A Book for Your Library: Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems

[By Simone Savannah]

Don’t you just love that feeling of buying or receiving a book? Oh, that feeling of wanting to get home to cuddle up with it and a cup of roasted dandelion tea? Okay, just me? Last week, my professor gave me a copy of Zora Neal Hurston: A Life in Letters, and I knew that I had to pass on the favor. So, I am sharing a title in the hopes that you’ll run to your nearest bookstore or library, then home with it and a cup of tea.

A Book for Your Library 

Beacon Press published Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems on April 1, 2014. It includes an introduction by poet, Nikky Finney who examines Baldwin “as poet” and reveals the significance and power of his poems.

James Baldwin, as poet, was incessantly paying attention and always leaning into the din and hum around him, making his poems from his notes of what was found there…James Baldwin, as poet, was forever licking the tip of his pencil, preparing for more calculations, more inventory, moving, counting each letter being made inside the abacus of the poem.

James Baldwin: Notes on the House of Bondage

[By Goyland Williams]

In November of 1980, James Baldwin's essay "Notes on the House of Bondage" appeared in The Nation at a moment not unlike our current political landscape. Both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were inadequate at best, and bankrupt at worst. According to Baldwin, A vote for Jimmy Carter was not an endorsement but  a cold calculated risk, "a means of buying time" (1). Indeed one must always contend with time and space.

When he raised the question, "Who you going to vote for Uncle Jimmy," it was loaded with as much anger as it was rhetorical. Baldwin didn't have to consult Nina Simone to know that anger--born out of intelligence, has a way of moving things. 

A glance at the American political and social scene illuminates the sense of hypocrisy, mendacity, and outright criminal activity by which our politicians have operated. James Baldwin prefigured this moment. He knew--without an iota of doubt--that when one is dealing with corporate thugs and pimps, the vote has little to no power. Time, and a lot of hope is the cure. Speaking to that point, Baldwin reasoned:

My vote will probably not get me a job or a home or help me through school or prevent another Vietnam or a third World War, but it may keep me here long enough for me to see, and use, the turning of the tide--for the tide has got to turn (3).
   
At a moment when the paraphernalia of power and chaos remain intact and highly visible, Jerry W. Ward, Jr. knew that it would be hard to be a patriot in America. Still, Baldwin cautioned against holding one's peace--knowing that silence is deadly. 


 

Literary Vantage Points: Multiple Perspectives of James Baldwin

In our second installment of Literary Vantage Points, we have collected brief interviews from a number of professors to get their perspectives about various authors. In this particular feature, we asked three literary scholars—Professors Sandra Govan, Jerry Ward, and Bob Butler—to describe their initial impressions of author James Baldwin and discuss the legacy of her work.

The goal of these interviews is to reveal the diverse nature of African American literature. These three scholars provide very different responses about how they became acquainted with James Baldwin and the aesthetic value of her work. Please join us as we begin a new chapter of HBW history.

Video Editing: Howard Rambsy Sr.
Video Concept: Kenton Rambsy
Video Footage: Crystal Boson and Yuan Ding

Comments on James Baldwin’s The Cross of Redemption

Guest Blogger Professor Jerry W. Ward

Baldwin, James. The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. Ed. Randall Kenan. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.

“Is A Raisin in the Sun a Lemon in the Dark?” is one of the more revealing essays in this collection. Disputing Nelson Algren’s criticism of Hansberry’s play as a drama about real estate and his valuation of Wright’s Native Son, Baldwin contended “both Native Son and A Raisin in the Sun are flawed pieces of work,” because he found “a profound connection between the two works, and even certain rather obvious similarities. Wright’s flaw is…involved with [an] attempt to illuminate ruthlessly as unprecedented a creation as Bigger by means of the stock characters of Jan, the murdered girl’s lover, and Max, the white lawyer”(25).  Bigger’s tortured reality precludes belief in the two.  Likewise, belief is not warranted by Hansberry’s “juxtaposition of the essentially stock…figure of the mother with the intense (and unprecedented) figure of Walter Lee.  Most Americans do not know that he exists” (26).

Despite his awareness in 1961 that drastic measures were needed to educate most Americans about systemic racism, Baldwin yearned for dramatic verisimilitude divorced from social data, for a certain kind of art.  One profits from reconsidering Baldwin’s problematic judgment by way of reading Robin Bernstein’s “Inventing a Fishbowl: White Supremacy and the Critical Reception of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun” in Modern Drama (Spring 1999).

 Baldwin’s venial flaw was insufficient consideration of the agon of the particular and the universal in American letters.  His flaw leads to a cardinal, contemporary question: should most Americans even care that the characters Walter Lee Younger and Bigger Thomas have become living human beings? An answer might illuminate something.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Professor of English at Dillard University, is the author of The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery (UNO Press, 2008). A Richard Wright scholar, poet, literary critic, Ward was born in Washington, DC but has spend most of his adult life in Mississippi and Louisiana. He is co-editor with Maryemma Graham of The Cambridge History of African American Literature and HBW Senior Board Member.