James Baldwin and The Cross of Redemption

(Editor Randall) Kenan means for The Cross of Redemption to be a companion to the Library of America edition of Baldwin’s Collected Essays (1998). The fifty-four previously uncollected pieces range from Baldwin’s earliest book reviews, published in The New Leader in 1947, to his denunciations of the Christian right, written not long before his death. Included are speeches from rallies in the 1960s; open letters, such as his fiery letter in 1970 to Angela Davis when she was incarcerated, in which he declared that “the enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America”; and a memoir of playwright Lorraine Hansberry when she, too, confronted Robert Kennedy and asked him for a “moral commitment” to combat racism.

...Not all of the work in The Cross of Redemption is political: we get considered essays on jazz (“This music begins on the auction block”), on the uses of the blues, on the debate about Black English, on mass culture as a reflection of American chaos, on the untruthfulness of American plays and the consequent “nerve-wracking busyness” of the American stage—which spent huge amounts of skill and energy attempting to “justify our fantasies, thus locking us within them.” There are some forewords and afterwords to books about black America, profiles of the Patterson-Liston fight in Chicago in 1963 and of Sidney Poitier in 1968 as well as a spirited defense of Lorraine Hansberry’s best-known work, A Raisin in the Sun. In the pieces on culture, The Cross of Redemption becomes an absorbing portrait of Baldwin’s times—and of him.

That's all from Darryl Pinckney's New York Review of Books essay on The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin, edited and with an introduction by Randall Kenan. In the wake of book's recent publication, my to-read pile totters even more threateningly. Baldwin may very well have my nomination for the greatest essay writer in the English language of the twentieth century. He takes a strong stance, and then digs into the nuance that is implicit in it, rather than mistaking nuance for wavering equivocations that slide squeamishly into tidy conclusions. And--let it not be taken for granted--what he writes about is interesting. He doesn't just write well; he has content. It reminds me of the advice that I believe Seymour Glass gave his brother Buddy in response to one of Buddy's stories (which in turn is relayed in one of J.D. Salinger's stories, Seymour: An Introduction): "Are you a writer, or just a writer of rattling good stories? I mind getting a rattling good story from you. I want your loot." In his essays, Baldwin is not merely rattling. He has the loot. And though there may be moments where his work loosens and fails to quite cohere, he is fearless.

In related news: see my video review of Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son here. Other resources on Baldwin (besides his own work, of course) includes the PBS "American Masters" segment on him and his 1984 interview on the art of fiction in The Paris Review. See an excerpt of The Cross of Redemption--Baldwin writing about why he stopped hating Shakespeare--over at NPR's "Morning Edition."

Image Credit: Black Looks.