Because it was yesterday. Bleeding into today.
ESQ: How can we get the black people to cool it?JAMES BALDWIN: It is not for us to cool it.ESQ: But aren’t you the ones who are getting hurt the most?JAMES BALDWIN: No, we are only the ones who are dying fastest.
[from Esquire]
Related, and later, and mostly about writing.
“I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me. My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed.”
[from The Paris Review]
The Art of Fiction No. 78
James Baldwin in Hyde Park, London. Photograph by Allan Warren, The Paris Review No. 129.
This interview was conducted in the two places dearest to James Baldwin’s struggle as a writer. We met first in Paris, where he spent the first nine years of a burgeoning career and wro..…
This interview was conducted in the two places dearest to James Baldwin’s struggle as a writer. We met first in Paris, where he spent the first nine years of a burgeoning career and wro..…