Significant Others - James Baldwin and Maya Angelou

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

Without the profound connection between these two artists, would the world ever have gotten I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings? Starring: Christina Elmore as Maya Angelou and Larry Powell as James Baldwin. Also starring Angelica Chéri as Lorraine Hansberry. Source List:James Baldwin: A Biography, By David Adams LeemingThe Three Mothers, by Anna Malaika TubbsNotes of a Native Son, by James BaldwinAt 80, Maya Angelou Reflects on a ‘Glorious’ Life, NPR, 2008The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou, Compilation copyright 2004 by Random House, Inc.Conversations With a Native SonJames Baldwin Biographical Timeline, American Masters, PBSMaya Angelou, World History ProjectJames Baldwin’s Sexuality: Complex and Influential, NBC News“James Baldwin on Langston Hughes”,  The Langston Hughes Review, James Baldwin and Clayton Riley “Talking Back to Maya Angelou”, by Hilton Als, The New Yorker“Songbird”, by Hilton Als, The New Yorker“A Brother’s Love”, by Maya Angelou“James Baldwin Denounced Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son’ as a ‘Protest Novel,’ Was he Right?” by Ayana Mathis and Pankaj Mishra, The New York Times“After a 30 Year Absence, the Controversial ‘Porgy and Bess’ is Returning to the Met Opera”, by Brigit Katz, Smithsonian Magazine“Published More Than 50 Years Ago, ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ Launched a Revolution”, by Veronica Chambers, Smithsonian Magazine“On the Horizon: On Catfish Row”, by James Baldwin“James Baldwin: Great Writers of the 20th Century” “An Introduction to James Baldwin”, National Museum of African American History & Culture“‘The Blacks,’ Landmark Off-Broadway Show, Gets 42nd Anniversary Staging, Jan 31”, by Robert Simonson, Playbill “Do the White Thing”, by Brian Logan“James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket”, American Masters, PBS“James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction”, by Jordan Elgrably“The American Dream and the American Negro”, by James Baldwin“The History That James Baldwin Wanted America to See”, by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.“Lost and ... Found?: James Baldwin’s Script and Spike Lee’s ‘Malcolm X.’” by D. Quentin Miller, African American Review

This episode contains mentions of suicide and sexual violence. Welcome to Significant Others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side of history. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in this episode, we focus on a couple who are not technically related, but became family anyway. Neither of them toiled in obscurity, nor did one depend more on the other for his or her success, but they understood each other in a way few others could. And that connection not only changed the course

of at least one of their careers, it was integral to their survival. This time on Significant Others, meet James Baldwin and Maya Angelou. A note on the voices. Often on this podcast, we're talking about folks whose voices were never recorded or at least aren't super familiar to our ears. But Maya Angelou's voice is not only quite distinctive, it's very well known. Rather than trying to imitate it, we simply brought in a wonderful actor to bring Miss Angelou's words to life. The life of the artist is not an easy one.

Nor, historically speaking, is the life of a Black American. To be both of these things at once requires talent, support, and courage, because artists have to tell the truth, and the truth can be dangerous. No one knew this better than Maya Angelou and her friend James Baldwin. Angelou famously stopped speaking as a child because she feared her words had the power to kill. Baldwin had a breakdown when he realized his words couldn't keep anyone from being killed. When they met in the early 1950s, they were two Americans living in Paris, having, to various degrees, fled the country that both gave birth to and oppressed them. Baldwin was already a serious writer with a reputation as an intellectual, but Angelou was on an adventure, halfway between the events of her childhood and the moment at which she would

sit down to capture them. In her best-selling autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, that book made her a star and launched a genre. And had it not been for her friendship with James Baldwin, she might never have written it at all. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a touchstone, especially for those who had not seen evidence of their own lived experience in memoir form before. Hilton Alves, writing for The New Yorker, said that before Angelou, Black women found it difficult to rewrite themselves as central characters. Only in private could they

