In a rare one-on-one interview, world-renowned author and poet Maya Angelou sits down with iconic writer and activist James Baldwin to explore Baldwin’s personal journey as a Black American and the inspiration for his highly-revered work.
Baldwin shared his attitude about being a Black American abroad and why he left the U.S., and the lasting impact of living through challenges in America.
TRANSCRIPT
Angelou: When you leave your house in France and come to the United States — when you leave your adopted home and come to your real home, what kind of response do you have inside yourself?
Baldwin: I miss my family. I miss a lot of people who are a part of me. And a certain kind of speed, energy, beat, which only Americans, only American Black people, you know…
Angelou: I know.
Baldwin: I miss that. You say “my home” it’s not exactly my home, it’s a kind of asylum it’s a… it’s a place where I can work. I have a lot of work to do. And if you are in a situation where you are always resisting or resenting it’s very hard to…
Angelou: Well it takes up too much energy.
Baldwin: You can’t write a book. You can’t write a sentence…
Angelou: Most people…
Baldwin: I asked my brother David. We were driving through Harlem the other day. I was in Harlem, and I said to him, I said I wonder what would have happened to me if I had stayed. And you know David…
Angelou: I know David.
Baldwin: Cause I also wanted to stay…
Angelou: Yes, of course…
Baldwin: I didn’t want to go. David laughed. That laugh, that laugh… [Baldwin laughs]
Angelou: That terrible knowing laugh…
Baldwin: He said “You’d be dead, everybody else is.”
Angelou: That’s right.
[Baldwin sighs]
Angelou: And you look around at your friends long dead. Lost in…
Baldwin: Well, David is 43. I’m 50. None of us… Neither of us…
Angelou: That’s something I’m going to talk to you about.
Baldwin: About 50?
Angelou: Yes. But that’s coming…
Baldwin: Neither if us know anybody our age.
[Angelou sighs]
Baldwin: My oldest nephew knows one person his age. Baby, this is a high price country.
Angelou: Your family is closely knit.
Baldwin: I’m a very lucky cat.
Angelou: You’re very lucky. I find myself very lucky because I’ve become adopted into that family so I find myself…
Baldwin: That’s not true, you marched into it.
[Baldwin and Angelou laugh]
Angelou: I took it, didn’t I. I’m going to talk about mother in a while…
Baldwin: Go on.
Angelou: But what does the family feel about you living in the south of France. I mean living without, say an arm’s reach. Distance, out of arm’s reach.
Baldwin: Sweetheart, you have to understand… you have to understand… my mother’s telephone, when I’m in town, people call her up and tell her what they will do to me if she doesn’t make me shut up. You also got to remember that I been writing after all between assassinations. And if you were my mother or my brother, you would think “who’s next?”
[Angelou unintelligible]
Baldwin: It’s extraordinary. The woman raised 9 children, and you… everyone of them, the difference between me and George, the difference between me and David, the difference between me and Willy, and all five girls, and though she was scared to death.
[Angelou chuckles]
Baldwin: No, really, really scared to death…
Angelou: You mean of your father or after his death…
Baldwin: No, scared to death of what was going to happen to us!
Angelou: Yes, yes…
Baldwin: Cause she knew something we didn’t know…
Angelou: Of course, she couldn’t…
Baldwin: And there we went. And she never blackmailed us…
Angelou: Yes…
Baldwin: And she just… I went to Paris, 1948, it was a rainy day. Mama came downstairs [Baldwin nods his head] like that. Paula was upstairs. Paula was 5 years old…
Angelou: That’s the baby?
Baldwin: The baby. And… you can’t explain to a baby what and why you have to do what you to do… and she wouldn’t talk to me, she was crying. [Unintelligible] and the taxi drove away. But she let me go. I think… I think at bottom she knew how much… maybe she knew better than I did, how much I loved them. And I didn’t want her to see me turn into a junkie, you know…
Angelou: Or a prostitute, in any way…
Baldwin: In many, many ways… go to jail cause nobody could call me nigga. I had done the post office bit, I had gone to the army, I had been up and down those streets. So now I had 5 minutes, and I had to jump to save my family.
Angelou: And they let you go…
Baldwin: That sounds very grandiose by the way…
Angelou: No, no, because I do know a story. I know that when you went to France, that Mother Baldwin with all of those children, from time to time — one of the lovely stories about our family — is that from time to time, David or George, the older boys, would work with coal in the winter, [Baldwin nods] ice in the summer selling, and on welfare, whatever, whatever, [unintelligle] sometimes comes to families, and would still manage sometimes to send you a little check.
