But Charlottesville had rattled me, shaken me up, and now his essays were beckoning. Most of my life I had been a Buckley-Kirk type of conservative, and so these facts were not liable to make me want to read Baldwin’s work. Buckley, in commenting on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, had written that he could never understand Baldwin’s saying that in Harlem throwing your garbage out of your window was an act of protest. It said, it is time.Īll I remembered about Baldwin was that he had written a novel about being a boy preacher, that he was gay (a lesbian friend of mine in graduate school told me once she had seen “Jimmy” in Provincetown hand-in-hand with his lover), and that William F.
The lurid tiki-torch-lit images of the rally were not blazing in my mind that night in a French-language bookstore, but the Library of America edition of James Baldwin’s Collected Essays somehow spoke to me anyway. I had always wanted to read James Baldwin, but never got around to it until I was on vacation the week after Christmas in a bitterly cold Quebec City in 2017, a few months after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
0 kommentar(er)