talk about their personal lives. But Angelou took these stories public. She wrote about Blackness from the inside without apology or defense. Detailing the specifics of Angelou's early life from her fervent wish as a Black girl in a deeply segregated Southern town to be white, to giving birth to her own child at 17, the memoir spoke to so many who had never before felt spoken to, who thought their lives were somehow not worth the ink. Oprah Winfrey, in her foreword to the 2015 edition, called the book a talisman. The artists who claim her as an influence include, but are not limited to, Rihanna, Kanye, and Amanda Gorman. The book has been translated into 17 languages and never once gone out of print in the 53 years

since it was published. Angelou wrote, all told, seven autobiographies. But that was not what she set out to do in the beginning of her career at all. In fact, the beginning of her career was more like beginnings. She was an actor, a dancer, a singer, a poet, a playwright, a sex worker, and, oh yes, she became the first Black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco at the age of 16, long before she wrote the first of her personal histories. She had apparently no interest in writing any of them. So what changed? According to Angelou, in a 2008 interview with NPR, 2008 interview with NPR. My editor had talked to James Baldwin, my brother, friend, and Jimmy had told him that if you want Maya Angelou to do something, you just tell her that she can't do it.

There are many people to thank for the existence of any book. In her acknowledgments for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou thanks her mother and her brother Bailey, and Robert Loomis, the editor who ultimately conspired with Baldwin to get her to write it. And of course, we all have the author herself to thank, too. But this story's other hero is himself already well-studied. He has been called the conscience of a generation striving for racial equality and is a major force in the American canon of literature. But he shines here in a role he may be less well-known for, the role of brother-friend.

What brought James Baldwin and Maya Angelou to Paris in the early 50s was, in some respects, quite different. Angelou had arrived as a dancer in a early 50s was, in some respects, quite different. Angelou had arrived as a dancer in a traveling production of Porgy and Bess. Baldwin had been living there on and off for years by that point, building a body of work, falling in love, and picking fights with Richard Wright in literary journals. When asked later in life what she thought of him at first, Angelou said, He was small and hot and dancing himself. I mean, his movements were always the movements of a dancer.

So when I met Jimmy, well, we liked each other. In a piece she wrote decades later, she put it a bit differently. He and I and the world were young enough to believe ourselves independently salvageable. Their early meetings were most likely superficial, bumping into each other at the Calypso Club

where Angelou sang at night, or in bars or cafes with other expats. Angelou was focused on making as much money as possible to send home to her young son, while Baldwin was marinating in emancipation, conversation, and whiskey. Paris is, according to the legend, the city where everyone loses his head

and his morals lives through at least one histoire de more, ceases quite to arrive anywhere on time, and thumbs his nose at the Puritans. The city, in brief, were all become drunken on the fine old air of freedom. Angelou was in Paris almost by happenstance, but Baldwin was very much there on purpose. He had escaped there from New York City in 1948 with $40 in his pocket, following in the footsteps of Richard Wright, who had become his mentor. He was both chasing a literary career and attempting to, in his words,

cheat destruction by leaving home. It was not the first time he had left. In fact, the story of his early life reads like the story of someone trying repeatedly to run away from home, if one's true home is the self. Baldwin had been born to a single mother who, according to Anna Malaika Tubbs in her book, The Three Mothers, was likely the source of Baldwin's literary talent. Tubbs writes that, at school, Jimmy was the best writer in the building, including the adults, and it was clear to them where he got his talents. Years later, the principal would still remember the beauty of the notes that Bernice Baldwin wrote to explain her son's absences. Those notes may have been flowing frequently during Baldwin's early teen years when he was losing faith in everything, from school to the church to his own parents. faith in everything, from school to the church to his own parents. He had recently learned that David Baldwin, the man he knew as his father, was actually his stepfather. Berdice had married David

when James was two and then went on to have eight more children with him. But James only learned the truth of this accidentally, having overheard his parents talking about it when he was a teenager. accidentally, having overheard his parents talking about it when he was a teenager. David was already by that point a deeply formative influence on James. Enraged at the world that had enslaved his mother and continued to oppress him, David Baldwin had been bent into bitterness by life, but he found dignity in the church. As a Pentecostal preacher, he funneled his rage into righteousness at the pulpit. Writer Anamalika Tubbs says, David experienced the tragedies of racial violence and lived with the daily fear and torment. In seeking relief from these, he sought God. He saw the white man

