 (“James Baldwin’s Immense Metamorphosis” digital painting by Aberjhani ©2024) Dear Readers, Please enjoy this excerpt from a work in progress presented in honor of the James Baldwin Centennial 2024. On December 2, 1987, I was proudly seated in front of a brand new word processor, a technological upgrade from my plug-in electric typewriter, tapping away at the keys to complete the first draft of a novel when news came that author James Baldwin had died at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. Because of a promise I had made myself just a year earlier, while preparing to end a four-year tour of duty with the U.S. Air Force in England, the announcement made no sense at all. Since I had neglected during all that time overseas to cross the English channel and make my way to Baldwin’s home to express gratitude for his ground-quaking literary labors, which had granted me permission to pursue a career as a writer, I swore to myself I would one day, after publishing a book or two, travel back across the Atlantic as a civilian. This time, I would go straight to France to correct my past mistake. There was supposed to have been time. He was only 62 when I left Great Britain and made my way down to the Ft. Lauderdale-Miami end of Florida. I was certain I could make it back and spend at least a few minutes interviewing him––or having a drink, or quietly comparing notes on evolving human conditions––in about five years or less. According, however, to the news, that would no longer be possible. How was it that would no longer be possible? It should have been easy enough to comprehend the words of the excited news anchor’s voice, informing me from a different room where my older sister was watching television, that “Famed African-American author James Baldwin has died...” Only it wasn’t easy at all. On that same day, I had babysat an infant niece for an hour and wrote with unbroken concentration as she napped in the cushioned bassinet beside my makeshift desk, unbothered while waiting for her mother to get off work. A confrontation with a nephew battling an addiction to crack cocaine had flared up like a summer storm and rolled quickly away, as did the sound of a man and woman hurling profanities like bricks at each other while they walked past the house. If I allowed domestic events like these to stop me from completing my work when Baldwin had produced masterpiece after masterpiece while constantly fending off poverty, racism, and a barrage of social phobias and personal anxieties, how would the word “author” ever come to apply to me? Then the news was announced again and my sister called out to make sure I had heard it. I flinched in anticipation of hearing how this great man had died: a reference to “cancer” of some kind stabbed like a switchblade between my eyebrows, sending the many images of him with cigarette in hand flickering around my aching head, while other photos of him debating one point or another with influential Whites rose up flashing lights of defiance. An Immense Metamorphosis  “We are in the middle of an immense metamorphosis here, a metamorphosis which will, it is devoutly to be hoped, rob us of our myths and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our personalities.” ––James Baldwin, “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes,” (1959) from The Cross of Redemption, Uncollected Writings, p. 7. It was a strange thing that just before the solemn pronouncement had been delivered, no matter what interruption threatened to silence it, the reportedly deceased author’s voice had been swirling all around me. Like a river of jeweled leaves, perfumed lava, and steamy waves of morning light surging with encouragement and determination, flowing alongside mine while I feverishly typed, typed, paused, and typed away. What had I been writing? A novel about a young black woman and a young white man who both worked as sharecroppers on the same plantation in 1920s Georgia. Both had been abused in different ways by different members of the wealthy family that owned the farm and by others who worked with them. They had heard rumors about places up North where two people like them stood a chance of becoming something besides what others demanded they become at any given moment. It was the kind of story Baldwin, or Margaret Walker, or Jean Toomer, I thought, might have encouraged me to give my best shot. But now? The river of inspiration and confirmation which carried me from doubt to effort was one I recalled first springing forth and sluicing along passageways of membranes and waking conscience when, as a teenager, I read everything by Baldwin local librarians dared place on shelves. Exactly how I first became aware of him I’m not certain, but have a vague memory of pulling a copy of The Fire Next Time from a plastic bag of paperback books which one of my older sisters had brought home from the nursing facility where she worked. After that in the months and years that followed: the essays Notes of a Native Son, and No Name in the Street; the short story collection Going to Meet the Man; and the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain, Another Country, and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. There is another uncertain memory of picking up a copy of Giovanni’s Room and someone cautioning that it was not a book I should read until, possibly, later. Which I did. A Dialogue with revolutionary poet Nikki Giovanni and A Rap on Race with anthropologist Margaret Mead made a gift of the illusion of actually speaking with him. I did not, in those introductory days, understand everything I read by him but the outraged music that pushed and coaxed his language to overflow from one paragraph to the next made re-reading, until comprehension did set in, more pleasurable than painful. Having access to such empire-defying words, at a time when Black men and women could still find themselves dangling and dripping blood at the end of a noose just for being Black men and women was, no minor thing. By Aberjhani |
AberjhaniContemporary award-winning American author of classically-styled works in history, poetry, creative nonfiction, speculative fiction, and journalism. 
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