Poet, Prophet, Prodigy

I cannot afford despair [. . .]
you can't tell the children there is no hope.
— James Baldwin

Let’s begin where it began for us both: a Sunday morning sanctuary in New York City; organists petitioning the Holy Spirit; that lone poet standing over the pulpit, 10 feet tall once the homily begins, prophesying fire. Your stepfather, David, himself a traveling minister, once asked you what seems to me an impossible question: you’d rather write than preach, wouldn’t you? As if the two, for that younger version of you, James—and for so many of us born into this particular, cultural crucible—could ever truly be separated. I now have a much better sense of what he saw back then, in those earliest flashes of your preternatural gift. How your voice, already booming, supersonic, could live a life on the printed page that reached far beyond the bounds of a storefront church uptown, or any sanctuary in the world, really. In your adventures as an essayist, novelist, poet, you would reach millions, and ultimately engage in your own form of lifelong ministry. Albeit, by another name.

As a boy, you attended the world-famous Abyssinian Baptist Church with your family on 138th Street, not far from the block that raised you. Though you were, in your own words, “the only child in the house” for many years, eventually you became one of 10: eight of your younger brothers and sisters—Barbara, George, Ruth, Wilmer, David, Gloria, Elizabeth, and Paula Maria—born from the union of David and your mother, Berdis. And your older brother, Samuel, from David’s previous marriage, who would eventually leave the house in protest, vowing not to return until his father’s death. It was a promise he kept.

In 1937, at age 13, you also set out on your own in a sense, moving one avenue over from Abyssinian to a church on Lenox known by a few different names in its lifetime: Mount Calvary of the Pentecostal Faith Church and Pentecostal Faith Church of All Nations among them. There, you were introduced to Rosa Artimus Horn, or Mother Horn, as she was often hailed (you learn early on that multiplicity, as well as an unending commitment to transformation, are indelible features of these spaces). Upon meeting you, she too asks a question, not unlike your stepfather’s, about where you belonged, to whom, and as part of what tradition: whose little boy are you? With a vulnerability that defies description, you answered: “Yours.”

You eventually moved from Mount Calvary to Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. From the ages of 14 to 17, you found your voice as a Black church prodigy within its four walls: a teenage preacher whose reputation blossomed throughout the city, eventually outpacing that of your stepfather. To my knowledge, there are no remaining physical traces of those sermons, no records or tapes that survived into the present day on which we might hear the earliest echoes of a voice many of us can now conjure from memory. Much like the public speeches for which you would come to be known across the world, you did not write them down. There were notes at times, gestures toward a general idea of where you might land at the end of a speech or a public lecture, but vast swaths of the addresses themselves, the living text experienced in those rooms, were pulled from the air in the moment of delivery. These were collective compositions of a certain kind, crafted in tandem with an audience enraptured—totally original moments of oratory, never to be replicated outside the limits of a listener’s imagination.

That you honed this approach, this electric style, during your life as a teenage preacher is fitting. Scholars have devoted hundreds of pages to the religious content and tenor of your writings: your repeated references to the imagery of the King James Bible, how the flow of your essays so often echo the homiletic form. But I’m nonetheless struck by the distinctions you drew between the two, your sense that the difference between your prose and your preaching, your essays and your sermons, the church that raised you and the bright cathedrals you sought to build with language, was largely a matter of sincerity. In The Fire Next Time (1963), you wrote:

Being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked. I knew the other ministers and knew the quality of their lives [. . .] I knew how to work on a congregation until the last dime was surrendered—it was not very hard to do—and I knew where the money for “the Lord's work” went. I knew, though I did not wish to know it, that I had no respect for the people with whom I worked. I could not have said it then, but I also knew that if I continued I would soon have no respect for myself.

In the end, you refused to remain in the pulpit out of a sense of devotion: to the people in the pews listening, and to both your present and future self. What did you leave behind in those sanctuaries? What remained? What inner metamorphoses took place in those pulpits—and inside that dramatic temporality, to borrow your framing—where the honest questions you held most dear did not seem admissible, pertinent, possible?