as the devil and he knew that God would punish white people for their sins. It was a religious tradition not based on love. David's God was punitive, vengeful, and, ironically, yet another hallmark of white supremacist society. As David Leeming puts it in his book, James Baldwin, a biography, Instead of the loving father for whom the young James so longed, the father he was still trying to create in his very last novel. The Baldwin family suffered the presence of a Black parody of the white great God Almighty, so essential to the tradition of the Calvinist American dream they were not allowed to share. I had to fight him so hard nobody ever frightened me since. I fought my father so hard that in a sense I became a writer because of him. Because he was afraid I couldn't do it.

Because he said I couldn't do it. And because on a level I couldn't understand then, because I loved him. And I thought that if I got through, that ultimately my old man would be proud of me. But pride was a luxury David Baldwin could not afford. He would never, no matter how hard he worked, raise his family out of poverty. And the shame and resentment he felt literally drove him mad.

It also made him cruel. He taunted James for the way his eyes looked, a criticism that would haunt James forever. He told him he was the, quote, ugliest child he had ever seen. He beat him for small mistakes and had him circumcised at the age of five, which James later interpreted as an attempt to cleanse him of the sin of his illegitimate birth. David's anger was understood by James later to be self-hatred. It had something to do with his blackness, I think. He was very black, with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black, but did not know that he was beautiful.

In his essay, The Fire Next Time, framed as a letter to his nephew, Baldwin wrote of his father, He was defeated long before he died, because at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. But of course, James wanted to please and impress this father. Poignantly, one of his earliest memories is of looking at David's face and knowing he was loved by him. So when James

became a preacher too at the age of 14, it was partly an homage to his father, but it was also an attempt to avoid the truth of himself as a sexual being. When James was 13, the summer before he became a preacher, he was molested by a stranger in public. Asked to run an errand, James was expecting a dime in exchange for helping with the shopping, but instead found himself cornered and caressed by a 30-year-old man he didn't know. A loud noise frightened the man away and that was the end of it, but James had been aroused by the contact and was ashamed. He was aware already that Black men's bodies and their sexuality had been fetishized and mythologized by the white world, and he was

reluctant to become a part of that conversation. Any evidence at all of sexuality in himself was terrifying. Homosexuality presented an extra layer of danger. So he went to church and had an experience there that was a kind of ecstatic release and felt like an acceptable alternative outlet for his sexual energies. Within a year, he was preaching himself. Delivering sermons was the realization of a childhood fantasy. He would stand on a hill in Central Park and imagine himself as a celebrated hero being adored by the masses down below. This sense of himself as a prophet resonated throughout his life. But within a few years, the allure of the church wore off as Baldwin came to realize its hypocrisies and flaws, and that piety did not

ensure virtue. Physical nearness to some of the church sisters was, sexually, almost as complicated as the assault from the stranger on the street. Meanwhile, in school, he was discovering an option that felt even more like salvation—the written word. He had always been a voracious reader, but by the time he graduated, he was writing stories, plays, and poems, and on his senior yearbook page said he wanted to become a novelist playwright. He knew, however, that he would be forging a difficult path if he were to try to achieve that goal from within the walls of his parents' apartment. By the time he was graduating from high school, Baldwin felt like an outsider at home on multiple counts by virtue of his

homosexuality, his illegitimate birth, and his artistic ambitions. Not only was his stepfather David a destructive presence descending further into madness, But with eight younger siblings, the burden of care on the eldest son was great. In addition, the Harlem Renaissance had by then faded into history. Biographer Leeming says, Baldwin always said that 16 was the age at which the child in Harlem can suddenly see the past and the future,

his future, in his father's or his mother's eyes, in the drunks and pimps of the street. It was the age when people went mad, and he saw madness overtake several of the adolescents in his church. If escape number one for James Baldwin had been to go into the church, then escape number two lay in leaving it and going south, from Harlem to Greenwich Village. It was a stepping stone to a more racially integrated, sexually open, artistic society. It gave Baldwin room to wrestle more deeply with his identity, but not yet room enough to completely inhabit it. He was now sleeping with both women and men, but still feared his homosexual urges and couldn't yet allow himself to bring

sex into his relationships with the men he loved. When one of these men jumped off the George Washington Bridge, Baldwin felt both guilt and fear that he was headed in a similar direction. All around, he saw avenues to the future closing off. His stepfather had been institutionalized, to the future closing off. His stepfather had been institutionalized. Harlem had become a ghetto. He had no money, no prospects, and most men who looked like him wound up either in jail or the morgue.

