Kim McLarin - James Baldwins Another Country

James Baldwins

Another Country:

BOOKMARKED

KIM MCLARIN

New York, NY

Copyright 2021 by Kim McLarin.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:

Ig Publishing

Box 2547

New York, NY 10163

www.igpub.com

ISBN: 978-1-63246-122-3

For Ray.

For once in my life.

PART ONE

Why I Write

The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. Youre bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face.James Baldwin

I USED TO SAY THERE were no baby pictures of me, the forgotten middle child. This was a statement that felt true even if what it impliedabundant photos of my mothers four other childrenwas not. There arent many pictures in general, just a few group shots of us three oldest girls, followed by more frequent and casual snaps of the late-stage, exciting twins. The reasons for this paucity of photosmy mothers full hands, my parents deteriorating marriage, the high price of filmare less revealing than the way my brain packaged the situation. I told myself a story of invisibility and outsiderness, portrait of the artist as an outcast, right from the start. Writers are full of themselves because thats the first thing we eat.

At least I can say I came by it honest. My mother, who has rarely met a person she was not afraid would mistreat her if given the chance, is an outsider of the first order. The only years she really felt like she belonged were her earliest ones, spent on her grandfathers Mississippi farm. For years my mother mentioned these days and for years it failed to occur to me what it meant for a Black man to own land in the Delta in 1940. Not until I read a story in The Atlantic about the theft of Black land did it occur to me to wonder.

Turns out my great grandfather was not alone. After the Civil War thousands of freedmen, driven by what W. E. B. DuBois called land hunger and encouraged by his Atlanta-compromising peer (and sometimes nemesis) Booker T. Washington, grabbed up every acre they could beg, buy, or barter from white landowners across the south. My mother remembers her grandfathers farm as a self-sufficient (and completely colored) paradise, blessed with fish-stocked ponds and pecan trees and enough freshly grown vegetables and egg-laying chickens to feed everyone. Paradise was disrupted when she was sent to live with her father and his schoolteacher wife. My mother missed the farm, but her new stepmother was kind and childless, which meant no half-siblings against which to compete. She taught my mother to read and write and value education. The only thing they cant take away is whats in your head.

The rest of my mothers childhood was far less golden, but she remembered her stepmothers advice. At eighteen she got on a bus and headed east to knock on the door of Knoxville College, a small HBCU. They took her in, put her in a room with two other girls, and gave her a job in the cafeteria to pay her tuition. In the summers she was sent north to work for white people. Thats where she met my father, a Navy seaman. She left college, a decision she would deeply regret. Five children later, she found herself divorced, back home in Memphis with five little mouths to feed and five little bodies to shelter and five little hearts to attend. It was a Herculean task, one she managed heroically. We never starved and we were never homeless. Our hearts, however, were on their own.

Are writers born?Are writers made?

In On Becoming a Novelist, the writer-teacher John Gardner suggests what the writer probably needs most is an almost demonic compulsiveness. A psychological wound is helpful, if it can be kept in partial control, to keep the novelist driven. Some childhood accident

Does anyone survive childhood without a psychic wound? Certainly, my own bruises did not match Gardners in intensity: he accidentally ran over and killed his brother while driving a tractor. One can only imagine the ensuing trauma. But so many things can wound a child. We, for example, were impoverished. Poverty is like water: it takes the form of its container. The poverty of my husbands familywhite, Catholic, two-parent, and northernwas in some ways similar to (stitched-together meals, the dodging of creditors) and in some ways different from (crowded apartment versus crowded house, parents who had not gone to college versus a mother who had) our Black, Pentecostal, one-parent, southern existence. For a child, the hardships of our kind of poverty (cheap meals, heating water on the stove because the water heater is broken, taking the bus because the car needs fixing, rising at four in the morning for a newspaper route) are not harmful. It is the humiliation which wounds, especially when that humiliation becomes attached to some intrinsic part of oneself.

Growing up I knew nothing about Daniel Patrick Moynihan or his influential 1965 report The Negro Family but it was pretty clear to me that the reason we were poor was because we were Black. Sure, our father not living with us didnt help things, but my uncle lived with his family and they were still poor. So were the folks up the street and so was my maiden Aunt Pearl and so were a lot of other people, all of them Black. This was not true, as far as I knew, of any of the white kids with whom I went to school and it certainly wasnt true of any of the white folks on television. My husband, offhand, mentions identifying with the poverty of The Waltons. I look at him in surprise: The Waltons were poor? Did you see the size of that house?

Standing in long, hot lines outside a government office with my mother to get food stamps was not hard but was shameful. Temporary layoffs! Tearing food stamps as colorful as comics out of a book at the checkout line was not hard but was humiliating, as was being called to the front of the room every Monday morning to pick up your bright, yellow, free-lunch card. Easy credit ripoffs! Shopping at Goodwill was only humiliating if someone saw you going in or coming out. Scratching and surviving. My mother refused to sign up for actual welfare (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and took the food stamps only reluctantly, but still her humiliation at struggling was palpable, and infectious. Hanging in and jiving! In the documentary The Pieces I Am, Toni Morrison, who grew up in Lorrain, Ohio, said casually, We were poor when poverty was not shameful, and I sat in the theater thunderstruck. Such a possibility had never occurred to me.

Good times.

All of which is to say books were not so much an escapethere was no escapeas an expansion. They showed me other possibilities for living, even if all of those possibilities belonged to white people. My mother filled the bookshelves in the living room with books, including a dazzling collection of Readers Digest Condensed Books. Dazzling, anyway, to me. I worked my way through the set, staying up all night in summers reading boiled-down versions of novels like Hotel.

It is tempting for me to say these books featured no Black people, but thats probably not true. Probably they were sprinkled with Black characters, dusted with two-dimensional stock figures trotted out to provide some color or make some point, directly or indirectly, about the white protagonist. As Morrison showed us, Black characters haunt the imagination of white American writers, from Poe to Hemingway and beyond. A few years ago, I began keeping a list of short stories by white writers in which Black characters pop up, stories which are routinely assigned in writing programs: Rock Springs by Richard Ford, Silver Water, by Amy Bloom, others I cannot now recall. These characters serve as either as Magical Negro or Looming Threat. And once you start looking, theyre everywhere.