James Baldwin on Love and Living with Light

Written by: Charlotte Ungar 

So often when considering the penetrating prose of James Baldwin do we forget his legacy of love. In part, this omission is because love has never been convenient for anyone. It is also common, as readers, for many of us to dismiss the selectivity of our memories, determined by our innermost reservations. 

Baldwin understood that the world lacked love, and in fact, he was certain of the processes to its deprivation. In an interview with Director Terence Dixon from the documentary Meeting the Man, Baldwin states, “If everyone had been in love they’d treat their children differently. They’d treat each other differently.“ 

Passionately stirred, Baldwin’s statement is derived from Dixon’s generous assumption that readers of his novel, Another Country, can identify with the characters on the basis of their struggles with love alone. Baldwin, believing radical-self accountability to be the gateway to love, disagreed that readers might reach that basis with ease. 

A starting point, however, in surrendering oneself to self-reflection and selfless relationships, begins with reading. In an interview with Life Magazine in 1963, a fervent Baldwin states, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive.”

After re-reading career-defining works like Go Tell it on the Mountain, it is far easier to become enwrapped in the devastation of Baldwin’s Harlem than it is to cherish the necessity of Baldwin’s suffering for the genuine self-development of his characters. There is the evolution of young John, who feels a threatening severance from his most intimate communities as well as powerlessness to the predeterminations of the white world. While lying on the threshing floor at the very end of the novel, the floor of the Temple of the Fire Baptized, John recognizes that he is at the mercy of a foreign presence. This presence, sensing the vulnerability inside John, possesses him, until John’s soul undergoes an irreversible refinement. Out of his alienated stupor, John emerges more assured in his faith and himself than ever before.

Baldwin’s choice to name the final section of the novel “The Threshing Floor” indicates a larger plea for endurance, given that to thresh entails a separation of a grain from a plant, and without machinery, the grain must be tediously separated from the chaff by hand. 

This separation continues in the form of a frightening judgement on the humbling floor of John’s church in which John emerges rich with faith and admiration for his community. Tearful, John’s soul is refined as he has absorbed the darkness that once plagued his life. 

Like John’s transformation, many readers may emphasize with the trials of radical self change, however, very few of us can comprehend how to bear the then ushered in light from such a change. John himself never clearly knew what to do with light; we only know that living, as Baldwin teaches us, is not about obsessing over pain, but rather understanding how to exist authentically and with newfound light.