Richard Wright was an inspiration as a successful Black American author, but he had moved to France, and Baldwin was already starting to feel pigeonholed by the publishing industry as a, quote, Negro writer. When I was 22, I started waiting on tables in a village restaurant and writing book reviews, mostly, as it turned out, about the Negro problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert.

So when James left home for Paris at the age of 24, escape number three, he was not only running toward a career as a serious writer, he was running away from a society he sensed would either take his life or persuade him to take it himself. In 1948, James Baldwin landed in Paris and went directly from the airport to Les Deux Magots, the café made famous by Hemingway and Camus, to join Richard Wright and Jean-Paul Sartre and some friends who were launching a literary magazine. Thus began the initial phase

of his expatriation, which, Richard Wright aside, was spent largely either alone or in the company of white bohemians who had money and so could feed and house him. He noticed that he wasn't the only one who felt less self-conscious while traveling. According to biographer Leeming, Baldwin basked in the feeling that in Paris, American whites seemed relieved at not having to concern themselves with questions of skin color. While he missed the sights, smells, and sounds of home, he also noticed that meeting other Black Americans abroad sometimes brought joy, but it also brought the memory of what he called... Past humiliations. but it also brought the memory of what he called past humiliations. One day, in another cafe, Baldwin was sitting with a friend

and heard a French woman say, look at the Americans. As David Leeming puts it, he was clearly included in a group he had come to Europe to escape. He glimpsed the fact that whatever he might feel about it, he was an American. In France, Baldwin was unburdened by the legacy of American slavery, in the sense of his being seen as inferior by a ruling class.

But he also now saw that, like it or not, he and the members of that ruling class were in it together, no matter what they might think of each other. No one gets to choose his inheritance, and for Americans, this means that the history of our divisions is part of what unites us. When Angelou arrived in Paris, she was not so much running away from America as she was running toward the rest of the world. She had packed a lot into her first 30 years, having survived childhood in an intensely racist town

and relocated to San Francisco, where she became a single mom at 17, she then worked as a fry cook and a waitress, eventually turning tricks and narrowly escaping the junkie's life when her friend wouldn't let her shoot up. She had been married and divorced, moved to New York and back, performed as a calypso dancer, and nearly lost her son to a deranged caretaker, all by the age of 26. In 1954, she had just been offered a role in a new Truman Capote musical in New York when the Porgy and Bess offer came the same day. And while the musical was an amazing opportunity, for Angelou there was no question which job she would rather take. As a piece of theater, Corgi and Bess is problematic. It was the first opera about Black American life, and the creative team behind it had not one Black American on it.

Baldwin himself wrote in a review of the 1959 film version, It is an extraordinarily vivid, good-natured, and sometimes moving show. Just the same, it is a white man's vision of Negro life. But Angelou had seen the stage show in San Francisco and fallen in love. Whatever its flaws, the joy and camaraderie of the cast was authentic and intoxicating, and she wanted to go wherever it could take her, especially abroad. I wanted to travel, to try to speak other languages, to see the cities I had read about all my life. But most important, I wanted to be with a large, friendly group of Black people who sang so gloriously and lived with such passion.

