He didn’t linger in the noisy standing ovation we gave him that night in California. He never rested on any fame, award, or success. His way of seeing her, of remembering what was important about her, helped her stay with me. Baldwin’s lush remembrance brought her to me in powerful living dimension. After her untimely death, I had a palpable need to still see and feel her in the world. Hansberry had given me two atomic oars to zephyr me further upstream: I am a writer. I was the Black girl dreaming of a writing life and Hansberry, the Black woman carving one out. Baldwin’s intimate remembrance became the introduction to the book of the same name, a book that, as a girl of fourteen, I was highly uncomfortable ever letting out of my sight. Hansberry died from cancer at the age of thirty-four, soon after her great work, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, yanked the apron and head rag off the institution of the American theater, Broadway, 1959. I had met James Baldwin by way of his "Sweet Lorraine," a seventeen-hundred-and seventy-six-word loving manifesto to his friend and comrade, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry. My worldview was set in motion by this big, bold heart who understood that he had to leave his America in order to be. Baldwin, deep in thought and pulling drags from his companion cigarettes, looking his and our danger in the face and never backing down.
Black, gay, bejeweled, eyes like orbs searching, dancing, calling a spade a spade, in magazines and on the black-and-white TV of my youth. In every direction I turned, my ears filled a little more with what he always had to say. I arrived on planet earth in the middle of his personal and relentless assault on white supremacy and his brilliant, succinct understanding of world and American history.
James Arthur Baldwin, the most salient, sublime, and consequential American writer of the twentieth century, was in the midst of publishing his resolute and prophetic essays and novels: Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), TheAmen Corner (1954), Notes of a Native Son (1955), and Giovanni’s Room (1956). The air of the Republic was already rich with him when I got here.