James Baldwin: The Making of an Extraordinary Mind

 

James Baldwin: The Making of an Extraordinary Mind

Before James Baldwin became famous, he was already becoming James Baldwin

James Baldwin is often introduced as a novelist, essayist, playwright and one of the great literary voices of twentieth-century America.

That is true—but it doesn't quite tell us how James Baldwin became James Baldwin.

Read the usual biography and the facts can seem to line up like newspaper clippings: Harlem. A strict preacher father. A teenage preacher. DeWitt Clinton High School. Greenwich Village. Paris. Go Tell It on the Mountain. Civil rights. Race. Sexuality. Exile.

But there was something happening underneath all of those events.

A remarkably gifted young Black boy was developing an extraordinary command of language, religion, literature, argument and human observation.

And he was doing it long before the world knew his name.

The preacher's son who became a preacher himself

James Baldwin was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924.

His mother, Emma Berdis Jones, had come north from Maryland. When James was three years old, she married David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher who became the man James regarded as his father. David Baldwin was strict and deeply religious, and the household eventually included nine children.

Religion was not simply something Baldwin studied.

Religion was the atmosphere in which he grew up.

The Bible was not merely a book on a shelf. It was spoken, interpreted, preached and argued about. It supplied the language of his childhood.

And then something remarkable happened.

At fourteen, James Baldwin entered the pulpit himself.

He became a preacher at Harlem's Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. For approximately three years, this teenager stood before adults and children and spoke to a congregation. The Stanford King Institute describes him as an exceptional young orator and notes that he became a child preacher at fourteen.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture makes an even more important point: Baldwin's Pentecostal experience remained essential to understanding his later writing. His years in the pulpit shaped his rhetorical style, themes, symbols and biblical allusions.

That changes the way we should read Baldwin.

Before he became the celebrated essayist who could hold an audience spellbound, he had already learned how to hold a congregation.

Before he became famous for the rhythm of his prose, he had heard the rhythm of the Black church.

Before he became a public intellectual, he had been a young Black preacher speaking about matters of life, death, sin, love, salvation and human behavior.

That is not a minor episode in his biography.

It is part of the foundation.

And this child could read

There is another part of Baldwin's childhood that deserves more attention.

He was an extraordinarily serious reader.

The Wikipedia biography notes that while still in the fifth grade Baldwin had already read works by Dostoyevsky, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens. His teachers recognized his unusual ability, and he was writing and editing while still in school.

Think about that for a moment.

A Black child growing up in Depression-era Harlem was not simply being introduced to books.

He was devouring them.

He was learning how different writers constructed worlds.

He was absorbing vocabulary, rhythm, character, argument and moral conflict.

And he was not reading only one kind of literature.

The Bible was part of his intellectual inheritance.

So was the literary canon.

So was Harlem.

So was the Black church.

So was the street.

So was the theater.

So were the people around him.

All of these worlds were going into the same young mind.

Harlem gave him one education. Greenwich Village gave him another.

After graduating from high school, Baldwin could not simply go off to college and continue his education in the conventional way. His family needed his help.

His stepfather died in 1943, and Baldwin took jobs to support his family.

But something else was happening.

He was moving toward Greenwich Village.

And Greenwich Village was another kind of school.

Baldwin first stayed with the painter Beauford Delaney, an important modernist artist who became one of the young writer's mentors. Delaney introduced Baldwin to people and experiences outside the boundaries of Harlem.

Then came Connie Williams.

Enter Connie Williams and the Calypso

Connie Williams was a Trinidadian-born restaurateur who operated the Calypso Restaurant at 146 MacDougal Street.

This was not just a place to eat.

It was a gathering place.

Williams created a racially mixed environment at a time when such spaces were unusual. Artists, writers, musicians, activists and intellectuals passed through its doors. Sources describe figures including Paul Robeson, Henry Miller, Richard Wright, Malcolm X and others as associated with the Calypso's social world.

And there was James Baldwin—the young writer working there.

He was not yet the James Baldwin whose name would eventually appear on the covers of books around the world.

He was a young Black man washing dishes and working as a waiter while observing the people around him.

But imagine what he was seeing.

Imagine the conversations.

Imagine the personalities.

