In Remembrance of Baldwin
Over the years, I’ve written a lot about Baldwin, but every time an anniversary comes up about him, I still take pause. On this day in 1987, James Baldwin passed away in Saint Paul-de-Vence, where he lived out a lot of his last years.
In 2016, I traveled to France for the first time, met my first boyfriend, and could go back for three months in 2018 at the age of 24 as a way to commemorate Baldwin. I wrote about this experience for Catapult Story in the essay, “In an America on Fire, Baldwin’s Legacy Led Me to Paris".
The essay mines the many struggles and triumphs of Baldwin as a black, literary icon and man of wonder and romance.
I sometimes had to cave inside of myself and try to stamp out the rage at a white logic about the black body that had infected the entire world.