You would later say, in a 1974 interview with Christian de Bartillat, that you “had no childhood.” That you were “born dead and [. . .] knew it.” Poring through the extant materials of your early education—bearing witness, if only on paper, to the social worlds of your mentors and teachers during those first years of formal schooling—I can’t help but see signs of life everywhere. I hear the insights of your French teacher and literary advisor, the New Negro Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. And the praise of your elementary school principal, Gertrude Ayer, who spoke not only of the elegant letters your mother once sent to P.S. 24, saying, “she had the gift of using language beautifully,” but also that you, too, wrote “like an angel, albeit an avenging one.” I find that you were editor of your middle school periodical, The Douglass Pilot. And that you later wrote, across genre, for Magpie, the literary magazine at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. There, the closing stanzas of one your poems, “Black Girl Shouting,” stops me in my reading:

None will guess 
The way he died 

Turned your heart
To quivering mud
While your lover’s
Soft, red blood

Stained the scowling
Outraged tree.
Angels come
To cut him free!

Spending time with these lines, among others, from the sprawling archive of your literary life, I begin to understand your chosen narrative of emergence, ex nihilo, from the boundless void of those early years in Harlem. What is on the surface a poem about lynching—a character study of a young woman who loses her beloved to that brutal institution—is also a mirror reflecting the image systems of your religious upbringing. In the body of the slain Black man depicted here, we bear witness to a picture of the crucified Christ, an adjacency that appears throughout Black letters in the work of writers like Angelina Weld Grimké, Claude McKay, and the radical Black theologian James Cone, who writes of the cross as a lynching tree.

Your childhood was not marked by innocence, James, but by relentless introspection: a searching of the soul for faults and inconsistencies, the stakes of which were eternal life, or else the inferno. All this within the material context of the first decades of the American 20th century, and the ubiquitous, state-sanctioned violence against Black people that accompanied them. In reading your adult writing about this period in your life, I sense a pain that never quite subsided. Remnants of those battles with your stepfather, his judgements of you and your proper place in the world, a deeper, inner odyssey, only hinted at in your poetry, in which you wrestled with the harrowing figurations of a belief system that once served as the very ground of your metaphysics, and all you held dear.

But this was not all you had to say on the matter of childhood. Your later writing on the subject, in fact, was filled with messages of persistence: essays, poems, and works of fiction meant to bequeath a measure of your courage—especially in moments of looming or recent catastrophe—to the next generation. There was your famous 1963 address, “A Talk to Teachers,” in which you outlined your pedagogical vision for the country, one complete with an apocalyptic warning that echoes many of your prophetic forbears across the ages: “if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way—and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.”

Then there was “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?,” published in the New York Times over a decade and a half later, in 1979, in which you wrote the following in defense of the linguistic life-worlds that honed your genius from the beginning: “A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance [. . .] Black people have lost too many black children that way.”

In your sole work of children’s literature, Little Man, Little Man (1976), you sought to vividly reflect that sustenance, that enduring joy, found in certain moments of Black social life. It was your nephew, Tejan, who inspired you to craft this new world from the shared materials of your life and his own: “Uncle Jimmy! When you gonna write a book about MeeeeEEE!?” he recalls asking you, in his foreword to the book’s 2018 reissue. Little Man felt like a “book of code” that he could carry with him over the years, a story within a story, a symbol of how much he was loved and seen. A gift you thought to share not only with him, but with the countless children who would likewise cherish such a wonderful intervention, and reminder.

The book tells the story of a young man named TJ, his kin WT and Blinky, and their series of individual and collective misadventures in 1970s Harlem. Your collaborator, Yoran Cazac, provided illustrations throughout that lifted the reading experience into the realm of the truly surreal. We see dazzling depictions of characters like TJ’s mother, who not only has “skin the color of peaches and brown sugar,” but appears to have seven arms, moving at top speed, as she styles her glorious afro. Or Miss Lee, whom TJ sometimes sees “smiling to herself inside,” and who walks by a jar of honey the size of an apartment building. In TJ’s Harlem, the Harlem you built for him line by line, the ordinary and the mystical collide, and we are all transported elsewhere. Somewhere true, enduring, beyond the reach of time and mortal decay.

From that place beyond place, you speak to us even still. Guiding us to a new vista just beyond the limits of our present dreaming. In a passage from Nothing Personal (1964), you make the vision plain:

Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
            The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

The fire we dreamt of was no portent of punishment, brother, but a beacon. May your light—the million, brilliant aurorae in your world-encompassing eyes—never dim.