Baldwin: Oh, I remember, I remember…[Baldwin smiles]
Angelou: In France. I mean to think of a Black American family in Harlem who had no pretensions to great literature, and so forth, as such — I’m using in pips — and to have the oldest boy leave home and go to Paris, France. And then for them to save up enough pennies, and nickels and dimes to send $150 dollars to him in Paris, France…
Baldwin: That’s what… that’s what people don’t really know about us.
Angelou: One of the things I think, I mean I do believe we are Americans. It is true…
Baldwin: You believe it?
Angelou: Well…
Baldwin: I know it.
Angelou: We are Black Americans. We have our feet, our souls, our hearts and…
Baldwin: We have paid for this country.
Angelou: Absolutely.
Baldwin: That’s why I would never leave it by the way.
Angelou: Never. That’s the lovely thing about…
Baldwin: At least I never alluded myself into thinking that.
Angelou: About that line that you can’t go home again, you can’t leave home.
Baldwin: You can’t leave home.
[Angelou laughs]
Baldwin: You can’t leave home… you carry it with you.
Angelou: Of course. And then create a whole atmosphere…
Baldwin: There are no Harlem barbershops. There are beautiful barbershops, but there ain’t no Harlem barbershops in Paris. [Baldwin laughs]
Angelou: Yeah, I know. Or beauty shop where you can hear who’s doing what to whom at what time.
Baldwin: There’s not that speed, that beat, that fire. I owe my adopted country, as you put it, I owe them a lot cause it left me alone.
Angelou: Yes. When French people or Europeans ask you about your country, about the United States of America, or as I constantly say anywhere, is what James Baldwin calls it “these yet to be United States of America,” Jim, what is your response to the question?
Baldwin: I had to go to Germany for the publication of Beale Street. I was working very hard some place, in Paris, in fact… libraries and doing research, and I wanted to cancel the tour cause I was into my thing…
Angelou: Yes, staying in your groove.
Baldwin: And I didn’t want to [Baldwin gestures at his head] and I discovered that the USIS — the tour was for five German cities — and the USIS had broken its contract with my German publisher saying that the U.S. Information Service is not here to publicize novels and novelists.
Angelou: How had they had the contract in the first place?
Baldwin: In the normal way, you know the German publisher or the French publisher…
Angelou: Right, right…
Baldwin: In that manner if you come to your town, you’re an American writer, it’s kind of a courtesy to the American embassy…
Angelou: I see.
Baldwin: And they broke the contract. And this was all over the German press, the fact that I was banned by my own government. That’s not the end of the story. I called my poor brother David who just left and said “you better come back.”
Angelou: David, come. Help.
Baldwin: “Come and take me to Germany” because once I was banned I had to go! I had to go! And I went. Now, this is on German soil, right. And I was in a very difficult position because the Germans wanted to say how much better they were than the Americans…
Angelou: To Blacks. And you in particular…
Baldwin: And so I had to say “you gotta remember…”
Angelou: 1939…
Baldwin: “No, you got it all started in Europe. That’s how we got America. I know this was the Third Reich. You know, and I’m not let up congratulate yourselves about the disaster performance of my own country because I know the performance of yours too.”
Angelou: And in Africa. In [unintelligible]
Baldwin: “As far as [unintelligible] negro problem is concerned, if you really want to know what that is, look out the window. Look out your window right now and see who’s sweeping your streets. You call it the foreign worker problem. We call it slave labor.”
Angelou: And the Italians and Arabs?
Baldwin: We left them fighting with each other.
[Angelou laughs]
Angelou: Jim, I tell you, your life. There are a million questions I have to ask and I have to ask you to direct yourself to some, what they call “heavy.” Young people, especially young Whites found that word and they attach it to anything.
Baldwin: Yeah, they found the word “beat.”
Angelou: You said something. A man asked, made a question to you about homosexuality. And you had a response to it. And I would like to hear it again, and again and again…
Baldwin: I said it’s a weary, weary, weary question… I said “homosexual” is not a noun. It might be a verb, transitive, it’s certainly an adjective, but it’s not a noun. To ask the question means you don’t know anything about human experience, where it can take you, what it can do. You know, and if you categorize the world in that way, then you lock yourself out from so much. I’ve known boys… I swear to you sweetheart, I’ve known kats, I’m talking about White kats too, football player types who went on the needle, went on the needle and then finally died because they’re afraid someone would call them a faggot. All I know about human life… and I don’t know much…
Angelou: Less and less.
Baldwin: Yes, when I was young I knew a lot… [Angelou laughs]. Now I don’t know nothing, which is a great relief. [Angelou and Baldwin laugh]. But all I know about human life is if I love you, I love you. And if I love you and duck it, I die.
