In November 1970, in the wake of the controversial arrest of the
black activist and UCLA professor Angela Yvonne Davis, James Baldwin
reflected on the acrid irony of seeing a dark-skinned woman harassed and
manacled by white Americans. “One might have hoped that, by this hour,
the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains,
would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so
unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up
and strike off the manacles,” he wrote in an open letter to Davis. “But
no,” he lamented, “they appear to glory in their chains; now, more than
ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.”
The incident began at California’s Soledad Prison,
with a guard’s grisly murder of three black inmates. Davis rallied to
the cause of the Soledad Brothers, as the executed prisoners became
known. Their black bodies, it seemed, had been unceremoniously shipped
off, like so many others, to some vast necropolis of America, a
necropolis ironically the only city, by virtue of being a city of the
dead, where black bodies seemed safe. But Davis was not alone in her
anger at the Soledad Brothers’ deaths. Months after the murders, armed
militants stormed a trial in Marin County to attempt to free three
convicts in retaliation. Pandemonium erupted. In the chaos, bullets
began to fly in the courtroom, and four people died, including a
superior court judge. Davis was accused of supplying firearms to the
militants, and she fled California in fear, becoming, in the process,
the third woman ever to appear on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list,
charged with homicide, conspiracy, and kidnapping.
To Baldwin’s dismay, Davis—who would be acquitted of all charges in a
1972 trial that captivated the nation—appeared on the cover of Newsweek
in 1970 in handcuffs—“chained,” as he put it. Only her attire and her
glasses, really, appeared to set her apart from the countless slaves
depicted in manacles in dehumanizing illustrations of slavery. America,
Baldwin believed, not only could not stop putting chains on black
people; it thrived, like a blood-drunk rose, on the wounds it inflicted
on black bodies, its white inhabitants able to avoid nightmares only by
imagining that black Americans were safely sequestered and rotting in
distant, fetid cells.
Four years after that open letter, Baldwin composed what I consider his masterpiece, If Beale Street Could Talk,
which also examined a black body forcibly incarcerated—that is, put in
chains. It was also a profound depiction of two black people in love,
both before and after one is wrongly imprisoned. To me, it is Baldwin’s
most poignant, most moving novel. And, in its exploration of police
brutality and racist cops trying to frame black men for crimes they did not commit, it has a particularly powerful resonance in 2018—making Barry Jenkins’s years-in-the-making cinematic adaptation, which will be released in American theaters later this month, particularly timely.
In some ways, If Beale Street Could Talk can be read as a response to, if not a corrective rewriting of, Richard Wright’s Native Son. The second novel by an African American to become a best seller (the first being Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem), Native Son
was both popular and controversial, at once a gothic narrative of
grisly violence and a moralizing tract advocating for better treatment
of black Americans. For decades, Baldwin mentioned the book in his
essays and lectures. Though he was initially repulsed by it, he couldn’t
get it out of his head, couldn’t stop orbiting its ugly sun. ... [mehr] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/11/13/james-baldwins-optimism/
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