The Brilliance in James Baldwin’s Letters
9 min read
“My dear Mr. Meeropol,” the correspondence begins. “Your letter is completely unanswerable because it drags up out of darkness, and confirms, so much.” It was the fall of 1974, and the accolades for If Beale Street Could Talk—his novel depicting a love story interrupted by incarceration—still wreathed all of James Baldwin’s moves. For the moment, he was one of the most famous writers in America. Yet, in the middle of it all, Baldwin took the time to respond to his high-school English teacher Abel Meeropol, an author in his own right who, under the pen name Lewis Allan, wrote the poem “Strange Fruit,” later recorded by Billie Holiday.
Meeropol had reached out to his former student, the “small boy with big eyes,” to reminisce on their time in the classroom. His letter recalled that during one exercise, Baldwin had decided to write a winter scene by describing “the houses in their little white overcoats,” a delightful detail that presaged a career full of delightful details. In the humblest possible manner, Meeropol also shared his own work, including his titanic poem, which had by that time become the Black American protest song.
Baldwin proceeded to answer the missive that he had called unanswerable. “I don’t remember what you remember,” he wrote, “but if I wrote the line which you remember, then I must have trusted you.” He continued, “I hope you’ll write me again, and I promise to answer.”
Having read through dozens of Baldwin’s letters, which are mostly housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, I know that this kind of promise was not an idle one for Baldwin. The archive is full of his exchanges with celebrities, activists, fans, and fellow literati. Alongside The Fire Next Time, they form an epistolary canon that is, in the main, much less well known than his essays, novels, and plays. But on the occasion of what would have been Baldwin’s 100th birthday, consider that letters were actually the form where his light shone brightest. Baldwin’s correspondence showcases that which still makes him a special read today: a belief in the power of human connection to change the world.
Many letters to Baldwin begin with the same salutation: “Dear Jimmy.” He was approachable—both close friends and new acquaintances used the intimate greeting—even as he prompted a deep sense of respect. Those who’d never written to him before nonetheless felt a certain familiarity, while those who regularly wrote to him remained eager for his approval and love.
This duality is evident in letters from the author Alex Haley, then best known for his The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Haley and Baldwin struck up a close correspondence in the late 1960s, one in which Haley often pressed Baldwin to allow him the honor of becoming Baldwin’s biographer; Baldwin tried to gently dissuade Haley from the endeavor. The two also tried to make plans to adapt Haley’s work on Malcolm X for the stage. One gets the sense in their letters that Haley tried hard to impress his friend. During one meeting, Baldwin complimented Haley’s luggage, so Haley had a set sent to him. (It’s not clear whether Baldwin received the set; Haley acquired the proper address from Baldwin’s assistant, and yet the packages were returned to their sender, without the luggage.)
Haley also felt compelled to share with Baldwin the research that would lead to his most famous work, Roots. “Dear Jimmy,” Haley wrote in 1967. “I went through over 1100 itineraries of slave ships, and I found her, unquestionably—the ship that brought over my forebear Kunta Kinte.” Although Haley would go on to invent much of the purported history presented in Roots, his earnest excitement—and the fact that he’d wanted to share the moment with Baldwin—is a small treasure of the archive.
There are other treats as well. Baldwin often invited his friends, including Haley, to visit during his frequent sojourns in Istanbul. One such guest was the actor Marlon Brando, who had been one of Baldwin’s dearest companions since their college days. Brando came on “a mission which was unclear,” according to Baldwin’s biographer David Leeming, one that saw him hounded by much publicity. Brando abruptly traveled back to the States, leaving behind only a note dashed off on hotel letterhead. “Dear Jim, just had to split,” he wrote. “The press are like flies in the outhouse.”
James Baldwin, ghosted! His international friendships were full of comings and goings—a strange combination of aloofness and yearning. Writing to Lena Horne in 1973, he invited the world-famous jazz singer to a Christmas Eve special he was planning that was to be broadcast for incarcerated people. “I think the show might be important,” he told Horne. But the real prize would be an opportunity for the two to catch up. “Please get in touch with me as quickly as you can,” he wrote. “And please remember dear lady, that this strange solitary distant man loves you very much and will always love you.”
Baldwin was a caretaker within his friend group of Black intellectuals and performers, a role that they treasured in their notes to him. Nina Simone, for whom Baldwin had served as a mentor and confidant, wrote to him in 1977, while he was living in the south of France and she in Geneva. Both were in their own kinds of exile, reeling from disillusionment with the racial order in America. Simone had recently fled America in the face of mounting tax bills and was estranged from her husband, who managed her money. But her sunny letter inviting her dear Jimmy to a series of her shows in Paris illustrated his capacity for lifting spirits. “I need to hear from you man! I’m very homesick,” she wrote. “P.S. I wear your scarf all the time.”