Imagine a young man who already knew the Bible, already loved literature, already understood the power of spoken language, suddenly finding himself in a room filled with artists, writers, performers and political thinkers.

The restaurant became another kind of classroom.

Connie Williams was more than an employer.

She became part of Baldwin's intellectual and cultural formation.

The National Park Service's documentation of Baldwin's Greenwich Village years records that Delaney introduced Baldwin to Williams and that Baldwin worked as a waiter at her restaurant.

The Village was a laboratory for Baldwin

This is where the story becomes especially interesting.

Baldwin was not arriving in Greenwich Village as an empty vessel.

He already had a foundation.

He had the Black church.

He had the Bible.

He had literature.

He had Harlem.

He had the experience of preaching.

He had learned how words could move a crowd.

And now he was encountering another world.

The Village exposed him to people whose lives, politics, sexuality, artistic practices and intellectual assumptions could be very different from those he had known growing up.

He was watching.

Listening.

Reading.

Arguing.

Writing.

Learning.

This was not a university in the formal sense.

But it was an education.

And Baldwin was an extraordinary student.

The strange education of James Baldwin

Perhaps the most important thing missing from the conventional telling of Baldwin's life is the idea that his education was assembled from many different worlds.

The Black church taught him rhetoric.

The Bible gave him an enormous vocabulary of moral questions and metaphor.

Harlem gave him an understanding of Black life in America.

Literature gave him other worlds to enter.

The Village introduced him to artists and intellectuals who challenged his assumptions.

His work experiences taught him about economic survival.

His friendships exposed him to different kinds of people.

And his own inner life forced him to examine questions that many people would rather avoid.

All of this became material.

Baldwin did not merely write about America.

He had been studying America.

Before the famous books

By the time Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953, he had already spent years gathering the material that would make his writing so distinctive.

The novel drew deeply upon the religious world he knew firsthand.

His later writing continued to carry the imprint of the pulpit.

PBS's American Masters quotes Baldwin reflecting on his years preaching: “Those three years in the pulpit”—he said he later realized—“turned me into a writer.”

That statement deserves to be taken seriously.

Baldwin did not simply abandon the church and become a writer.

The preacher became part of the writer.

The cadence remained.

The confrontation remained.

The questioning remained.

The demand that the listener examine himself remained.

Even when Baldwin rejected the theology of his youth, he did not lose the language he had learned there.

He transformed it.

Baldwin was already an intellectual before he was called one

This is why the story of James Baldwin should not begin with his fame.

It should begin with his formation.

The teenage boy reading Dickens and Dostoyevsky.

The Black child immersed in the Bible.

The fourteen-year-old standing in a Harlem pulpit.

The high-school student writing and editing.

The young man moving through Greenwich Village.

The young worker at Connie Williams's Calypso Restaurant.

The young writer surrounded by painters, actors, political thinkers and other outsiders.

The young Black intellectual learning from every room he entered.

That is the Baldwin story that can get lost when biography is reduced to a list of accomplishments.

What the Wikipedia biography should make us see

Wikipedia does provide many of these facts.

The problem is not necessarily that the information is absent.

The problem is what the reader sees when the pieces are put together.

A reader should be able to understand that Baldwin's intellectual power did not suddenly appear when he published a book.

It was cultivated over years.

It was cultivated in church.

It was cultivated through reading.

It was cultivated in Harlem.

It was cultivated through encounters with artists.

It was cultivated in Greenwich Village.

It was cultivated through work, friendship, argument, observation and writing.

And it was cultivated by a young man who seemed to understand very early that words mattered.

James Baldwin's great achievement was not simply that he wrote famous books.

It was that he took the many worlds that had formed him—the Black church, Harlem, literature, Greenwich Village, the experiences of race and sexuality, friendship, politics and exile—and turned them into an extraordinary instrument for examining American life.

The preacher became the writer.

The reader became the intellectual.

The young observer became the witness.

And the boy from Harlem eventually became one of the most powerful voices of twentieth-century America.

These ideas are a  starting point for improving the Wikipedia biography. The key isn't simply to add more facts about Baldwin; it is to change the narrative architecture so that readers can see the connection between the Black church → the Bible → early reading → preaching → Harlem → Connie Williams and Greenwich Village → the intellectual James Baldwin.

C