Table of Contents
Preface
In 1963 my aunt, Orilla Winfield, sent me a copy of The Fire Next Time for my thirteenth birthday. I read it in the library of Headington School for Girls in Oxford, England, where I had been exiled for a year from my life as a teenage American girl who liked rock and roll and mini skirts, who ratted her hair and secretly smoked cigarettes. I was just beginning to learn that there were worlds very different from the one I had inhabited for the first thirteen years of my life. Headingtonwith its gray-blue uniforms, its daily prayers, its kidney pie, and its extremely studious young womenseemed like another planet from the American junior high school I had attended just a few months previously. The day I read The Fire Next Time, however, I got my first glimpse of yet another world, one that was also American, but a long way from the America I knew, as one of those white innocents at home that Baldwin so adeptly describes and addresses.
I have never been able to boast a photographic memory or even a particularly good memory, but I vividly remember reading James Baldwin for the first timeI remember where I was sitting in the Headington Library, what the room looked like, and how the book made me feel. I remember being unable to put it down, drawn in by Baldwins tone of moral seriousness (rather than moralism) and by the intimacy of his voicea voice that made me feel he was letting me in on his life, as he was, somehow, letting me in on my life as well.
My aunt, Orilla, was a strong advocate for racial justice and an avid reader, so it was not surprising that she had sent me The Fire Next Time. But I didnt know, then, of her friendship with Jimmy Baldwin. I soon learned that she was the white school teacher whom Baldwin first mentioned in Notes of a Native Son, and that, periodically, they still kept in touch. However, it was not until Baldwin published The Devil Finds Work in 1976 that I really started to appreciate the significance of that relationship, not only for James Baldwin and my aunt, but for the legacy it left me and my family, a legacy of hope that we can cross barriers of race, class, and culture, that we can share a vision of the way things should be, that we can be friends, comrades, and lovers. In the Devil Finds Work, Jimmy writes:
It is certainly partly because of her, who arrived in my terrifying life so soon, that I never really managed to hate white peoplethough, God knows, I have often wished to murder more than one or two. But Bill Millerher name was Orilla, we called her Billwas not white for me in the way, for example, that Joan Crawford was white, in the way that the landlords and the storekeepers and the cops and most of my teachers were white. She didnt baffle me that way and she never frightened me and she never lied to me. I never felt her pity, either, in spite of the fact that she sometimes brought us old clothes (because she worried about our winters) and cod-liver oil, especially for me, because I seemed destined, then, to be carried away by whooping cough.
Yet it is another description from the Devil Finds Work that has stood out for me, even more than the one above, when I think about my aunt as a political activist and young school teacher: Bill took us on a picnic downtown once, and there was supposed to be ice cream waiting for us at a police station. The cops didnt like Bill, didnt like the fact that we were colored kids, and didnt want to give up the ice cream. I dont remember anything Bill said. I just remember her face as she stared at the cop, clearly intending to stand there until the ice cream all over the world melted or until the earths surface froze, and she got us our ice cream saying, Thank you, I remember as we left. I can well imagine that scene and my aunts expression (she could be quite undaunted), and it makes me smile. She was a woman whose values and principles always came through in her actions.
Standoffs with the police were not something Aunt Orilla talked about with me, although having been a member of the American Communist Party in the 1930s, like many idealistic people of the time, I imagine there was more than one. What she did talk about, when I asked her about the young James Baldwin, was his brilliance, the dignity of his family, and their extreme poverty. My aunt was only twelve years older than Jimmy Baldwin, making her about twenty-four when they first met. She grew up in a small farming community in Illinois, then had gone to Antioch College (until her family lost their home and land in the Great Depression), and finally to Teachers College in New York City. She had been hired by the WPA Theater Projects Educational Division to put on plays in the schools and was assigned to Harlem on her request, because it was in walking distance from her apartment. The school she worked at was not only racially segregated (99 percent black, except for a couple of very blond Finns), but after the fourth or fifth grade, the classes were segregated by gender as well. The children she worked with were all boys, virtually all black, and all hungry. The children were fed at school. Orilla said, It was the worst poverty I ever saw. I dont think people today have any idea of the poverty of that time in the cities.
James Baldwins classroom teacher welcomed help, was very supportive of special programs, and allowed Orilla to take Jimmy out of the class as much as she wanted because he already knew everything the class was doing. Jimmy became my aunts assistant director, and they spent a lot of time together. She said, it was a real break for me. He was a remarkable child. She recalled how they were both enthusiastically reading A Tale of Two Cities, and they would have these long conversations up in the attic of the school about Dickens, which she enjoyed more than the conversations about Dickens [she] had with adults. She felt that Jimmy should be seeing more theater and more of the world and asked permission to interview his parents. Thus began the relationship between my aunt and the Baldwin family. The relationship also included my aunts husband, Evan Winfield, and her sister, Henrietta Miller, both of whom lived with her. They lived very close to the Baldwin apartment, within walking distance, and my two aunts and my uncle began to include Jimmy on their outings, like a little brother. Orilla described him as a very sweet child ... always a pleasure to have around. The friendship continued for about two years. After James joined the church, Orilla and Evan saw less of him and then my uncle, a Merchant Marine, was stationed in Puerto Rico during the war, and they left New York.
Years later they would have a few reunions. One was in the mid-sixties when Baldwin was traveling with CORE in southern California. It was the first time Orilla heard him speak in public, and she was utterly surprised. She described him as an absolutely stunning and dramatic speaker. He had the whole audience in the palm of his hand. After the speech, and before he was hustled off to a Hollywood fundraising party, they only had time for a brief exchange. She described him, then, as the most exhausted looking person Ive ever seen. But to Orilla he was still that sweet boy, now a sweet man. Orilla heard from James Baldwin at occasional intervals. He was not an easy person to keep in contact with, but both Orilla and her sister, Henrietta, corresponded more regularly with Berdis Baldwin, Jamess mother.
My aunt has been gone for ten years now; she died four years after Jimmy, but the last time I saw her, about a month before her death from cancer, she asked me to read a letter to her from Berdis that had just arrived in the mail. This study of James Baldwins later fiction is dedicated to my aunt, Henrietta Miller Tschannen, who is still with us, to the memory of my aunt, Orilla Miller Winfield, and to their children, my cousins: Steve, Ken, Tom, Mary, and Peggy. It is also dedicated to the memory of my mother, Margaret Miller Wasserman, to my father, Robert Wasserman, to my husband, Randall W. Scott, and to my children, Sara, Ziba, and Margaret.
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