Baldwin wrote to Lorraine Hansberry, to Ray Charles, to Maya Angelou. He was one of the people who encouraged a young Black editor at Random House to try her hand at novels. That editor, Toni Morrison, later bemoaned having to pass on Beale Street, writing in her own letter to Baldwin, “It is so beautiful that I wanted to cover it, touch it, promote it, be knowledgeable about it—you know become an If Beale Street Could Talk groupie.” Baldwin was always encouraging his comrades to create, to continue bringing new work into the world. This propensity took on a special significance after the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. In various letters from this period, Baldwin prayed that his generation of writers and artists might dare to persist.
Even in his private correspondence, Baldwin believed in the power of the word to change the world. Regarding assassinations and grief, he jotted down a letter to then–Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 after the assassination of his older brother President John F. Kennedy. Baldwin wrote on behalf of himself, Hansberry, Horne, and Harry Belafonte, who together had met earlier that year with the younger Kennedy to try to push the administration to more openly support civil rights. Baldwin proved as calculating as he was consoling, imploring Bobby Kennedy to fight on in his brother’s memory. “Death, as we know, is in one way absolutely final; in another, as we know, and as human history proves, it affords the greatest of all challenges to the human spirit,” Baldwin wrote. “A number of our most massive achievements have been snatched from the jaws of death—by we, the living, whose burden of opportunity it is to carry forward the work for which our fallen comrades died.” Kennedy evidently took the group’s words to heart, becoming a stalwart protector of civil rights during his tenure as attorney general and an ally of the movement during his ill-fated presidential campaign.
Baldwin frequently endeavored to turn his epistolary power into action—the man loved an open letter. In 1970, as mail from across the country poured into the New York Women’s Detention Center in support of the activist Angela Davis, who was incarcerated there while facing murder charges, Baldwin added his own letter to the torrent. In his missive, later published in the New York Review of Books, the influence of Black Power on his evolving worldview was clear. “We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is doomed because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have,” he told Davis. “The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America.”
In 1974, Baldwin again hoped to use his letters to indict the system. That year, after President Gerald Ford controversially pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, for Nixon’s role in the Watergate scandal, Nelson Rockefeller—the previous governor of New York and incoming vice president—applauded his new partner’s decision as “an act of conscience, compassion, and courage.” In an open letter he seemed to have wanted published by Newsweek, Baldwin excoriated Rockefeller. “If Mr. Rockefeller judges Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon ‘an act of conscience, compassion, and courage,’” he wrote, “then there are American citizens who would like to be informed as to how he judges the no-knock, ‘stop-and-frisk’ laws he, as the governor of New York, instituted in New York State.” Baldwin continued: “This particular American citizen would also like to have described that ‘conscience, compassion, and courage’ which led to the slaughter at Attica,” referring to the 1971 prison uprising that Rockefeller sent police to crush, resulting in the killing of more than 30 men.
Baldwin’s two most famous letters, the two parts of The Fire Next Time, exemplify his masterful use of the form to create intimacy with—and generate empathy in—readers. Their enormous influence, then and now, has inspired an epistolary tradition in the Black literary canon. But I’m most interested in the ways that those same tools inspired Baldwin’s readers in their own lives, and how many of those readers felt compelled to send him letters. Alongside the requests for autographs or photographs are notes that reveal the deeply felt impact of his work on average Americans. “I am just writing you to let you know that your writings have penetrated my being,” one fan wrote in 1973. In 1977, another correspondent wrote that “without reservation,” Baldwin was “one of the five greatest novelists and literatists of this age.” One woman, writing on stationery adorned by a sketch of a rabbit, said that she’d read Beale Street in a single sitting, and that “the last two hours that I have lived in this book have engulfed me with a humbleness that will never leave me.”
My favorite letter in the Baldwin archive, written by hand from a fan in Pittsburgh, regards Beale Street. The writer describes sharing the novel with the man they love, who is incarcerated. “He says he loves all your writing as much as I do,” the letter reads. “And more than that, much more than that, it hasn’t been until I wrote to him about this book that he’s written that he loves me too. It’s like just knowing someone as important and powerful as you are could write seriously about people like us, divided by jails, gave him a new sense of hope, of belief in himself again.” Baldwin’s work may have shaken America’s foundations, but this letter illustrates how his ability to peer into people’s inner lives mattered just as much. He cultivated beauty, even in the bleakest situations, and it often bore fruit.
There are dozens more letters to sift through: love letters, family business, more fan mail, official publishing business, Baldwin’s unusually graceful rejection notes for requests he couldn’t accommodate. In all, they do just as much as Baldwin’s literary works to help explain and diagnose America’s ills. They also help elucidate the ineffable something that makes his work special. Baldwin’s letters closed the distance between past and present, Black and white, prison and the outside, person and person. His elegance is matched only by his humility and care. As with Baldwin’s novels and essays, his letters evince a genuine love for humanity that not even the frustrations and sorrows of the post-civil-rights era could fully extinguish. For Baldwin, the letter was an act of optimism, a bet on the possibility of people seeing themselves in the other.
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