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Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin
“I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.” When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin’s brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything—Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer’s last chance to speak at length about his life and work.
The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin’s career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience.
Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin’s life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin’s fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.
“I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.” When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin’s brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything—Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer’s last chance to speak at length about his life and work.
The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin’s career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience.
Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin’s life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin’s fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.
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Soumia
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Daniel Roldan
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z
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“James Baldwin, what a mind you have !! and what a life you have lived !!
there is a quote from Quincy Troupe at the start of the Last Interview eulogizing Baldwin, and i find that it encapsulates my thoughts on him well: “…this profoundly human spirit who altered the course of so many lives with his enormous talent, his deep commitment to justice, and his abiding love for humanity.”
i first encountered James Baldwin when i was 22. it was may, and i was sitting in a park, having just bought a large collection of his non-fiction work. i worked my way through a few of his essays for the first time. i lingered on his descriptions of loving another man, and of being loved in return. i sat there reading passages he wrote about prejudice and cynicism, about injustice and otherness in the fabric of America and systemic issues that never really went away, about his life in Harlem and in America and in France. he just stuck with me, as i sat alone in the sunny grass.
i began venturing into Baldwin’s fiction when i was 23. while i still have much of it to work through, i’m savouring the experience. i am simultaneously inhaling every page, and dawdling to complete his back catalogue. James Baldwin was a man of many words, but he did not mince them. he strung every sentence together with perspective, pragmatism, and passion.
sitting with his words, i have felt such unbridled joy and hope for the future, perhaps as he did. what Troupe described in the aforementioned quote as Baldwin’s “abiding love for humanity.” as i get older, and a thing of jadedness grows in me during this decade of my life, it’s oddly important to me—particularly in these interviews—how much i value said optimism and hope.
when someone asks, “who is the one person in history you would have a conversation with?” – i already know my answer.
some highlights:
• “Terkel: One last question. James Baldwin: who are you, now?
Baldwin: [Long pause] Who, indeed. Well, I may be able to tell you who I am, but I am also discovering who I am not. I want to be an honest man. And I want to be a good writer. I don’t know if one ever gets to be what one wants to be. You just have to play it by ear, and … pray for rain.”
• “Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology, as you put it, because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.”
• “I know that we can be better than we are. That's the sum total of my wisdom in all these years. We can also be infinitely worse, but I know that the world we live in now is not necessarily the best world we can make. I can't be entirely wrong. There're two things we have to do-love each other and raise our children. We have to do that! The alternative, for me, would be suicide…”
• “To be a white American is to have a very peculiar inheritance…”
• “He was not really my father, because I was born out of wedlock, but that's the difference, my father. He did give me something. Don't you see, he taught me how to fight. He taught me how to fight. But it would be better to say he taught me what to fight for. I was only fighting for safety, or for money at first. Then I fought to make you look at me. Because I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.”
• “That's what happened, I don't care who says what. I watched it happen, I know because I watched it happen. And all this, because they want to be white. And why do they want to be white? Because it's the only way to justify the slaughter of the Indians and enslaving the blacks-they’re trapped. And nothing, nothing will spring the trap, nothing. Now thev're really trapped because the world is present. And the world is not white and America is not the symbol of civilization. Neither is England. Neither is France. Something else is happening which will engulf them by and by. You, Quincy, will be here, but I'll be gone. It's the only hope the world has, that the notion of the supremacy of Western hegemony and civilization be contained.”
and my personal favourites:
• “Being a maverick saved my life. What club could I have joined? I had to make peace with a great many things, not the least of which was my intelligence. You don't realize that vou're intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”
• “Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, vou won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all. That's the only advice vou can give anybody. And it's not advice, it's an observation.”
• “There's nothing in me that is not in everybody else, and nothing in everybody else that is not in me…””
Lily M
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MaenadMarti
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About James Baldwin
JAMES BALDWIN (1922–1987) was a novelist, essayist, and activist. He is best known for the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Giovanni’s Room (1956), and the collections Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963). He was an important figure in the civil rights movement, and his books addressing the African-American and gay experiences have influenced generations of writers.
Other books by James Baldwin
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