Angelou: Exactly. Exactly. Well, you see out of that, I think, is, for me, I see the nature of love, the ability to dare to challenge despair, and to dare to love. Which I…
Baldwin: You see you can’t prophecize, you can’t make a decision I’m going to fall in love with the girl I marry, [Baldwin gestures at face] all that [unintelligible]. You have to trust life. You have to trust life.
Angelou: And when you say trust life, of course you mean all life, you mean all of it?
Baldwin: Yes, all of it.
Angelou: Ok. Then what does that mean about death?
Baldwin: Death?
Angelou: Is death not within that circumference?
Baldwin: I think that the only way to life is to know you are going to die. If you’re afraid to die, you’ll never be able to live.
Angelou: Hey, hey! Hey, hey!
Baldwin: And nobody knows anything about death, and that is also just another word for something you don’t…
Angelou: Singing the blues. [Angelou laughs] Death is another word…
Baldwin: You don’t know anything about. When I go, I go, and where I go I don’t know. It might be beautiful, it might be nothing, it might be… you know, I think it’s a cycle. I trust my ancestors. Because I know, however this may sound, I know what happens to me when I’m in trouble. I know what my mother taught me, which is to love everybody, and when I’m in trouble, I listen to something. When I’m writing, I’m listening to something. Because you know all this theatre about being a writer, being a star and all of that, the truth is you become a writer because a day comes in your life you have to accept the fact that you’re not a truck driver.
Angelou: Yes, even if you loved it.
Baldwin: I can dig a ditch, and you know I ain’t never drove a truck, but I can still dig a ditch. That is… there’s a division of labor in the world. Some people can do this, some people can do that, and the people that produced you, what I mean by my ancestors. I’m a kind of poet and I come out of a certain place, a certain time, a certain history…
Angelou: Right.
Baldwin: You know. And the people who produced me, whether or not they always loved me or liked me or….
Angelou: They produced you.
Baldwin: They produced me…
Angelou: The total of that.
Baldwin: That is my gig.
Angelou: That’s right. Jim recently, you had a 50th birthday.
Baldwin: That’s right. Oh yeah, I’m 50 years old. Isn’t that astounding?
Angelou: And beautiful.
Baldwin: I don’t believe that I’m that old. [Baldwin laughs] I don’t believe it.
Angelou: You’ve made a statement about it. What do you think about being 50?
Baldwin: I said to you it seems very unfair because you’re dealing with numbers, right?
Angelou: Right.
Baldwin: I’m 20 years away from 30…
Angelou: Yeah.
Baldwin: And I’m 20 years away from 70.
Angelou: Not bad.
Baldwin: Now that seems a little unfair. Unfair in the sense like, alright here we go. You can’t go back.
Angelou: Right.
Baldwin: There’s 20 years between 30 and 50, and between 50 and 70, which means for me finally, I will have to hang around a while.
Angelou: It also means that you’re closer, you said, to 70…
Baldwin: Aww, I’m much closer to 70 than I am to 50. But something else happens to you when you realize that. Something else happens to you. You realize now you gotta use the time. You gotta use the time. I ain’t gonna live another 50 years. Given my temperament and my stubbornness I might live another 30 years. All bets are off, but it does mean you gotta use the time.
Angelou: Could you stay alive, vital and productive without your family?
Baldwin: No. No way! No way! If I didn’t have… if I didn’t know I was at my back, the net… I’m on a tight rope. And no net on a tight rope. Each time out…
Angelou: You’re out there.
Baldwin: It’s higher. And yet I’ve got a certain safety… I’ve got a certain safety because we love each other.
Angelou: Ok. Let me just ask you this: How do you cope with success, and after that, if you want to weave them together it’s fine with me, how do you cope with despair? Despair in front of the fact that the world is saying you’re a success. Ok, so ok?
Baldwin: I think. I don’t know, well in my own case, in a paradoxical fashion which cannot possibly be explained what is called a success in my own case, right, what came out of despair.
Angelou: Of course. Life out of death, death out of life…
Baldwin: I, that’s how you learned to live with despair. Success, is a little like finding yourself on a runaway horse because you never see it coming…
[Angelou unintelligible]
Baldwin: And also, in a very serious way, it is not possible, it is not possible for an artist to be a success.
Angelou: Jim, would say that again?
Baldwin: I said it is not possible for an artist to be a success.
Angelou: Thank you.
Baldwin: Once you think of yourself as a success… [Baldwin laughs]
Angelou: You’re finished. You’re finnito…
Baldwin: You’re forget it.
