Dear Readers,
This story was originally written for and shared with my students in an African-American art and literature class on November 9, 2016 - The day after Donal Trump was elected President of the United States. Some of the names and dates are muddled from memory, but the story is mostly true. Except for the part where I am brave and resilient all of the time.
I was born in a college town in Connecticut in 1979. My father was a music professor and my mother did taxes for non-profits and helped run the town’s WIC program. We were pretty good at pretending to be middle class, but it wasn’t always easy to do.
For one thing, the public school that I attended decided that despite my off the charts test scores and capacity to read at a 5th grade level at the age of 7, I should be placed in the “slow” class. My parents showed the principal what a couple of uppity Mississippi and South Trenton niggas could do when their baby got messed with, and I got moved to a different class. The teachers showed us what they could do to the child of said uppity niggas, and proceeded to make my life miserable for the majority of my 1st grade year. My parents pulled me out of that school a few weeks into the 2nd grade, and sent me to a private one on the other side of town, paid for with credit union loans and secretly scrambling each month to keep the household afloat.
When I began my tenure at The Independent Day School I was the lone black child in my class of thirteen students. Christy and Melissa were the only other girls in the class and they rarely spoke to me other than to express their distaste about my hair and clothes. The boys were practicing daily domination; constantly disappearing to the bathroom to compare the size and shape of their genitals and punching Christy and Melissa in the arms on the lunch line. I was grateful to be invisible to them (for the time being) and I got very good at spending time alone with books. In truth, this had been my favorite pass-time since the moment I’d learned to read at age 4. Being in school taught me that if I was going to learn anything useful, I would need to get very good at reading anything and everything that I could get my hands on because few of the white women in charge of my education had much to offer me.
There were some genuinely wonderful things about the Independent Day School. The school was situated on several acres of forest and wetlands that we were encouraged to explore. Our teachers regularly took us on walks to the frog pond or to pet the sheep at the neighboring farm, and I was allowed to disappear onto the hill behind the soccer field with whatever book I was absorbed in during recess. During the winter months, when ice and snow covered the entire bucolic New England landscape, the recess hour was lengthened to 90 minutes and we brought sleds and cafeteria trays out to the hill behind the gym so that we could slide screaming and giggling down the hill, and then haul ourselves back up the hill, and back down again, and back up again, and back down again, over and over until we were filthy, soaked and exhausted.
By the 3rd grade I made a few friends. Danielle was a hyperactive black girl two years my senior whose mother, Krishna, worked with my father at the college. Krishna was white and had no idea what to do with her daughter’s hair, so Danielle came to our house so my mother or older sister could put her hair in neat box braids and oil her scalp. Danielle and I joined the Girl Scouts together, and we made up a Witchcraft Badge based on the books on the subject that we’d begun reading on the bus that carried us from school to the troop leader’s house. Once, while we were engulfed in our reading and scheming, two boys tried to set Danielle’s hair on fire, which she put a stop to by screaming at the top of her lungs while I punched one of the boys in the jaw. He responded by telling us niggers to go back to Africa. In shock and holding back tears, I gave him a brief and disorganized lecture on the trans atlantic slave trade. I got sent to the vice principal’s office for fighting, and Danielle and I began furiously researching spells to cause permanent diarrhea.
The third grade was also the year that our class was tasked with doing a presentation before the entire school on an important figure from Connecticut History. Our assignment was to choose someone we found interesting, do research on their life, dress up in their likeness and speak in their voices in front of the 100 or so other children and teachers in the school. I was distraught by this task, finding it difficult to connect with any of the people we’d learned about. Should I research John Davenport, Puritan minister and founder of the Connecticut Colony? Or perhaps Eli Whitney, inventor of the Cotton Gin? Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had high marks in the mind of my teacher who really wanted to encourage my interest in African-American culture and history. Fortunately for me, I had the help of my parents who, in their infinite wisdom, gifted me a book by James Baldwin earlier that year. It was called “Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood.”
This book tells the story of TJ. The opening line is “Music all up and down this street, TJ runs it every day.” TJ spends time with his friends and neighbors; Ms. Honey, Mr. Man, Blinky, and WT. The story meanders through his daily experiences of life as a young black man growing up in Harlem. The kinetically expressive watercolor illustrations in the book mesmerized me as much as the story, and Little Man, Little Man became a permanent fixture in my bookbag for several months. This young man’s life was very different from mine, but he was also so familiar to me. TJ could have been my father or one of cousins, or even my older sister before my parents moved on up out of Atlantic Avenue, in Brooklyn, NY to Hunting Hill Avenue in Middletown, Connecticut. In one passage, TJ witnessed his friend WT beating his older brother in a rage and TJ notices that “his brother just make sounds and spit coming out his mouth and running down his chin and his eyes roll up and he move just like them plants TJ saw under the water, just back and forth and back and forth like that, just like them plants TJ saw way at the bottom of the water that time when they went to Jones Beach and his Daddy carried TJ out in the water on his back.”
In his fear and sadness, TJ transported himself to another time and place, and shaped what he saw into something manageable and beautiful. He made sense of the violence around him through his imagination; through his capacity to allow his mind to rescue him from a present that was too much for a child to bear. As an adult I’ve learned very useful clinical concepts like “dissociation” and “complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” but as a child, James Baldwin and TJ helped me feel less alone.
