“You will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earthquake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win,” are the words that opened “Reading James Baldwin (1924-1987): A Celebration of Baldwin’s Writing.”  

The event was held by the Mandel Center for the Humanities and the Creative Writing program on the evening of March 20 in the Mandel Atrium. A collection of Baldwin lovers and students from various courses, such as Prof. Stephen McCauley’s (ENG) Fiction Workshop: Short Fiction class, gathered to listen, speak and eat pizza. About a dozen students and faculty got up to the microphone and read from their favorite passages. Some participants spoke in reverence of Baldwin, others described the significance of a particular passage and a few simply read aloud. 

A black and white photo of the writer and civil rights activist was displayed behind the speaking area. “Giovanni’s Room,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Sweet Lorraine,” “Another Country,” “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “The Giver” are all works that speakers pulled from. Although the variety of pieces read and people speaking was extensive, an encompassing theme emerged: love. 

James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York, in 1924. He was the eldest of nine children and watched over his siblings with care in their strict, religious household. At 19, when his stepfather died, Baldwin picked up odd jobs to support his three brothers and five sisters. He played guitar in cafes after dark and wrote into the night. 

In Harlem, Baldwin was met with racism and homophobia. He was often subjected to beatings from police and residents in his neighborhood. Baldwin left to find safety, and at the age of 24 he obtained a fellowship for a novel and moved to Paris. He spent 40 years living abroad but visited the US often. During those years he wrote eight novels as well as essays, poems and non-fiction pieces that drew from his  life. 

Halfway through the event, Assistant Professor Andie Berry (THA) stepped up to the microphone. “Baldwin has resonated in my childhood home, consciousness and life,” Berry said. She emphasized the beauty of his writings and how his depiction of love — both romantic and platonic — can be universally felt. She read from “Sweet Lorraine,” a love letter and tribute to Baldwin’s close friend Lorraine Hansberry. “Sweet Lorraine. That's the way I always felt about her, and so I won't apologize for calling her that now. She understood it: in that far too brief a time when we walked and talked and laughed and drank together, sometimes in the streets and bars and restaurants of the Village, sometimes at her house, gracelessly fleeing the houses of others,” read Berry. 

Associate Professor David Sherman (ENG) read from “Another Country,” a 1962 novel. “The question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he would never recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?” read Sherman. Sherman reflected on Baldwin’s ability to create images so specific that they become universal. He spoke slowly and steadily. 

Baldwin passed away in 1987 after a brief battle against stomach cancer. Writers Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou all spoke at his wake. Angelou said that Baldwin’s love “opened the unusual door for me, and I am blessed that James Baldwin was my brother.” 

The event ended with a reading of “The Giver,” a poem Baldwin wrote for his mother. The poem’s first stanza reads, “If the hope of giving / is to love the living, / the giver risks madness / in the act of giving.” 

After closing remarks from Professor Ulka Anjaria (ENG), audience members reflected on their desire for something of this nature to be done for all their favorite authors.