Fifth avenue uptown: James Baldwin, 1924-1987 - poem

African American Review, Winter, 1993 by Gary Smith

1

Jimmy is dead; his body asleep; his mind at rest. So, too, the bright, snow-laden streets of Harlem, where cabdrivers doze inside mustard-colored taxis, where pedestrians walk beside the snarl of midday traffic, where the amazed-balloon faces of Negro children press against the windows of tenement buildings. The monotonous abundance of skyscrapers cultivated like fields of evergreen trees; their windows fired with Christmas lights and the triangular icons of Christianity; the Christchild coiled inside Mary's womb and three wisemen trudging toward Bethlehem.

2

Our Black Jeremiah, Prophet of Doom, you were our oldest ancestor, the jagged voice of the Old Testament gospel. Your popped eyes, dwarfed body, and scarred nose spoke of an ancestral past, not an expectant future. You bore the legacy of the New Negroes who taught us why caged birds sing, why style mattered more than content, and why elegance wore its own wardrobe. You were a witness for the speechless multitude, the unrepentant converts, the lost tribes of Scythians, Babylonians, and Medes.

3

Wordsmith, maker of sentences, you were Henry James's godson. Expatriate and homeboy, Parisian and Harlemite, your gapped-tooth smile and doleful eyes were tropes of identity, etchings of character. You complicated the Negro; he was, as you were, America's abiding past: indigene, cylindrical, and deeply rooted. Thus, the rapes, lynchings, and castrations that engorged your imagination were more than violations of civil law or democratic process; they were corruptions of the human spirit: self-identity that feasts upon its distortions.

4

Your quarrels with Richard Wright were like those you had had with your father. He, too, was a Nigger: thrifty and ingrown, a lustful man who tossed his children like sacraments to his God's wrath; an Old Testament believer, spiteful and cunningly silent, yet extravagant with his own pitted griefs; a praying saint whose prayers rocked the pew where you once sat, rooted in your non-belief. And when, at last, you were reconciled, his dark lips fastened upon your closed mouth and his body contorted in a rough embrace, you bore him the child he had conceived.

5

France was your wife and concubine, a willing mistress whose heart you won; the one love you wore like an heirloom: her cat eyes black with love and consumption, a family secret worn thumb-smooth with pleasure. She was your Old and New Worlds, the white whore who sanctified your art and dressed your griefs with kisses. In her parlor, you first learned to write; she was the anvil and spark of your passion, the radical love you sought but did not find in the country you forsook but never disowned.

6

You wore friendship like diamond-encrusted cufflinks. Gems, idle and purposeless, fastened by their remarkable colors: Styron, Belafonte, Mailer, Makolm, and Vaughn. Lives that reflected an aristocracy poverty fed with fish and loaves hidden within the pockets of its garments. Artists whose emergent songs were bred in the subsoil of America's democracy. Solitary men, as brilliant as they were wanton, and women from whose throats issued songs of love that could move the rock of ages.

7

Your last works bore the promise of fame: titles, pretty and bluesborn, ruffled with fluted ribbons pinned at their throats.

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

        If Beale Street Could Talk
        Just Above My Head

You regarded each as sovereign, self-contained, and innocent. They spoke of possibility and pain: infants suckled upon the whims of an expectant audience devoted to you and indulgent of your faults; critics who praised what they chose not to see.

8

You counted your friends among the poor, children whose lives sprung open like tulips: the forsaken, voiceless ones whose plaintive murmurs are drowned within the rabble of America's democracy, whose heroism hardly matters since the lives they save are their own. You valued those whose lives meant less: a tough reflexive love, hard-won but sturdy, and fashioned after your example. You crafted your life from its cradle and wore its poverty like a vested suit.

9

Saving your self, you learned not to hate. Once, the boy-preacher whose sermons brought passion to Christ's ordeal: Calvary and Mary's grief-soaked linen, Daniel's hon-infested den, and Jonah's whale, pregnant with misgivings. And, again, the journeyman writer whose essays cut as quickly as the hawk's tooth. For you, complacency was the enemy, the thronged ignorance of Sunday picnickers who would as soon watch a lynching as they would the coupling of love.

10

Your legacy outlives its birth: words spent and dabbled with silence; books, brittle and sunspotted, unsettled upon the podium. You wanted to be known as a Witness: a writer who had washed his feet in the dust of salvation. But your gift was innocence: the trust each child shapes with surprise as the carousel turns. Their lives renewed by a heart that remembers only the next beat; their beliefs as contiguous as the sound of painted, wooden horses in flight.