baldwin offers his readers at last is not to a particular piece of truth but rather to a newly expanded moral and social awareness of themselves and others.

The work of reading on which Baldwin implicitly wagers the nation is described with precision in a classic formulation of reader-response criticism. Wolfgang Iser’s “Interaction Between Text and Reader” (1980) proposes that literary meaning resides neither in the text nor in the reader, but in the exchange between the two, the movement, at once linear and cumulative, of reading: “As the reader passes through the various perspectives offered by the text, and relates the different views and patterns to one another, he sets the work in motion, and so sets himself in motion, too” (21). Yet Iser’s description of this many-mindedness remains abstract and apolitical until it is set within the surviving historical evidence of “a practice (reading) that only rarely leaves traces” (Chartier 1). A formal analysis of Baldwin’s prose reveals the political possibility—of an American first-person multiple overcoming singular, segregated white innocence—encoded in its pronominal, syntactical, and organizational structures. A reception analysis tests that possibility against the testimonies of actual readers, allowing us to observe how far they follow the example of Baldwin’s essay and how far they fall short. Readers from William Shawn onward have started down the same path, whose end is elusive and yet already integrated into the essay’s conclusion, joining “the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others” (“Letter” 144).

________

Histories of reading go partway to affirming Edward Said’s description of “the actuality of reading [as], fundamentally, an act of perhaps modest human emancipation and enlightenment” (66). The activity is not, in fact, guaranteed to generate those outcomes; it can enforce as well as trouble various orthodoxies. But this doubleness is precisely what makes “practices of reading” so valuable to the study of race—to the extent that they “both created and allow us to understand that content [of race],” such practices are also capable of “producing new forms of identity” (Spiller 3, 9). By following the reception of James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” I have shed light on the reciprocal reflections that structure the essay and that challenge white readers in particular to renounce single-minded innocence for a many-minded maturity. From the essay’s editorial treatment to its long critical afterlife, written reader reactions capture the interaction of perspectives—inhabited, compared, and resisted—which constitute the reading process, an ongoing operation which partly fulfills and partly limits Baldwin’s hoped-for creation of consciousness.

One question unasked and unanswered by Baldwin’s biographers and New Yorker historians leaps out at the present-day reader of “Letter”: Why did the author, having scored such a well-read and well-paid success, never publish again in the magazine? The records contain no trace of acrimony between Baldwin and Shawn, yet another assignment was years in coming and the article ultimately never appeared.²⁰ The answer, though unknowable, dovetails with a greater divergence in Baldwin’s career. Few critics fail to mention that Fire directly precedes an “authorial swerve” (Birmingham 221), although the degree to which Baldwin’s marked shift in tone and style represents another conversion, rather than an evolution of qualities already potential in his writing, is disputed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. sketches the established narrative most clearly: A writer finds his gifts ill-suited to a changing historical moment and betrays them in pursuit of relevance. The early Baldwin’s “arguments, richly nuanced and self-consciously ambivalent, were far too complex to serve straightforwardly political ends,” but those were precisely the ends that mattered to the next generation of Black writers, leaving Baldwin to “chas[e], with unseemly alacrity, after a new vanguard” (Gates, “Fire Last Time”). Lynn Orilla Scott points out that that “the current revival of his work” has reversed this once-common critical account; now it is the “latter-day Baldwin who seems especially prophetic in our era . . . [as] the struggle to make black lives matter continues” (138). Both appraisals turn on the post-civil rights disillusionment that Baldwin readily acknowledged, and both reflect the author’s desire for a different audience.²¹ Tired of being “the Great Black Hope of the Great White Father” (No Name 87), Baldwin set out in search of new readers.