“I got away with not even crying” was how Cecil Brown concluded his presentation on the writer James Baldwin (1924-1987) at Washington University on Friday, February 21. Brown had just finished delivering his participant observations of Baldwin, based on many years of friendship, illustrated with candid photographs.
Much of Brown’s witness to Baldwin the writer and person was centered around the summer of 1973, when he visited the expatriate in the south of France. Baldwin was then a world-famous writer, both lionized and reviled, with a fat publisher’s advance and a staff to manage his living conditions while he worked. The advance was for the novel that would become “If Beale Street Could Talk” and be published the following year by Dial Press.
Baldwin’s fifth novel, “If Beale Street Could Talk” may be his best known work today thanks to the film adaptation by Barry Jenkins released in December 2018. Brown structured his essay about these experiences around a screening of that film at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Brown’s essay, “With James Baldwin at the Welcome Table,” is essential reading for students and fans of Baldwin (or Brown). It was published last year in a special “James Baldwin & American Democracy” edition of The Common Reader (Volume 4, Number 1), a journal of the essay founded and edited by Gerald Early.
Listening to or reading Brown’s experiences with Baldwin, it’s easy to appreciate his temptation for tears. In the summer of 1973, Brown was a young (he turned 30 that July) writer recently celebrated for his first novel, published in 1969 with a title that is not printable in a family newspaper. Baldwin, though no longer at the height of his powers in 1973, was still writing (with difficulty) and finishing the last of his major works. Brown had a seat literally at the table as Baldwin fretted over the strategies he was using in the novel and met some of the people whose names and personal details Baldwin encoded in his novel.
The “Welcome Table” named in the title of Brown’s essay in The Common Reader was an outdoor table at Baldwin’s villa in Saint-Paul de Vence. The seats at the Welcome Table, Brown writes in his essay, “were generally filled with people at dinner time. Some were famous, some were not. Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis visited when he was playing in Nice or nearby. Writer Maya Angelou and singer Nina Simone came. Young artists who worked in the village would often show up for dinner.”
To remember spending intimate time at such a powerful and storied table could wring tears from a memoirist, especially given that Baldwin and all of these bold-face-named guests are no longer with us. At the public event, Brown was visibly pained to recall that lost time. “I wasn’t aware of the things I should have been aware of,” he said. “I never knew I would one day be giving a lecture on him.”
Baldwin was drawn to Brown, the younger writer recalled, in part because Brown was from the South, like Baldwin’s family; Baldwin himself was born and raised – famously, for readers of his immortal essays – in Harlem.
“Jimmy came up in Harlem and had a romantic view of black people from the South, where his dad came from,” Brown said at the public event. Brown grew up in rural Bolton, North Carolina, with a population (today) of 660. “I come from so far back in the woods,” Brown said, “that even country people called me ‘country.’”
Baldwin and Brown also shared – obviously, given that they met in Paris and spent time together in the south of France – an exile from the United States. They were seeking refuge from this country’s violent racism; in 1973, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had all been assassinated within the past 10 years.
“I had to leave the States to save myself,” Brown reports Baldwin telling him when they first sat down together in Paris. “I finally had to leave for good. I loved Medgar. I loved Martin and Malcolm. We all worked together and kept the path together. I’m the last witness—everybody else is dead.”
It is not difficult to see why Brown would say, after remembering these stories for two hours, while faced with enormous, enlarged pictures of his now-dead friend, that he was lucky to get away with not even crying.
It is also clear that Baldwin’s impact on the younger writer (who is now himself 76 years old) was deep and lasting. Brown went on to study, teach and write about African-American folklore, as well as write more fiction (and a screenplay with his other world-famous, now-dead friend, Richard Pryor). “One thing Jimmy always told me,” Brown said at the public event, “was always claim your heritage.”
To read Brown’s essay on Baldwin, visithttps://tinyurl.com/Brown-Baldwin. To purchase a print copy of “James Baldwin & American Democracy,” the print edition of The Common Reader in which that essay appears, email commonreader@wustl.edu.
