DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
Today, August 2, marks the centennial of the birth of James Baldwin, one of the most influential writers to emerge during the civil rights era. His essays and novels addressed racial issues head-on. Baldwin's best-known works include "Go Tell It On The Mountain," "Giovanni's Room," "Nobody Knows My Name," "The Fire Next Time" and "Another Country." For most of his adult life, Baldwin lived as an expatriate in France, where he died in 1987. He was 63 years old. Terry spoke with James Baldwin in 1986. He told her that he grew up in Harlem, where his father was a preacher in a storefront church.
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JAMES BALDWIN: Daddy was old-fashioned, fire and brimstone hellfire preacher, you know, very direct, very chilling sometimes.
TERRY GROSS: Was it pretty frightening to have him as a father? And I'm thinking if he thought that he was directly connected to God, then it really gave him a lot of power.
BALDWIN: Oh, yes, he did have the aura of the divine about him, that is to say his orders were not only coming from him but from the Almighty. So in a way, to contest him was to be contesting, you know, the Lord, to be fighting the Lord. Of course, my father was not slow, you know, to point this out.
(LAUGHTER)
BALDWIN: There was something very frightening about it.
GROSS: You became a preacher when you were 14.
BALDWIN: That's right.
GROSS: Why did you do that?
BALDWIN: Well, it was almost inevitable, you know, being raised that way. And after all, I'm not doubting anything my father said, not doubting the gospel, not doubting the church, you know? And at the time of puberty, when everybody goes through a storm, you know, the storm of self-discovery, the storm of self-contempt, the storm of - the terror of, who is this self which is suddenly evolving, you know, suddenly is distinguishing itself from other selves? And all of these things - and the sexual question, of course, you know? All of these things sort of coalesce into some kind of hurricane in a way, you know? And in that hurricane, what did I do? I reached out for the only thing I could - which I knew to cling to, and that was the Holy Ghost.
And those three years in the pulpit, it's very difficult to describe them. I probably shouldn't try. There was a kind of torment in it, but I learned an awful lot. And my faith, perhaps - I lost my faith, all the faith I'd had. But I learned something else. I learned something about myself, I think, and I learned something through dealing with those congregations. After all, I was a boy preacher, and the people I was - the congregations I addressed were grown-ups. And a boy preacher has a very special aura in the Black community. And that aura implies a certain responsibility, you know, and the responsibility above all to tell the truth.
So as I began to be more and more tormented by my crumbling faith, it began to be clearer and clearer to me that I had no right to stay in the pulpit. And I didn't know enough. I didn't - the suffering of those people, which was real, was still beyond the ken of a boy 14, 15, 16. You could respond to it, but I had not yet entered that inferno. They knew something about being a [expletive] which I was only just beginning to discover, and it frightened me. So, for those reasons and complex reasons, I left. I left home and left the church.
GROSS: What did you do to try to get your foot in the door somewhere as a writer?
BALDWIN: Well, I wrote all the time, you know? I worked all day and I wrote all night. And I was defined as a young Negro writer. And that meant that certain things were expected of a young Negro writer. And what was expected I knew I was not about to deliver. What was expected was to accept the role of victim and to write from that point of view. And from my point of view, it seemed to me that to take such a stance would simply be to corroborate all of the principles which had you enslaved in the first place.
GROSS: "Go Tell It On The Mountain" was a fairly autobiographical novel. And it really won you a lot of attention and prestige in America. Your book of essays, "The Fire Next Time," which was published in 1963, was, I think, perceived by many whites as an attack against whites, like he's threatening us with the fire next time. Did that happen? Did some white people see it that way, and did it change your reputation to becoming more of a controversial writer?
BALDWIN: Yeah, but that had begun to happen already without my quite noticing it, because long before "The Fire Next Time," which was not an attack on white people - they flatter themselves.
(LAUGHTER)
BALDWIN: Long before that, when I first got South, first went South and tried to begin to - because I went as a reporter, and I tried to get the story published, you know? The first few times, the first few magazines when I came back did not want to publish the reports because they accused me of fomenting violence. Now, I was describing violence, a violence which I was in no way responsible. And I thought that people should know what is going on and why it's going on. And "The Fire Next Time" is probably the combination of all those years. You know, it was when I was being called the angry young man on the white side of town and being called an Uncle Tom on the Black side of town.
GROSS: Some of your writing has really been, I think, very important to gay people and people in the gay movement in America. And I wonder if the gay liberation movement had any effect on you, if it was important for you to have, you know, a movement...
BALDWIN: No.
GROSS: ...About that.
BALDWIN: No, no, no. I left the church when I was 17. I have not joined anything since. You see; before I left this country, I had been afflicted with so many labels that I'd become invisible to myself.
GROSS: (Laughter).
BALDWIN: You know, I had to go away someplace and get rid of all these labels to find out not what I was, but who. You see what I mean? And the gay liberation movement is ideally an attempt precisely to find out not what one is, but who one is, and also to have no need to defend oneself, you know? So it was a very simple matter for me, in any case, to say to myself, I'm going this way, you know, and only death will stop me, you know, and I'm going to live my life, the only life I have in the sight of God.
BIANCULLI: James Baldwin speaking with Terry Gross in 1986. Today would've been his 100th birthday. He died in 1987 at age 63. On Monday's show, how brain surgery has been transformed by new technologies, new instruments and more powerful computers - and how brain surgery has contributed to a better understanding of the human mind. We'll talk with brain surgeon Theodore H. Schwartz, author of the new book "Gray Matters." He'll share some of his own experiences. Join us.
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BIANCULLI: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman and Julian Herzfeld. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
(SOUNDBITE OF RAY CHARLES' "JOY RIDE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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