Monday
A few months ago Editorial Page’s John Stoehr alerted me to a powerful James Baldwin warning from his prose poem essay Nothing Personal. As our country passes the 150,000 mark for Covid deaths and as the bottom drops out of the economy, it’s vital that we hold on to each other. Otherwise, “the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
Baldwin wrote these words in 1964, when we had a similar sense that “nothing is fixed” and that “the earth is always shifting.” Yet many of us believed then—at least those of us who were white—that America’s basic safeguards would hold. We had confidence that the rule of law, the electoral system, and the U.S. Constitution’s system of checks and balances were fixed and immutable.
Baldwin is not so sure. In the face of uncertainty, however, he reminds us of two important things: we are responsible to future generations (“we are the only witnesses they have”) and it is vital to keep faith with each other. Our children and our children’s children must not lose the dream of a just and egalitarian society. They must not become inured to autocracy.
When Baldwin warns against “break[ing] faith with one another,” think of him referring to the Declaration of Independence, to America’s vision of e pluribus unum, and to the Statue of Liberty’s welcoming light.
To be sure, fighting against a sea that “does not cease to grind down rock” is a daunting challenge. People of color know better than anyone how the forces of racism and oppression never let up. But even while acknowledging the harsh reality, Baldwin points to how we must respond: lovers must cling to lovers and parents and children must cling to each other. Without that, we are lost for sure.
I know we often lose, and that the death or destruction of another is infinitely more real and unbearable than one’s own. I think I know how many times one has to start again, and how often one feels that one cannot start again. And yet, on pain of death, one can never remain where one is. The light. The light. One will perish without the light.
I have slept on rooftops and in basements and subways, have been cold and hungry all my life; have felt that no fire would ever warm me, and no arms would ever hold me. I have been, as the song says, “buked and scorned” and I know that I always will be. But, my God, in that darkness, which was the lot of my ancestors and my own state, what a mighty fire burned! In that darkness of rape and degradation, that fine flying froth and mist of blood, through all that terror and in all that helplessness, a living soul moved and refused to die. We really emptied oceans with a home-made spoon and tore down mountains with our hands….
It is a mighty heritage, it is the human heritage, and it is all there is to trust. And I learned this through descending, as it were, into the eyes of my father and my mother. I wondered, when I was little, how they bore it–for I knew that they had much to bear. It had not yet occurred to me that I also would have much to bear; but they knew it, and the unimaginable rigors of their journey helped them to prepare me for mine. This is why one must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found–and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, there it is; and if the father can say, Yes. Lord. the child can learn that most difficult of words, Amen.
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
Further thought: Baldwin may well be alluding to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” even though Arnold’s ocean is moving in the other direction. Arnold laments that the tide (of faith) is receding, not coming in, thereby leaving us “on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, /Where ignorant armies clash by night.” Nevertheless, the prescription is the same: “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!”
With that in mind, the wide support for Black Lives Matter—much broader, more multicultural, and more egalitarian than that enjoyed by Black activism in the 1960s—is reason to hope. To be sure, Trump is more reckless than Richard Nixon while today’s GOP is more supine than it was then, but this means that holding each other is essential.