The Gospel According to James Baldwin: An Interview With Greg Garrett, Part 4

Editor’s Note: This is the third of a four-part interview with Dr. Greg Garrett, who will be a guest on the Good Faith Weekly podcast on Friday, March 15. The interview has been minimally edited for conciseness. (Part 1 can be found here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.) 

My interview with Greg Garrett, author of “The Gospel According to James Baldwin” concludes with a discussion of the future of James Baldwin’s work in colleges and universities and gleanings from a would-be syllabus, the reasons why Baldwin remains “America’s great prophet” and with race no longer a part of the conversation, what he would talk to Baldwin about when they met in the New Jerusalem.

Starlette: You’ve been a professor at Baylor University for more than thirty years. In your estimation, what of James Baldwin’s writings should be required reading in colleges and universities? 

Greg: Starlette, Baylor just granted permission for me to add a permanent undergrad class on Baldwin to the curriculum and I taught a graduate seminar on Baldwin and the Civil Rights era last fall. So, I’ve been thinking about Baldwin for just this question! I won’t bore our readers with a fifteen-week syllabus, but I do want to offer folks some suggestions to read or to return to. 

First, I’ve said often in interviews (and may very well tell Mitch and Missy on Good Faith Weekly!) that I would hold up the first seven pages of “The Fire Next Time” (“My Dungeon Shook”) with any seven pages written by any American author. Ever. Forever. 

In that letter to his nephew James, Baldwin is brutally honest about all these things you’ve asked in your marvelous questions, and yet he imbues his lines with so much beauty and his conclusion is about the beauty and strength of Black people and the possibility of hope. I’d hope people would read the entire book—I’ve had so many students tell me it rocked their worlds, and it is the one book I carry in my backpack everywhere I travel—but even that first short essay would be an eye-opener.

Then, depending on the course (“Fire” could be taught in American History, American Religion, political science, literature, and theology courses, among others), I’d recommend the novels “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Giovanni’s Room” and “Another Country”; all of them artful and important books. “If Beale Street Could Talk” is strong up until its ending, but it is so well-written up to that point and covers so many themes and things that Baldwin cares about, that I do recommend it, as well as the beautiful 2018 adaptation by Barry Jenkins. (I also often teach “I Am Not Your Negro,” which might be the best introduction to Baldwin, his life, and his work.)

Not everyone knows Baldwin was a proficient dramatic writer, but he had a real gift for it. Of the plays, the best is “Blues for Mister Charlie,” which was produced on Broadway in 1964, and which the New York Times called “a thunderous battle cry.” I also discovered as I was reading for the book, “One Day When I Was Lost,” Baldwin’s scenario/screenplay for a film based on “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” I like to pair those two, both great and important works. Baldwin’s screenplay was the basis for Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” but the Baldwin family asked for Baldwin to be uncredited, since Spike, being Spike, made substantial changes to the screenplay. 

Then, besides “Fire Next Time,” I’d encourage people to read the essays. I really do think Baldwin is one of the greatest essayists ever and the greatest American writer on race save, perhaps, Frederick Douglass. Notes of a Native Son contains the early essays that made his name as a critic and intellectual of the Civil Rights movement. 

“Nobody Knows My Name” shows Baldwin growing into his roles as a witness to racism and a prophetic voice of justice. My favorite of the nonfiction works is “No Name in the Street,” which is the closest to memoir, and shows Baldwin grappling with the losses of dear friends and the ultimate failure of the Civil Rights movement to shift the dial permanently. Like the first pages of “Fire Next Time,” the pages where Baldwin writes about Dr. King’s death and funeral are transcendent—so powerful, so sorrowful, so beautiful. 

Finally, I like to assign “The Devil Finds Work” to my film classes. It’s Baldwin returning to his roots as cultural critic and meditating on the failures of Hollywood films to adequately address the Black experience or push America forward, and I think anyone who is a film buff would find value in Baldwin’s clear critical eye.

Starlette: You say, “every age is an age of Baldwin.” Why does he remain “America’s great prophet”? 

Greg: I’m a devout Christian, so please believe that I don’t play the Jesus card without great consideration. I need Jesus’ teachings to convince me that I can be better, that the world can be more just, and that whatever I understand the New Jerusalem to be, there is hope. Love—pure, powerful, unconditional love—has won the day, and has defeated sin and death, although the world does not, mostly, recognize this yet.

I read and recommend Baldwin partly because he leads me back to these truths of my faith—I think of Baldwin as a wise uncle who may have left the church but never stopped thinking about its lessons—but mostly because he tells the truth with such beauty that even when I find myself convicted, captured in his spotlight, I know he also believes I can do better. We can do better. Maybe every age needs to be reminded that to live in a false reality is soul-killing, that to treat anyone as less human damages both the acted-on and the actor, and that although we have sinned and come short of the glory of God—or the unrealized ideals of America’s founders—hope endures. Love endures. The words of Baldwin endure, for this age, and the one after this, until we come to the end of the age.

And maybe even after. 

One interviewer, Rob Lee, asked me what I’d say to Mr. Baldwin if we met in the New Jerusalem, whatever that is. First, although I didn’t say this, I hope that he would invite me to call him “Jimmy,” as his friends did. What I did say: “If we’re in the New Jerusalem, we’d no longer need to talk about race and justice, because those would be part of the old hateful past. So, I’d want to talk to him about truth and beauty.”

And I do. May it be so.