The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin

Author:James Baldwin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

I think I understand the meaning of this exceedingly laconic and loaded exchange, which could take place only among Black people, in this country, now.

I remember a boy named Buddy, just before or just after I joined the church. I was about fourteen. He was seventeen. I met him a few times, very briefly. He had been a friend of the “older” boys in church, but they no longer spoke to him.

I remember seeing him, for the last time, on the avenue, in the daytime. I was coming home from school. He looked very sad and weary, with a cigarette between his heavy lips.

I remember the cigarette because the cigarette signaled, proved, his sinful state. He had been a member of the church, sanctified, holy, but had “backslid,” had “gone back into the world,” and we were forbidden to speak to him. By speaking to Buddy, I risked a reprimand and might have been forced to undertake a purifying fast.

Yet, I spoke to him. We talked for a little while. But he scarcely knew me—I was not one of the “older” boys. I still remember his face, lightless and lonely, unbelievably lonely, looking at something far away or deep within.

I remember watching him walk away, down the avenue. In my memory, he is wearing a black winter coat. I never saw him again. Very shortly afterward, he died, I was told, of TB: tuberculosis.

The encounter, his face, and the aftermath—his death—haunted me for many years; in some way, obviously, it haunts me still. I had the feeling, dimly, then, but very vividly later, that he died because he had been rejected by the only community he knew, that we had had it in our power to bring the light back to his eyes. He was a sinner and he died, therefore, in sin; but, we are all sinners. Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone. But I could not say that, then. It was when I found myself unable not to say it that I, too, left the church—the community; and it took me many years to realize that the community that had formed me had also brought about that hour and that rupture.

I was acting, after all, on the moral assumptions I had inherited from the community that had produced me. I had been told to love everybody. Whoever else did not believe this, I did. The way of the transgressor is hard, indeed, but it is hard because the community produces the transgressor in order to renew itself. I am afraid that this mathematic, this inexorability, will last as long as life lasts, and I would not have to risk sounding so grandiose were I not under the necessity of attempting to excavate the meaning of the word community—which, as I have understood it, simply means our endless connection with, and responsibility for, each other.

I say all that to suggest this: there is something profound and unanswerable stirring in the consciousness of all mankind today, and our identities, with every breath we take, are being altered.

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