Like Baldwin, Angelou had her own sense of liberation immediately upon leaving the country, just by setting foot in Canada. Among the many perversities in American race relations is the fact that Blacks do not relish looking closely at whites. After hundreds of years of being the invisible people ourselves, as soon as many of us have achieved economic security, we try to force whites into non-existence by ignoring them. Montreal provided me with my first experience of looking freely at whites. When she got to Paris, Angelou did not report finding it as complicated in terms of identity as Baldwin did. In fact, she enjoyed it so much, she almost decided to stay and raise her son there. The Africans said that in France I would never hear of lynchings and riots,

and I would not be refused service in any restaurant or hotel in the country. The people were civilized. And anyway, the French people loved Negroes. The French were indeed thrilled by Black American artists, Josephine Baker, case in point. But one night, Angelou discovered that her African friends were not so universally beloved when she introduced a wealthy white patron to two men from Senegal

who were not part of the Porgy and Bess cast. I said, these are friends from Africa. When the import of my statement struck her, the smile involuntarily slid from her face, and she recovered her hand from my grasp. The freak? The freak? She looked at me

as if I had betrayed her. So Angelou decided France was no freer from prejudice than any place else and continued her journey around the world with the rest of the cast. Her next encounter

with James Baldwin would come at the hands of another theatrical adventure. In 1960, Angelou was cast in an upcoming New York production of Jean Genet's play The Blacks, in which a group of Black characters enact a ritual rape and murder of a white woman for the entertainment of another group of Black characters who are wearing white masks. The play was written as a challenge to France's legacy of colonial oppression in Africa. Norman Mailer called it the truest and most explosive play anyone has yet written about the guilt and horror in the white man's heart as he turns to face his judge.

Lorraine Hansberry called it more than anything else, a conversation between white men about themselves. Suffice to say, the play can be difficult to appreciate, and Angelou didn't when she first read it. She rejected the premise of it, which condemned systemic oppression, but portrayed whites and blacks as being equally susceptible to the corrupting influence of power. In Angelou's view, Blacks were much better, which is itself a flawed premise. As Hansberry put it, Of course, oppression makes people better than their oppressors,

but that is not a condition sealed in the loins by genetic mysteries. Angelou saw Genet's play at first as a white foreigner's idea of a people he did not understand. Jeunet had superimposed the meanness and cruelty of his own people onto a race he had never known, a race already nearly doubled over carrying the white man's burden of greed and guilt. So when the director wanted to cast her, she was inclined not to do it. But then, her husband at the time, a Black South African activist, caught wind of it and said the one word that always spurred Maya Angelou into action. No. You do not perform in public, he told her,

superimposing, if not meanness and cruelty, then at least the limitations of his cultural context onto his half-American marriage. So first, Angelou changed her own mind about the play, and then she set about changing his. When the first rehearsal rolled around, there she was with the rest of the cast, which also included James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Roscoe Lee Brown, and Lou Gossett Jr. Baldwin was, by this time, back in New York himself, having stopped finally trying to escape who he was and where he came from. The years in France had allowed him to be more honest about himself, his sexuality, and his place in American society.

He was surer than ever that self-denial causes destruction. If I love you, I love you. And if I love you and duck it, I die. And he knew that hatred causes destruction too. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated. And he had begun to apply these truths to his idea of America itself. He saw it as a country that has long ignored the truth of itself and is suffering for it.

We are not, as a nation, divided, he argued. We are not a country of blacks and whites at war with one another. Rather, we are a nation that has divided itself into false categories. You're only white as long as you think I'm black. We have constructed a lie, and until we correct it, none of us will ever be free. One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds. The civil rights struggle was heating up, and he had begun traveling to the South in order to write about it for Esquire and Harper's, and going back to Harlem to write about that, too. And he could see that one side of America's divide was better acquainted with the truth than the other. In a 1962 essay in The New Yorker, he wrote,

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling. That their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen. Or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace. That Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors. That American men are the world's most direct and viral. That American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that.

The oppressor clings to delusion because it benefits him, but the oppressed can see the truth. Color is not a human or a personal reality. It is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the Black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Baldwin argued that Black Americans were, and are, as long as they continue to be oppressed, key to this country's salvation from destruction at the hands of a false identity. If we, and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious Blacks,

who must, like lovers, insist on or create the consciousness of the others, do not falter in our duty now. We may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country and change the history of the world. Baldwin had seen The Blacks when it opened in Paris and found it both formally and thematically powerful. As Hansberry put it, the play explores the idea that

it is the reflection of oneself that most enrages when we are engaged in our crimes against a fellow human creature. This was a truth Baldwin had first absorbed at the hands of his stepfather's brutality. Years later, he would write, It is a terrible and inexorable law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own. In the face of one's victim, one sees oneself. So when Genet's play opened in New York under the direction of a friend, Baldwin sat in on rehearsals and spent hours talking things down with the cast.

