James Baldwin: Living in Fire + Good Made My Face

James Baldwin: Living in Fire
By Bill V. Mullen

God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait
Edited by Hilton Als.

“god made my face”, edited by hilton als + “james baldwin: living in fire” by bill v. mullen

August 2nd, 1924 marked James Baldwin’s 100th birthday and in honor of I read the above two books. I had the great blessing to take a seminar on James Baldwin as an undergrad. My teacher, Don Belton, was an incredible translator of Baldwin’s work and art. Tragically, Don was murdered in a hate crime in the early 2000s in Bloomington, Indiana. As Ross Gay memorialized in one of his short essays, Don’s smile and laugh were true lights in the darkness. I am forever grateful to Don for his friendship and intellectual mentorship. He said to me one evening when we were visiting after I had done a volunteer shift providing child care at a St. Paul women’s shelter that my art was my work with people. I didn’t want that to be true, I wanted more then to be a writer.

Mullen’s biography centers on Baldwin’s political engagements and their historical contexts throughout his life. In a way it is an intellectual biography that uses Baldwin’s specific political involvement as a lens. Mullen places Baldwin’s reality as Black, gay man growing up in Harlem as the gravitational center of his politics and from there was Baldwin’s commitment to saving himself and preserving his art but knowing that doing so also meant engaging with all those impacted by the persistent racism and homophobia that is a throughline from Baldwin’s time to ours. 

For anyone curious about Baldwin’s life and thinking and how it formed the basis for his art this is a great read. I would also point folks towards Eddie Glaude’s excellent, Begin Again. It is memoir, cultural criticism and biography all in one. Glaude steps directly into Baldwin’s later essays and their disillusionment to analyze how to move in a country defined in part by Trumpism and that represents. It remains a timely book, published in 2020. This Throughline episode is a great introduction to Glaude’s perspective. Of course, if you have been inspired by the Baldwin quotes online but have yet to read Baldwin, do it! I highly recommend his essays. Each collection is incredible and worth reading. After his essays, his short story collection, Going to Meet the Man is epic. I don’t think it gets referenced in accord with its merit. The story, Sonny’s Blues, is as good a short story as one will find in American literature. I wont give the end away but I quote it to myself regularly and I first read it in 1991. 

God Made My Face is a collection of essays commissioned for an art installation on how Baldwin has been represented in painting, sculpture and photography. So, of course, the essays are imagistic and somewhat kaleidoscopic. I loved this book, each contributor has a unique lens on their Baldwin. And, the photos of the art are beautiful and offer such dimension to a perspective on Baldwin’s life and impact.

I had not read much by Hilton Als until his essays here and he is a stunning writer. I’m excited to read more of his work. The initial essay by him is a form of speculative biography that is just gorgeous. Als envisions the first exchange between Baldwin and the painter and friend and mentor to Baldwin, Beauford Delaney. Lines are blurred between journalism and biography and fictive art. Why not. Memory is its own sort of fiction anyways. It’s a stunning essay and one I have turned to again and again partly just to follow Als craft as much as for the narrative itself. 

The idea of speculative biography is where I will segue to another book. Mullen ends his biography of Baldwin with some hard questions regarding the absence of powerful women in Baldwin’s work. It’s absolutely an appropriate inquiry. Mullen references a dialogue between Audre Lorde and Baldwin that occurred in 1984. Lorde is engaging Baldwin on the importance of Black feminism as part of the continuation of work Baldwin had dedicated his life to. Lorde’s challenges were strong and unyielding, true to Lorde’s character. You can read the conversation here. 

It wasn’t long after I finished Mullen’s biography that Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ otherworldly biography of Audre Lorde hit the shelves and then my eyeballs. Cosmic timing, which, I would come to find out, was also true to Lorde’s character.

-Michael McMahon