I was eight years old, and in the third grade at the Independent Day School in 1987, the year that James Baldwin died, in late November. On December 20, 1987 William Styron wrote an essay honoring Baldwin for the New York Times. In this piece he discussed the importance of Baldwin’s legacy, and he credits Baldwin with teaching him difficult truths about the ongoing impact of slavery and racism in America. He also noted that he had the pleasure of spending a summer with Baldwin in Connecticut in 1960, when Styron offered his fellow author the cabin behind his home for an extended writing retreat while he worked on his novel “Another Country” and on notes for the essay that would become “The Fire Next Time.” 1987 was also the year that the first panel of the AIDS quilt came to the campus of the college where my father worked. I remember seeing it displayed in the library, and I remember thinking that the stickers around town with the pink triangles on them said “Science=Death” (which made sense to me, since I hated my science teacher) but having my sister explain that it actually said “Silence=Death.” I remember late night conversations about our local chapter of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, and I remember my mother arguing with our neighbors who thought that having a soup kitchen downtown would attract “a bad element.” I remember that my white friends at school were terrified of New York, but I was mad at my parents for not raising me there because when we visited I got to spend time with all of their interesting artist and writer and musician friends. I recently asked one of those friends, a black gay man in his 50s who still lives in New York, what he remembers about that time and he said “we were always going to marches and funerals and marches and funerals.” Marches and funerals and fighting and mourning and fucking up and starting over and trying again and also celebrating and dancing and dreaming and of course loving and loving and loving.
In the weeks leading up to my Connecticut History Presentation, I had been pestering my teacher about my dissatisfaction with my options for the project. I somehow got it into my head (probably with the help of my parents) to ask Mrs. Cavanaugh exactly how long someone had to live in Connecticut in order to be considered a “significant figure of Connecticut history.” You see, I’d gotten my hands on that William Styron obituary, and an idea was forming in my mind. In what was, I’m sure, a combination of exasperation and desperation on her part, Mrs. Cavanaugh agreed that 3 months was an acceptable amount of time to live in and have an impact on the history of the 3rd smallest state in the union.
My research into Baldwin was sloppy at best. I was only 8 years old, after all. For one thing, I did not know that he was queer. I mean, I knew that he was queer in the same way that I knew that I was queer. Which is to say, I didn’t yet have words to describe the person that I was becoming, but I knew that I wasn’t built for the tiny boxes that the world was trying to put me into, and I knew that my blackness was as important as my girl-ness, but also I knew that I wasn’t like the other girls, and I knew that I cried a lot for no apparent reason, and I knew that I would need to keep some people at a distance to be safe, and I knew that I would have to fight to survive and that my brain was going to be my weapon, and I knew that my parents loved me but didn’t totally understand me, and I knew that art would save me. And I knew that I loved Jimmy and that he loved me even though we would never have the opportunity to meet.
I focused considerable attention on Baldwin’s time in France. He had moved there in the late 1940s and become part of radical left politics. I learned that he resisted all wars, and wrote many books and essays and plays about racial and sexual politics, religion and American culture. I learned that he had been a preacher’s son, and that even as he fled the church, his spiritual core remained a critical part of his life. I learned that he never married or had children, but that he had important relationships with his nieces and nephews as they grew up. For my presentation at the Independent Day School, in the late winter/early Spring of 1988, just a few months after Baldwin’s Death, and just after my 9th birthday, I dressed up in combat boots, green khakis, a black beret, a thin white scarf tied at my neck, and dark sunglasses. I made a long thin cigarette out of construction paper and masking tape. I remember my mother pinning the beret to my short afro with bobby pins, and my sister loaning me a too large denim jacket with tough looking patches on it to sling over my shoulder as I walked on stage in the line up with all of the other children. The other girls wore long skirts to match the Victorian or Puritan dress of their chosen figures, and the boys looked nervous when I crowded to their end of the line-up. I dragged on the cigarette suggestively as I waited my turn on stage to deliver my prepared speech.
I wish my mother had kept a copy of what I wrote in her “Naima” file next to my diplomas and story contest entries and baby pictures. I don’t remember the words as well as I remember the costume and what it felt like to stand nervously in front of my entire school with that construction paper cigarette dangling between my fingers. Here is what I imagine a 9 year old version of me would have said:
“James Baldwin was BLACK and he cared about BLACK people and children and about doing what was right. He was born in 1924 and died last year. He lived in France because that was where he felt that he could be a free man, and that’s important. He lived in Connecticut for a little while where he wrote some VERY IMPORTANT BOOKS that I hope to read when I am older. I did read one of his books, called Little Man, Little Man. It is about black children and their lives, and I wish we could read things like this in school, but Mrs. Cavanaugh says that it had too much violence so instead we read a book about a rabbit, which was dumb and boring, but I still got an A on my report because I’m going to Yale or Howard when I grow up so I can also learn to write important books.”
I do remember that at the end of my speech, I thrust my fist into the air exclaiming “Vive La Resistance!” and stomped off the stage triumphantly.
Twenty-nine years later, in 2016, I am 37 years old and still deeply in love with James Baldwin. I have found his work again and again (or perhaps it has found me) at times when I have needed it. In eighth grade it was Giovanni’s Room. In 11th it was Amen Corner. In my twenties I finally made my way to The Fire Next Time, and I learned that Baldwin’s gift to the world was his unflinching willingness to tell the truth with all of the tools available to him. Two years ago when my mother began excavating “The Naima File” that had outgrown her basement, she found my copy of Little Man, Little Man and mailed it to me for my birthday. I’m reading it now, again and again and again. I’m saved again and again and again, by a mind and heart that is determined to imagine beyond what I’m told is possible. I’m Jimmy and I’m his beloved nephew. I’m a preacher’s son and a musician’s daughter and the great-great-great grandchild of slaves and I’m seaweed under the waves at Jones Beach and I’m a little boy who walks down the street filled with music and I’m a wet eyed mouthy defiant little thing with a mean left hook and the deepest love and loyalty to her friends and I’m a person who keeps mourning and fighting and daydreaming and truth-telling and…
Yours Truly,
Naima
