The free Sunday Spirit exhibit of Religious Images by African American Artists in the Bade Museum at Berkeley’s Pacific School of Religion closed on December 14, 2012. I attended the opening in September and was personally impressed enough to use the imagery as a backdrop for the following analysis of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time that I wrote for a class on African American Christianity and Freedom Struggle during the Civil Rights era.
In The Fire Next Time James Baldwin addresses issues of identity and community for an African American teenager growing up in New York City in the middle third of the twentieth century by literally raising concerns and events from his own life to mythic proportions. In the two essays that comprise the book – one a letter written in 1963 to his fourteen-year-old nephew and the second an autobiographical account that begins with Baldwin’s religious identity crisis at age fourteen, but twenty-five years earlier – the question “Whose little boy are you?” is posed repeatedly, implicitly in the first essay and explicitly in the second. Baldwin’s words offer a rhetorical answer in light of modern social concerns. And Baldwin’s imagery, particularly when interpreted through the lens of the Sunday Spirit exhibit of Religious Images by African American Artists, offers what might be described as an “archaic” answer as well.(1)
In writing about African-American religious art “as an essential source for Black theology and African-American biblical interpretation,” James Noel borrows the term “archaic” from Charles H. Long to describe an imaginative level of consciousness common to both aesthetic perceptions and religious experience. It is predicated on the priority of something given or already there and resides at a deeper level of awareness than language can interpret or express. Since the archaic manifests as symbol rather than discursive speech, bridging the gap between the archaic and its interpretation requires a participatory mode of consciousness that is obscured by modern language but commensurate with forms the interpreter wishes to understand.(2)
Upon taking Baldwin’s question, “Whose little boy (or girl, or child) are you?” into the Sunday Spirit exhibit, one notices that among nineteen images only one includes an actual living child in a familial context: an untitled mother-and-child portrayal by Ademola Williams, a writer and lecturer at the University of Benin in Nigeria. The child, while riding in the back of the mother’s garments, appears to be glancing backward into the exhibit space as the mother walks out of it. What appears to be the photograph of a child in another image entitled “Mother and the Presence of Myth” by Michael D. Harris turns out to be a childhood photo of the artist’s mother combined with elements of Yoruba religious aesthetic and symbols to suggest social transformation.
The only images in the exhibit that evoke the thought of children within the African-American Christian tradition are two that commemorate the 1963 church bombing that killed eleven-year-old Denise McNair, fourteen-year-old Addie Mae Collins, fourteen-year-old Carole Robertson, and fourteen-year-old Cynthia Wesley while they attended Sunday School at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. “Voices from a Birmingham Church” by Evangeline Montgomery presents a fiery red conflagration. In “I Remember Birmingham” by John Scott, a gauze-like layer of warm colors through which angry and sorrowful words seem to fall like rain or tears, barely mutes the blood-smeared white cross beneath it with a similarly smeared white church at its center. And is that a white-garbed figure, in a yet deeper layer, running to escape the crime? Since The Fire Next Time was published in 1963 and the first of two essays that comprise the book is titled “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” the Sunday Spirit exhibit seems to provide an appropriate venue for contemplating a deeper level of meaning.
The first essay is presented as the text of letter from Baldwin to his young namesake nephew, conveying warnings and advice for a young black man entering the world that Baldwin describes in the second essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in my Mind.” Both essays deliver a ringing critique of modern Western white supremacist society. They also warn of potentially disastrous consequences for white as well as black people, if black people respond to whites with in-kind racial hatred. Early on, Baldwin warns his nephew about the tragic mistake of Baldwin’s father: “Well, he is dead, he never saw you and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what the white people said about him. This is one of the reasons he became so holy…. You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.”(3)
Baldwin’s words are powerfully reminiscent of the “natal community connection” that Orlando Patterson says is ceremoniously broken when the bond of slavery is made, often broken in a way that humiliates the slave and breaks his or her spirit.(4) “The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you,” Baldwin explains and then continues later on. “Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear…. You must accept them… with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”(5) Baldwin describes them as if they are lost children.
