In Honor of James Baldwin

My ode to a literary legend who would have turned 98 years old.

I am late, I know. 

The prince’s birthday was yesterday and I am posting this now, at this very late hour. 

Now, after a long and harrowing experience of coming into maturity, of growing, of embarking on that concept we call “getting raised.” 

This path continues. It never stops.

“Remember once you have left this house that you were raised.” 

Thus said my parents, and other older giants in the African-American community who had, it seemed, some faint memory of lived trauma and pain from ages past, a past I’d just missed, just like that.

A pain filled with slavery and lynchings and beatings for something they did not choose to have, something they did not choose to be. A simple occurrence in Nature, and though many could not see it then, a reflection of Her glory.  

But it was not just pain that they carried. Even in their pain, they still sang their songs, they still had their joy. And in case you didn’t know, joy and making love are the same things. They both suggest an indefatigable gratitude for the simple fact of being alive.

“Lift every voice and sing,” they sang, at my 1st grade graduation. “Till Earth and Heaven Ring, Ring with the Harmonies of Liberty!”

I remember hearing a beautiful choir sing those words. This is the song they chose as their clarion call. I was in this dress that was all white. I think I had red and brown glasses, recently acquired wireframes on my newly near-sighted eyes. I was marked at an early age, destined to be a nerd in search of wisdom. 

But I would soon realize there was something cool about being this nerd. I could start to understand adults on some level. I could see the wisdom in their folk traditions and appreciate them.

This was a school where I’d learned poetry and music, where I  first felt the power and might of Harmony.

And of the strong and resilient Harlem Renaissance Lumineers.

James Baldwin was one of those guys.

I mean, what a feat, what a spiritual triumph.

Throughout all that pain and suffering, the ancestors had also felt spiritual triumph.

And that’s what I remember graduation feeling like, like the attendees at Langston Hughes Elementary School were imitating their baptist Sunday morning traditions, where folk would be baptized while wearing all-white, a sign of having come into a higher existence. 

That is what education meant to these folks. That’s what Freedom meant. It meant coming into a higher existence.

And the vision that James Baldwin glimpsed and tried to convey to us? 

It is an education. It is your birthright: Every single of you who has ever tried, who has ever yearned, to be free. 

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But listen, freedom is hard to obtain folks. 

Because what is truly meant by freedom is a certain kind of maturity. 

Freedom isn’t all daffodils and sunshine. 

It’s not the ability to consume, endlessly, till your dying day. 

Maybe the reason we think it is is because for so long, as a species, we had almost nothing. 

We had such scarcity and that traumatized us into believing that we have to hoard and consume fast enough to not die. 

Like if we consume more, maybe we’ll be able to escape death?

Maybe we will finally achieve that Promethean vision of blissful immortality?

No, this is impossible. 

This is an impossible vision. And we cannot face this fact. We refuse to. 

We don’t realize that death is just the other side of the coin that is Life. Two parts to a whole. 

One could not exist without the other. And this realization should enable us to feel every moment as if it contained the most beautiful exquisiteness, because it does. 

It should empower us to be so grateful. 

That’s what that Disney movie Soul was trying to teach us. 

(There’s a reason why it was called Soul. Come on.)

But we don’t know this.

So we squander our time.

And we starve ourselves into feasting on the ego trips we feel whenever we tear others down, not knowing that we actually have everything we’ll ever need.

I’ve done this, you’ve done this, we’ve all done this. 

 If only we had just a tiny bit of courage.

And once you find it, you will have found your freedom. 

Freedom presupposes a certain kind of self awareness, and a striving for a certain kind of maturity that can be excruciatingly difficult to bear. 

It is a maturity that comes with suffering,

That’s what Freedom is; that’s what it requires: a capacity to bear your suffering. 

And in fact this is what Christianity is really about, deep down. And it’s also what Buddhism is about. So many of our wisdom traditions are trying to teach us to develop the capacity to bear our own suffering, and to bear it gracefully.

And so many of the essays that James Baldwin wrote tried to teach us how to do just that. 

And for that, I am deeply grateful.