James Baldwin: The Top 5 Novels

James Baldwin is quite possibly the most quintessentially brilliant writer of the Civil Rights Movement and also in all respects, the most well-known. He is a man of incredible words, using his literature to reflect a society that was fuelled by their hatred against people of his own skin colour. I believe that citing him as the Malcolm X of Literature would be correct. A man who has done nothing wrong but is still hated purely because of the colour of his skin. One of the most powerful writers in black history (well, in every colour of history really!), James Baldwin is basically the superman of Modern Black Lives in Literature.

Not only a writer, Baldwin was an activist and a man who was constantly meeting with others working on the Civil Rights Movement, including: Nina Simone, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Bob Dylan.

Baldwin was a brilliant writer, remembered for his incredible way with words that made his books so fluent, filled with emotion and packed with life experience that he had either gotten himself or had seen of others of his own race. Baldwin was an absolute superhero of literature and one of my personal favourites so that when I was a teenager, I made a point of reading everything he ever wrote.

Why? Well because when you talk about the Civil Rights' Movement, you talk about James Baldwin.

Let's get on with my top five then, shall we?

5. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

“I remembered my mother’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear because I might get knocked down by a car on the way to or from school and I and the family would be disgraced even beyond the grave, presumably, if my underwear was dirty. And I began to worry, in fact, as the doctor sniffed and prodded, about the state of the shorts I was wearing. This made me want to laugh. But I could not breathe.”

This book is absolutely amazing. I ended up reading it when I was 18 since for some reason, I had completely missed it during my 15-17 years. About a man who has a heart attack when on stage, the story takes a turn as it isn't only about the race of your friends but it is also about sexuality, age, discrimination from all aspects and at the end of the day—it is about who your friends are and who your friends aren't. It is a beautifully written book which for me, echoes Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison in some ways. But in its own right, it is a beautiful novel.

4. Giovanni's Room

“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.”

Giovanni's Room is another one of those classic Baldwin tales about the struggles with race and sexuality. Not only that, but it is encompassed in poverty, tragedy and other situations in which it would make everything more difficult for the characters involved. It is a beautiful book that I read when I was only 16, and I have never regretted the time I spent on it.

3. Just Above My Head

“If one wishes to be instructed--not that anyone does--concerning the treacherous role that memory plays in a human life, consider how relentlessly the water of memory refuses to break, how it impedes that journey into the air of time. Time: the whisper beneath that word is death. With this unanswerable weight hanging heavier and heavier over one's head, the vision becomes cloudy, nothing is what it seems...How then, can I trust my memory concerning that particular Sunday afternoon?...Beneath the face of anyone you ever loved for true--anyone you love, you will always love, love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other--beneath the face of the beloved, however ancient, ruined, and scarred, is the face of the baby your love once was, and will always be, for you. Love serves, then, if memory doesn't, and passion, apart from its tense relation to agony, labors beneath the shadow of death. Passion is terrifying, it can rock you, change you, bring your head under, as when a wind rises from the bottom of the sea, and you're out there in the craft of your mortality, alone.”

James Baldwin's novel Just Above My Head is one of my personal favourite books by him. I read it once when I was 17 and then, I read it again only a few months ago (at the moment I'm 23 and a few months ago is the summer of 2019). It is a brilliantly clever book about a man who suffers the horrid loss of his brother. Through this story of race trouble, fame and the downfall of fortune, James Baldwin offers us the tiny insight into the world of what it was like once to be famous and black. The troubles that echo those suffered by Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and many more regarding the colour of their skin makes this book spiral into a whirlwind of drama, tension and unbridled violence.

2. If Beale Street Could Talk

“She knows Daddy better than I do. I think it's because she's felt since we were children that our Daddy maybe loved me more than he loves her. This isn't true, and she knows that now--people love different people in different ways--but it must have seemed that way to her when we were little. I look as though I just can't make it, she looks like can't nothing stop her. If you look helpless, people react to you in one way and if you look strong, or just come on strong, people react to you in another way, and, since you don't see what they see, this can be very painful. I think that's why Sis was always in front of that damn mirror all the time, when we were kids. She was saying, 'I don't care. I got me.' Of course, this only made her come on stronger than ever, which was the last effect she desired: but that's the way we are and that's how we can sometimes get so fucked up. Anyway, she's past all that. She knows who she is, or, at least, she knows who she damn well isn't.”

If Beale Street Could Talk was recently turned into an amazing masterpiece of a movie and was received so well by others that it won some really good awards. I was so happy it was made into a film because the book's premise is so important even today. With race again at the centre of the novel, Baldwin's classic tale of lovers in distress and across distance is a brilliant example of the way in which timeless Black American literature is created. Important as ever in the rising climate of racism against people of colour, Baldwin's romantic novel presents the tensions of life that are created everyday for the POC community and the outcomes of things that go horribly wrong are far worse for us than they are for you.

1. Go Tell It on the Mountain

“The morning of that day, as Gabriel rose and started out to work, the sky was low and nearly black and the air too thick to breath. Late in the afternoon the wind rose, the skies opened, and the rain came. The rain came down as though once more in Heaven the Lord had been persuaded of the good uses of a flood. It drove before it the bowed wanderer, clapped children into houses, licked with fearful anger against the high, strong wall, and the wall of the lean-to, and the wall of the cabin, beat against the bark and the leaves of trees, trampled the broad grass, and broke the neck of the flower. The world turned dark, forever, everywhere, and windows ran as though their glass panes bore all the tears of eternity, threatening at every instant to shatter inward against this force, uncontrollable, so abruptly visited on the earth.”

My favourite novel by James Baldwin and possibly in my top 50 favourite novels of all time. Go Tell It on the Mountain takes place over the course of one day in the classic modernist style. It tells the story of John Grimes on his birthday when his brother suffers an act of racially-motivated violence; his father is made out to be a brute, and when you keep reading, you keep learning about the Grimes family, their history and why Gabriel acts the way he does. It is an absolute heartbreaker and has, at the core of it, a message about sticking together through times of racial trouble and through times of terror. The violence against the innocents is strong and yet, very little has changed since. It is such a beautiful and relevant novel filled with violent emotions and turbulent events that propel the novel forwards through the impact of how much family matters and how the different members of it react with the "why" revealed slowly, but surely throughout.