This is when he and Angelou began to grow close. But the first sign of real friendship comes in an anecdote she shared in her fourth memoir about being forced to leave the show suddenly. The New York production included music composed by Max Roach, the legendary jazz drummer. You can check him out on YouTube if you don't, like some of us do, happen to have a jazz musician in your family who likes to share these kinds of clips with you on the regular. Roach's wife, the singer Abby Lincoln, had been cast in The Blacks as well. But on opening night, there was a sudden change. Lincoln was gone, and Roach's music was too.

Roach said the producers had reneged on their agreement with him, so he was pulling both his compositions and his wife from the show. Lincoln's understudy had worked with Angelou and Porgy and Bess, and the two of them clicked quickly into gear together. In a single afternoon, they wrote two songs so the show could go on, which it did for more than 1,400 performances. It was, in the end, one of the longest-running shows off-Broadway at the time. But only a fraction of the performances featured Angelou. Because when she and the other actress demanded

to be paid for the music they had created, the show's producer Sidney Bernstein, after first trying to deflect, said finally, according to Angelou, you didn't compose anything. I saw you. You just sat down at the piano and made something up. Angelou knew she was being screwed over, but she didn't know what to do about it. She was still under contract to the show. She relayed the conversation to her husband and to Baldwin, who happened to be standing there. Her husband, the one who had forbidden her from taking the role in the first place, told her she had just given her last performance, but she knew she couldn't leave without giving notice. I whispered to Jim,

Tell him I can't do that. Please explain. He doesn't understand. To Angelou's surprise, Baldwin pushed back. He understands, Maya. He understands more about what Bernstein has done than you. Don't worry, you'll be all right. Angelou broke a lot of ground in her life,

but she was not one to break a rule. She was more focused on holding up her end of the contract than on protesting the producer's ill treatment of her. So her husband did it for her, sending a telegram to the producer that his wife would not be returning to the show because she resisted the exploitation of herself and her people. Baldwin applauded the move and said, See, Maya Angelou, I told you, you have nothing to worry about.

It was not long after that that Angelou and Baldwin became, almost officially, family. One afternoon, after drinking and discussing literature for hours, Baldwin put Angelou in a cab and took her home to meet his mother. Mama, I'm bringing you something you really don't need. Another daughter. Birdies Baldwin had nine children. Yet she smiled at me as if she had been eagerly awaiting the tenth. When Angelou said she considered herself lucky to have been adopted into the Baldwin family, her friend replied, That's not true. You marched into it. On Angelou's 40th birthday, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed. In the days that followed,

Angelou, like so many others, was cloaked in depression. Finally, Baldwin, who subscribed to the philosophy that psychic joy is a spiritual responsibility, called her up and said, You need to laugh. Put on something that makes you feel pretty. I'm taking you somewhere. That somewhere was a dinner party at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife, Judy. They did laugh, a lot. And they told their stories, Baldwin talking of his days as a teen preacher and Jules remembering his time in college. And Angelou, for perhaps the first time, talked about her

childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, which had not played out as a comedy, but did have its moments of dark humor. The white folks are so prejudiced in my town, a colored person is not allowed to eat vanilla ice cream. After the dinner, Angelou remembers saying, I was so glad to laugh. And Baldwin said to her, We survived slavery. You know how? We put surviving into our poems and into our songs. We put it into our folktales. We danced surviving in Congo Square in New Orleans

and put it in our pots when we cooked pinto beans. We wore surviving on our backs when we clothed ourselves in the colors of the rainbow. We were pulled down so low we could hardly lift our eyes so we knew if we wanted to survive, we had better lift our own spirits. So we laughed whenever we got the chance. Not long after that dinner, Angelou got a call from an editor at Random House. Robert Loomis said that Judy Pfeiffer, who had, as it turned out, been instrumental in the publication of Christina Crawford's book Mommy Dearest,

