James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey

Preface

Preface In I963 my aunt, Orilla Winfield, sent me a copy of The Fire Next Time for my thirteenth birthday. I read it in the library of Headington School for Girls in Oxford, England, where I had been "exiled" for a year from my life as a teenage American girl who liked rock and roll and mini skirts, who ratted her hair and secretly smoked cigarettes. I was just beginning to learn that there were worlds very different from the one I had inhabited for the first thirteen years of my life. Headington-with its gray-blue uniforms, its daily prayers, its kidney pie, and its extremely studious young womenseemed like another planet from the American junior high school I had attended just a few months previously. The day I read The Fire Next Time, however, I got my first glimpse of yet another world, one that was also American, but a long way from the America I knew, as one of those white "innocents" at home that Baldwin so adeptly describes and addresses. I have never been able to boast a photographic memory or even a particularly good memory, but I vividly remember reading James Baldwin for vi WITNESS TO THE JOURNEY the first time-I remember where I was sitting in the Headington Library, what the room looked like, and how the book made me feel. I remember being unable to put it down, drawn in by Baldwin's tone of moral seriousness (rather than moralism) and by the intimacy of his voice-a voice that made me feel he was letting me in on his life, as he was, somehow, letting me in on my life as well. My aunt, Orilla, was a strong advocate for racial justice and an avid reader, so it was not surprising that she had sent me The Fire Next Time. But I didn't know, then, of her friendship with Jimmy Baldwin. I soon learned that she was the white school teacher whom Baldwin first mentioned in "Notes of a Native Son," and that, periodically, they still kept in touch. However, it was not until Baldwin published The Devil Finds Work in I976 that I really started to appreciate the significance of that relationship , not only for James Baldwin and my aunt, but for the legacy it left me and my family, a legacy of hope that we can cross barriers of race, class, and culture, that we can share a vision of the way things should be, that we can be friends, comrades, and lovers. In the Devil Finds Work, Jimmy writes: It is certainly partly because of her, who arrived in my terrifying life so soon, that I never really managed to hate white people-though, God knows, I have often wished to murder more than one or two. But Bill Miller-her name was Orilla, we called her Bill-was not white for me in the way, for example, that Joan Crawford was white, in the way that the landlords and the storekeepers and the cops and most of my teachers were white. She didn't baffle me that way and she never frightened me and she never lied to me. I never felt her pity, either, in spite of the fact that she sometimes brought us old clothes (because she worried about our winters) and cod-liver oil, especially for me, because I seemed destined, then, to be carried away by whooping cough.! Yet it is another description from the Devil Finds Work that has stood out for me, even more than the one above, when I think about my aunt as a political activist and young school teacher: "Bill took us on a picnic downtown once, and there was supposed to be ice cream waiting for us at a Preface vii police station. The cops didn't like Bill, didn't like the fact that we were colored kids, and didn't want to give up the ice cream. I don't remember anything Bill said. I just remember her face as she stared at the cop, clearly intending to stand there until the ice cream all over the world melted or until the earth's surface froze, and she got us our ice cream saying, Thank you, I remember as we left."2 I can well imagine that scene and my aunt's expression (she could be quite undaunted), and it makes me...