He begins the second essay by describing a “prolonged religious crisis” that descended upon him when he turned fourteen. Evidently Baldwin’s fear of sinking into the moral depravity of Harlem street life became so acute that his best friend introduced Baldwin to his pastor. “There she sat, in her robes, smiling, an extremely proud and handsome woman, with Africa, Europe and the America of the American Indian blended in her face. She was perhaps forty-five or fifty at the time…. [S]he looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Whose little boy are you?’…. [P]recisely the phrase used by pimps and racketeers on the Avenue when they suggested, both humorously and intensely that I ‘hang out’ with them…. [W]hen the pastor asked me with that marvelous smile,… my heart replied at once, ‘Why yours.’”(6)
In some ways this second essay reads like the Yoruba storytelling of Amos Tutuola, in which young people disobey their elders or break fundamental social rules to consequently become ensnared in wildly supernatural and sometimes grisly adventures.(7) Baldwin’s father is a pastor, but the father-son relationship, as the first essay suggests, is very poor. So Baldwin is sorely tempted at the onset of puberty to take up an apprenticeship in the “church” of Harlem street life, which in the Yoruba mythology of Tutuola and of the Sunday Spirit artists who portrayed children, might be thought of as Esu, the trickster. Before succumbing to Esu however, Baldwin finds himself answering in the affirmative when another pastor (a yin to counter his father’s yang) whose description evokes the Yoruba mythological imagery of a honey-hued Osun, love goddess. Baldwin’s relatively short-lived apprenticeship to the Christian incarnation of Osun seems doomed at the outset, however, when he realizes, during the conversion experience that precedes his three-year evangelical preaching career that “God—and I felt this even then, so long ago, on that tremendous floor, unwillingly—is white.”(8)
Perhaps predictably, twenty-four years later Baldwin finds himself under the influence of another irresistible smile that seems to ask once again, “Whose little boy are you?” This time the smile belongs to the Hon. Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam. In Yoruba mythology, however, Baldwin is now in the presence of Sango, the king and wielder of thunderbolts. Baldwin manages to resist the invitation this time, which probably saves him from another disturbing conversion experience in which the Black God he was expecting turns out to be an Arab.
“The Negro has been formed by this nation for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other—not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam,” Baldwin declares. “The paradox… is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one’s past… is learning to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. How can the Negro past be used? The unprecedented price demanded—and at this embattled hour of the worlds history—is the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars.”(9)
Baldwin now appears to answer the central question “Whose little boy are you?” The American “Negro has been formed by this nation,” he states. So we must be America’s children. But the fiery red imagery from Birmingham, the departing mother and child, and the biblical archaeology in an adjacent art exhibit seem to hold out a potential for further and perhaps deeper interpretive exploration. Baldwin's words seems to ask the question of Americans who are not of African heritage as well. If you get a chance to visit the exhibit perhaps you can ask that question for yourself, ponder the “archaic” firsthand, and come up with an answer of your own.
After meditating on this for several weeks, I find myself coming back to add a conclusion of my own. My essay only gives Baldwin three archetypes to choose from, and I imagine him both in life and in The Fire Next Time in the archetype of the Trickster. The Trickster is able to communicate with everyone, and Baldwin used that power very capably to communicate both the message of the powerful king, and of the love goddess to people all sorts of people. Perhaps that is the role of the artist. I'm reminded of a song I released about four years ago, entitled "God, Goddess, and Trickster." If you'd like to hear it or read the lyrics, you can find it online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AozJXuTRqw. Abiding peace, abundant blessings, and one love to you and yours.
References
1. Details of the Sunday Spirit Religious Images by African American Artists from the Jean and Robert E. Steele Collection, currently on display at the The Doug Adams Gallery at the Badè Museum can be found online at http://care-gtu.org/doug_adams_gallery.php
2. James A. Noel “African American Art and Biblical Interpretation” in True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, edited by Brian K. Blount, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2007, 75, 80
3. James Baldwin The Fire Next Time Dell Publishing, New York, 1964, 13-14
4. Orlando Patterson “Authority, Alienation, and Social Death” in African American Religious Thought: An Anthology edited by Cornell West and Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, 2003, 118
5. James Baldwin The Fire Next Time Dell Publishing, New York, 1964, 19
6. Ibid., 43-44
7. Amos Tutuola The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Grove Press, New York, 1953.
8. James Baldwin The Fire Next Time Dell Publishing, New York, 1964, 46
9. James Baldwin The Fire Next Time Dell Publishing, New York, 1964, 110-111