Angelou: What I find is you start to believe your own publicity…
Baldwin: You begin to take your identity from other people…
Angelou: From something else… and you stop experimenting because somebody says “when you did so and so, that was such a success, why don’t you do that again?”
Baldwin: When I wrote “Go Tell it on the Mountain,” which God help us, 1952… I am 50… [Baldwin laughs] But I knew something, it’s very hard to describe. I knew… I mean “Go Tell it on the Mountain” was a success, a young man’s success. A young man’s book and everybody fell in love with me. I was going to be the new great folklore hero, but I thought no, I’m a writer. I am ain’t going to… I’m not going to write “Go Tell it on the Mountain” again…
Angelou: 73 times. “Go Tell it on the Mountain” returns.
Baldwin: So I did a play nobody would do “The Amen Corner”… put it in my trunk for years and years and years…
Angelou: Eleven years in fact before it was produced.
Baldwin: Put it in my trunk… in my trunk. One of my little finger exercises cause I was not going to write another novel at that moment. And “Giovanni’s Room” was also very much one of those finger exercises, and also in order to confront something I had to deal with in myself, cause one of the dangers of being a Black American, certainly a Black American man, is there’s such a complex of ambiguities to deal with, such a complex of poses…
Angelou: Right, roles to play …
Baldwin: And I had to. I had been playing a certain role too. I was a stud and I didn’t wanna drown that neither. I wanted to figure out… to tell you the truth myself… about where it is, what it is this male, female, man, woman, Black, White…
Angelou: Up, down [unintelligible]…
Baldwin: I had to try to deal with that. Well…
Angelou: So, “Giovanni’s Room” came out of that?
Angelou: Well, when it comes to “Go Tell it on the Mountain” and “The Amen Corner,” you know Forget it. “Giovanni’s Room” was a certain kind of hit because nobody believed the man who wrote “Go Tell it on the Mountain”…
Angelou: Could also, or would write “Giovanni’s Room” … or would …
Baldwin: Or would!
Angelou: But there are those who say “Giovanni’s Room” was until… that was one of your greatest and most perfect books.
Baldwin: A book is always flawed and the writer knows it before the critics do…
Angelou: Long before.
Baldwin: And you become a writer by…. I wrote “Go Tell it on a Mountain” I don’t know how many times. But you have to accept that fact that alright, this is not Hamlet, it’s ain’t the Brother’s [unintelligible] which hasn’t been written by the way.
Angelou: And well.
Baldwin: This is me. And at a certain point you cut the performance off and you gotta get it out of the house, so you can start again.
Angelou: Is there any time in life when you start a project that you’re not afraid?
Baldwin: Scared to death.
Angelou: Scared to death.
Baldwin: I tell you about no name in the street, which was after all written between assassinations. [Unintelligle] I finally say at the end of the book I had to reconcile myself to the fact that I was never going to be able to finish it because it was not a journalistic assignment I had to do. It was involved with all the headlines, you know. It was a very public in a sense document dealing with a lot of public events. I finished it, that is put it on my desk… [Baldwin smacks his hand] My brother David came to see me because David always knows when I’m in trouble. And he read it. He came out of the office, he read the book, didn’t say a word, went back upstairs and he said “have you mailed it yet?“ I said no. So I went upstairs…
Angelou: This is in Saint Paul?
Baldwin: This is in Sant Paul.
Angelou: De Vance?
Baldwin: Saint Paul De Vance. France. In the hills. The next morning he came downstairs, he looked at me, picked up the book and he said “Ain’t you got no envelopes?”
[Baldwin and Angelou laugh]
Angelou: Mail it off!
Baldwin: And he mailed it.
Angelou: He mailed it off.
Baldwin: Because he knew — there’s a moment after all, I don’t want to go into this really but… I loved Malcolm and he got his head blown off, I loved Medgar, he got his head blown off, and Martin got his head blown off, I had wrote with Bobby and JFK, and Lord have mercy, wow, ain’t nothing I’d done, the typewriter keys, which saved nobody. It took me a very long time. That’s why I ended up in a hospital.
Angelou: I know.
Baldwin: It took a very long time to reconcile myself to trying to be a writer again because one is always trying to be a writer, I don’t care what the world says.
Angelou: I know that. That’s like trying to be a good Christian, a good Jew, a good Muslim, a poet. If you’re 80, you get up and try to make that fit you again, that cloak you put down last night. Exactly, I have no argument.
Baldwin: What David did, was really, point out to me, in his laconic fashion, that I had to keep the faith.
