"The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin"

"On good days, being the first black intern meant doing my work quickly and sounding extra witty around the water cooler; it meant I was chipping away at the glass ceiling that seemed to top most of the literary world. But on bad days I gagged on my resentment and furiously wondered why I was selected. I became paranoid that I was merely a product of affirmative action, even though I knew wasn’t. I hadn’t mentioned my race in either of my two accepted applications. Still, I never felt like I was actually good enough. And with my family and friends so proud of me, I felt like I could not burst their bubble with my insecurity and trepidation...

What makes us want to run away? Or go searching for a life away from ours? The term “black refugees” applies most specifically to the black American men and women who escaped in 1812 to the British navy’s boats and were later taken to freedom in Nova Scotia and Trinidad, but don’t many of us feel like black refugees. Baldwin called these feelings, the sense of displacement and loss that many Black Americans ponder, the “heavy” questions, and heavy they are indeed...

Baldwin left the States for the primary reason that all emigrants do — because anywhere seems better than home. This freedom-seeking gay man, who deeply loved his sisters and brothers — biological and metaphorical — never left them at all. In France, I saw that Baldwin didn’t live the life of a wealthy man, but he did live the life of man who wanted to travel, to erect an estate of his own design, and write as an outsider, alone in silence. He had preserved himself...

Last week, when I got back from seeing his brown typewriter, I wrote down the word “joy” and underlined it three times, like it was an obligation, a chore, something that I would have to find, if not fight for. I did this because isn’t the more intimate, tenebrous story the one where we recognize each other not only in our despair but also in our joy? In your rainbow ink and your sleeplessness nights, in your demands and, in your nieces and nephews who love you like a black god. I will find you — in the enthusiasms of our people’s style, our verve and our wit, the way you slouched in your seat and crossed your legs, in the ways that they will misunderstand you but we will always know you, in the abridgments that we will make to history, changing it forever."

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelkaadzighansah/the-weight-of-james-arthur-baldwin-203?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Longform%2036&utm_content=Longform%2036+CID_1f6cbfdaead99b8325fe82ef937cbe64&utm_source=BuzzFeed%20Newsletters&utm_term=.gaa33kAJjJ#.qwV44qKP2P