Bearing Witness to the Truth James Baldwin: 1924-1987

By Otto Friedrich When TIME Senior Writer Otto Friedrich was living in Paris in 1948, he formed a lasting friendship with the young James Baldwin. Following are his reminiscences of his old colleague, who died last week in France at 63.

Late at night in Paris -- and it was almost always late at night in Jimmy Baldwin's Paris -- he would occasionally take out a ball-point pen and start drawing a large rectangle on what was left of a beer-stained paper tablecloth. Inside the rectangle he would slowly write, sometimes with a faint smile on his lips, a series of incantatory words:

Go Tell It on the Mountain

A novel

By James Baldwin

That was the dream that enabled him to survive the bleak and penniless early years in Paris, the dream that the chaos of manuscripts he had piled up in his grimy little hotel room -- all the retyped drafts and new inserts and scribbled revisions -- really was a novel and would someday make him famous. A short and rather pudgy youth with froggy eyes, Jimmy had worked on this book about his Harlem boyhood for five or six years back in the U.S. But he had run through a publisher's advance without getting the novel finished. He had worked at odd jobs, waiting on tables in Greenwich Village.

Then one day he had walked into a restaurant and asked for a glass of water, and the waitress looked at him blankly and said, "We don't serve Negroes here." After the many snubs and insults he had received all his life, something snapped. Jimmy threw a mug of water at the waitress and then ran out, terrified because "I had been ready to commit murder from the hatred I carried in my heart."

So he escaped to Paris in 1948 and lived in France for most of the next 40 years. There he wrote more than 20 books, including seven novels, four plays and five collections that contain some lastingly important essays. He defined and demonstrated in a new way what it meant to be black, and to be white as well. And when he died last week of stomach cancer at his home in St.-Paul-de- Vence, he died covered with honors. "It's a love affair," he said on being made a commander in France's Legion of Honor in 1986. "This is the place where I grew up, insofar as you can ever say you grow up."

Jimmy did, of course, finally get that first novel finished. "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else," he later told the New York Times. "I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal with my father." His father -- stepfather, actually -- had been a Harlem preacher so possessed by anger that he regularly beat his children. "His father's arm, rising and falling, might make him cry," Jimmy wrote in the autobiographical Mountain, "yet his father could never be entirely the victor, for John cherished something that his father could not reach. It was his hatred and his intelligence that Johnny cherished, the one feeding the other." Jimmy had become a preacher too, when he was 14, and that was to color everything he wrote.

Mountain brought Jimmy a considerable success when it was finally published in 1953, and that enabled him to put together a collection of his searing essays, Notes of a Native Son ("Each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage"). Then came Giovanni's Room, a rather purple novel about homosexuality. And then, in 1957, when French friends kept asking him to "explain Little Rock," where the U.S. Army had been summoned to escort nine black children to school through screaming mobs of whites, Jimmy finally decided "that it would be simpler . . . to go to Little Rock than sit in Europe, on an American passport, trying to explain it."

He had never been to the South before. "The South had always frightened me," he wrote later. "I wondered where children got their strength -- the strength, in this case, to walk through mobs to get to school." Those were heroic days in the South, when obscure and unarmed people with names like Rosa Parks and James Meredith and Martin Luther King Jr. fought for black rights on obscure battlefields with names like Selma and Neshoba County. In one of those rare cases of the right man and time and place, Jimmy was there too, organizing, encouraging, marching, helping to "bear witness to the truth."

He bore witness most passionately in The Fire Next Time (1963), in which he declared that he was determined "never to make my peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before I would let any white man spit on me, before I would accept my 'place' in this republic." He also proclaimed there his skepticism about the value of being "integrated into a burning house." And that, as Detroit and Newark soon showed, was what was coming next time. "White people in this country," he wrote, "will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this -- which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never -- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed."

Everything after The Fire Next Time was anticlimax. There were TV interviews and invitations to the White House and a portrait on the cover of TIME, but most of what Jimmy wrote after he became famous lacked the passion of his younger years. That is part of the price of success.

Jimmy could be very irritating. He borrowed things and didn't return them. He made appointments that he never kept. He could be spiteful, and he made use of anybody who could be useful. But he was also warm and intense and funny, and anyone who gained his friendship valued it highly. That included an Englishwoman who once lent him her typewriter because he had pawned his own. Jimmy did not return it because, he said, he was in the midst of Go Tell It on the Mountain and "had to finish the chapter."

He took much the same attitude in his first collection of essays: "I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer." After Jimmy was operated on for cancer last spring, he went back to writing a book about one of his friends, Martin Luther King Jr., and until the end, he kept hoping to finish it. That work didn't get done.