The Gospel of James Baldwin: Musician Meshell Ndegeocello Rekindles the Fire of Truth for This Time
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."
The history of the world is the history of telling others who and what we are — from tribal markings to national flags to family crests to pronoun-specifying email signatures. Every war that has ever been fought, political or personal, has been staked on these battlegrounds of identity and belonging. Every work of art that has ever been made has turned the battleground into a garden, where these same seeds of selfhood have come abloom in the artist's being to touch with the pollen of some grander beauty and some larger truth other beings, clarifying and fortifying their own identity, their own presence, their own belonging in history. "An artist," James Baldwin told the interviewer in his historic 1963 LIFE profile, "is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are."
Who and what we are is, of course, a complex mosaic with myriad tesserae, drawn from our genetic and cultural inheritance, shaped by the biological ancestors chance has dealt us and shaped equally by the spiritual ancestors we have chosen for ourselves, all of our ancestors themselves shaped by myriad confluences of chance and choice. The mosaic rests atop the most elemental stratum of our nature, for as Rachel Carson observed, "our origins are of the earth… so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity."
Musician and conceptual poet Meshell Ndegeocello reanimates Baldwin's words from that altogether vivifying 1963 interview to weave around them a lush lyric meditation on the roots and realities of personhood in an enchanting prose-poem, part of her multimedia experience Chapter and Verse — a project she envisioned as "a twenty-first-century ritual toolkit for justice, a call for revolution, a gift during turbulent times," inspired by Baldwin's prophetic 1963 book The Fire Next Time, which occasioned the LIFE tribute.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
Complement this small fragment of Ndegeocello's majestic Chapter and Verse with Anne Lamott's lovely letter to children about books as an antidote to isolation and Baldwin's great friend, champion, and fellow genius Gwendolyn Brooks's forgotten 1969 poem about the power of books, then revisit Baldwin's own account of how he read his way from Harlem to the literary pantheon and some of his most poignant, least known words of wisdom set to music by Ndegeocello's friends and frequent collaborators Morley and Chris Bruce.
The Root of Our Trouble (Né à Nouveau) from Meshell Ndegeocello on Vimeo.
“A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear in his parents’ voices because his parents hold up the world for him and he has no protection without them.’ — James Baldwin, ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’ (1962)
My parents were both born and raised in the south; my father enlisted in the Army enabling him to travel. I believe this contributed to his bitterness once returning to the US. European travel accompanied by the daily struggle of military service and taking care of a family because much like Rufus in Baldwins, Another Country, he pined for a career as a Jazz musician. My mother had a 4th-grade education and suffered from mental illness; she had a challenging, painful life, mostly working as a domestic or home health aide to the elderly. I know very little about my mother; I do know she was old enough to remember sharecropping on tobacco farms. My mother also suffered from the patriarchy; my father would not allow her to have her own bank account. The world they raised me in was troubled, harsh, filled with anguish, judgment, physical and sexual abuse, along with disturbing ideas about race. Music, books, people, art and theatre, I believe with all my heart, saved me from madness and my harrowing adventures in Christianity, other religions, drugs, and alcohol, and, as Baldwin put it, “my sexual career.”Baldwin writes in THE FIRE NEXT TIME, “I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was and limit me that way, and polish me off that way” I did not allow my upbringing and experiences to “finish” me off that way either. I’m grateful to those before me, beside me, and in front of me for safe passage in this realm.
I try with all my heart to create work that allows others the freedom to think and create for themselves. THE GOSPEL OF JAMES BALDWIN EMPLOYS GIFTED AND TALENTED HUMANS; IT ALLOWS FOR A FAIR WAGE, COMMUNION WITH OTHERS, AND THINGS UNSEEN.
Baldwin writes …”there seems to be no way whatsoever to remove this cloud that stood between them and the sun, between them and love and life and power, between them and whatever it was that they wanted. Baldwin gave me language for my brokenness, allowing healing and understanding to not only the personal but an account of how the systems at work made it hard for my parents even to begin to raise a resilient human ready to engage with life. “
– Meshell Ndegeocello
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