James Baldwin Looks Back

Another abrupt cut in the film’s opening minutes brings the Baldwin brothers from their daylit parlor into the shadows of a nightclub. They’re seated at a jazz lounge formerly on the corner of 97th and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan called Mikell’s. Cornell Dupree’s quartet circles and lands on a groove. They draw out the titular song’s long jazz lines, its thick, driving blues. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” had been written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong in 1966 (the year Stokely Carmichael called for Black Power in Greenwood); recorded by Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1967 (when Newark burned); and made a pop hit by Marvin Gaye in 1968 (the year “Martin’s head was blown off” in Memphis). Baldwin drags on his cigarette as his brother grins in the background. Then Baldwin smiles so intensely it impresses every line in his face. The intimacy of their togetherness, their deep pleasure in the music, belie the treacherous road of this return.

Throughout Baldwin’s road trip, Fontaine and Hartley’s camera is just as attentive to the old friends, mentors, and allies he visits along the way as it is to him. Some of them are giants in their own right. “You always see Sterling first,” David notices during another moment of the brothers’ conversation, which frames the film across its different chapters. The poet and educator Sterling A. Brown orients Baldwin to the American South just as he did in 1957. Born to formerly enslaved parents in 1901, Brown had lived an even longer stretch of Black American time than Baldwin. An elder writer of blues poetry and steward of the Black American literary tradition, Brown taught Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Lucille Clifton at Howard University. Baldwin’s return visit is that of yet another student at the professor’s feet.

Together they remember the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, when Brown, the Baldwin brothers, and a crowd of 250,000 listened to King proclaim his dream and faith that his listeners would “stand up for freedom together.” Key civil rights legislation followed, but four little girls were killed in the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church just two and a half weeks after the march. King delivered their eulogy: “They didn’t live long lives, but they lived meaningful lives.” Was he also speaking of himself?

King’s ghost hovers over Atlanta, his birthplace, which Baldwin describes as unrecognizable compared to how it looked and felt during the movement. The town, now “too busy to hate,” boasted skyscraper hotels, a bustling international airport, and a Black mayor. But King’s tomb was a monument built with a flickering “eternal flame.” What good is a monument when the people for whom the martyred die continue to suffer? Grand, hallowed figures like King and Evers are frequently invoked throughout the film, but Baldwin shares the frame most often with “another roll call,” the lesser-known veterans still struggling through the bloody aftermath. They detail present-day disinvestment in Black neighborhoods, diminished job prospects, the militarization of the police. Hosea Williams, King’s former field director, says the wave of integration that opened white businesses to Black patrons left Black Atlanta more economically and politically disempowered than ever before.

Bethel Baptist Church was bombed three different times during the movement, and a mob attacked its pastor, Freddie Lee Shuttlesworth, when he attempted to register his daughter for public school. During Baldwin’s visit to Birmingham, Shuttlesworth recalls telling his family, “This is freedom’s price.” The film implies the paying will continue as long as conditions remain unlivable. When a choir assembled by Shuttlesworth during the late 1950s holds court for the two men in a present-day sanctuary to sing the movement’s songs, the minister tells them to keep on singing.

The songs—many of them old spirituals adapted for the struggle at hand—buoyed the veterans during the movement and continue to transmit memory in their frequencies. Those veterans carry memory in their bodies, and the weight is heavy. David Dennis, head of Mississippi’s CORE chapter in 1964 when Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were disappeared, recalls the forty-four-day search operation in the creeks and rivers of Neshoba County. The waters were thick with dead bodies, face down, he remembers—bodies that did not belong to the three civil rights workers known to be missing.

The film flashes back to Dennis at the organizers’ funeral, his eyes aflame with despair. Chaney’s mother holds and comforts her younger son, Ben, as he joins in the chorus of “We Shall Overcome” through his tears. In another clip, Ben tells a reporter that he’s “ready to take [his] brother’s place” in the ranks of the movement. But back in the present, Dennis tells us that the young boy is now an adult serving time. The living bodies are mangled like the corpses, and all the South is a graveyard, the film seems to say.

A short distance from New Orleans, Baldwin visits a literal graveyard in Bunkie, Louisiana, the rural town where one of Baldwin’s uncles has been buried. “There was another brother,” Baldwin explains to his brother David, “a brother grandma had by the master.” Still images of a white ancestor flash and disappear. “It was strange to see, in effect, your father in whiteface,” Baldwin tells David. Here, we have descended into the original wound.

“[How] hopeless for them to deny their kinfolk, and do so in the name of charity and love and the name of Jesus Christ,” David says, circling a recurring motif in his brother’s writing. White and Black Americans have never lived in true isolation from each other. Slavery’s central realm was domestic. And the suffering that the perpetrators inflicted on their victims was and is a domestic drama, a tragedy staged among kin.

The tombs in Bunkie sit on top of the soil. Just three miles down the road at Clarendon Plantation, my own paternal relatives were enslaved by their father. The Anglo-Dutch planter Jonathan Koen left the parish in 1844, fleeing debt with his Black children Hannibal and Clarissa, and later freed them in his will. His white daughter, my great-aunt Martha, sued to re-enslave her siblings.

When Motown writers composed “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” they drew from a well much older than themselves. The “grapevine” can be traced to the antebellum years, when news of coming war, rebellions, and changes in the political landscape reached the enslaved by way of person-to-person transmission. Sailors and carriage drivers were key sources of information, as well as workers hired out by their masters to other plantations or across town. In Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington remembers:

Though I was a mere child during the preparation for the Civil War and during the war itself, I now recall the many late-at-night whispered discussions that I heard my mother and the other slaves on the plantation indulge in. These discussions showed that they understood the situation, and that they kept themselves informed of events by what was termed the “grape-vine” telegraph.

We’ll likely never know all the names of those who shaped this “common wind,” the individuals who provided contraband intelligence to other bondspeople. Just like we may never know all the names of the civil rights fallen. Baldwin must have known how evoking an anonymous network, the kind that shaped community bonds and spread knowledge and truth amid a system of crushing repression, could provide an opening, a way to keep singing.

The civil rights movement was one inflection point of a centuries-long reckoning with American society that dared the nation to apply its liberatory ethos democratically. Its gains were incremental, partial, and reversible. Some of the lessons Baldwin takes away are bitter indeed. “I think we learned something, which we now have to use,” he says. “The system cannot change itself, cannot transform itself. There is no morality which one can beseech in America.”

The balm is the community that witnesses you. The people who teach you. Despite its blood- soaked bayous and living graveyards, the South itself is a balm to James Baldwin. “I felt very much at home among the dark people who lived where I, if so much had not been disrupted, would logically have been born,” he wrote in 1972. Both his parents had been born below the Mason-Dixon, and, in his easy laughter and relaxed bearing, his comfort among the people is apparent. In a schoolhouse in New Orleans, Baldwin tells a room of small children that they “contain the hope of the future.” He had been invited by Jerome Smith, a former Freedom Rider who joined CORE at nineteen as a student at Southern University. Jerome, Baldwin tells us, has now founded an organization through which children learn from movement workers the history of their land and its people. In New Orleans, where jazz was born, and Congo Square held sacred space for ancient rhythms and let them breathe and change, Smith hoped to “reestablish a communication between the old and the young,” Baldwin says. “[Between] the dead and the living.” Put another way, the grapevine lives in Black time, which means that it yet lives.

“So we say to a child,” Smith tells us, “when trouble come, we’re here. We’re here. We’re here.”