Author, Author?

With the country on fire, who can tell us how this story ends?

I read James Baldwin’s “Another Country” in another country.

It was my junior year in college, and I was studying abroad in London. I’d taken a few books with me, including Baldwin’s 1962 novel, which is set mostly in Greenwich Village and Harlem in the late 1950's. My copy, which I still have, is a paperback Penguin Twentieth-Century Classic, in black and white and Tiffany blue. The cover is a bit wrinkled, its edges worn, but other than that it’s held up pretty well. Flipping through the pages, I can still see the passages I marked, the blue ink under the lines which struck or moved me.

My ability to recall the plots of books is terrible. I do, however, remember how books make me feel, especially those like “Another Country,” that do more than just tell a good story, but make me think and re-think, challenge my assumptions, and change the way I see the world.

As this country erupts over the murder of George Floyd, I feel myself drawn to Baldwin not so much for his writing on race, but for his singular assessment of humanity, the way he sized us up and dressed us down, his ability to call us out and draw us in, his bravery and dignity and wit.

In her 1987 remembrance of Baldwin for The New York Times, Toni Morrison wrote, “No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did. You made American English honest — genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and…