had told him of Angelou's stories, and he was wondering if she would like to write an autobiography. Angelou said, no, she was a poet and a playwright and anyway was only 40. Perhaps he could call back in 10 or 20 years more. A week or two later, the phone rang again. Loomis wanted to know if she had had a change of heart. This time, she was simply too busy working on a film shoot in California. Perhaps when she returned to New York, he would be interested in publishing some of her poems? A week or two later, when he called again, he did not bother asking. Instead, he said, You may be right not to attempt autobiography,

because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature. This time, she said, I'll start tomorrow. What happened between that second and third phone call? Robert Loomis had asked James Baldwin how he could get Maya Angelou to write her autobiography. And Baldwin had said, Tell her it can't be done. How did Baldwin know this bit of reverse psychology would work? Perhaps it was because he knew from experience that Angelou was the kind of person who would set about writing a short story simply because her writers group agreed it was the hardest thing to do.

Or that she had become a streetcar conductor because no other Black woman had, or perhaps it was because he knew, in a way few others could, the courage and determination at the root of her very existence. As biographer Leeming notes, a major theme in Baldwin's work and life is safety versus honor. theme in Baldwin's work and life is safety versus honor. As his career progressed, he felt increasingly compelled to tell the truth. He knew that if he didn't, he would be denying his own existence. But he also knew the truth had a cost. I loved Malcolm, and he got his head blown off. I loved Mecker, he got his head blown off. I loved Martin. He got his head blown off. Ain't nothing I'd done with a typewriter key saved nobody. That's why I ended up in a hospital.

The 60s were a brutal decade for many Americans. As the civil rights movement gathered momentum, Americans. As the civil rights movement gathered momentum, Baldwin went from being a witness to a prophet to a crusader. In May of 1963, he famously met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy in an attempt to convince the administration that it was failing the country on the civil rights front and to campaign for a deeper and more meaningful engagement. Hope is perhaps too simple a word for describing what Baldwin felt during this time. He was circumspect about Dr. King, the man, and did not agree with Malcolm X's militant philosophy. But he for sure felt galvanized. Change felt possible.

We could see our inheritance. But then, four young girls were killed in the Birmingham church bombing. When President Kennedy was shot two months later, Baldwin said, This is only the beginning. Tragically, he was right. By the time Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, Medgar Evers and Malcolm X were already gone. 1968, Medgar Evers and Malcolm X were already gone. In their absence, Baldwin then felt the mantle of responsibility weighing even more heavily on him to try to help the country save itself. When he got the news that Dr. King had been shot, Baldwin was writing the screenplay for

Alex Haley's book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, for Columbia Pictures. He was already at odds with the studio over who should play the starring role. He wanted Billy Dee Williams, who he had a crush on. The execs wanted James Earl Jones or Sidney Poitier or even, apparently, Charlton Heston in blackface. The studio had always wanted to tame the story, and Baldwin had been fighting to stay true to his vision. But now the work was even more highly charged. For Baldwin, it was nothing less than a chance to correct the historical record and help save America's soul. He considered himself the custodian of a legend that he sensed white America would rather not see. Malcolm may have been silenced,

but Baldwin, as steward of his story, would not be. He pushed back against the studio and their notes, wearing out both them and himself. Ultimately, they brought in another writer and the whole thing fell apart. But Baldwin published his version of the script years later, and Spike Lee cites him as a contributor to the screenplay for his 1992 movie Malcolm X. But between the losses of his allies, the war with the studio,

his unrequited attraction for the heterosexual Billy Dee Williams, and tension with his lover Jean, Baldwin was overwhelmed. He swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills in what was neither his first nor his last suicide attempt, but luckily was discovered in time to have his stomach pumped. Then he left Hollywood and went abroad. He needed some distance from America's race war and his place in it. Reading Angelou's manuscript for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings around this time soothed his nerves. It liberates the reader into life. Famously, that book includes the story of Angelou's self-imposed silence. After being raped by her mother's boyfriend at the age of eight,

Angelou at first kept quiet out of shame and fear of the man's retribution. When she was finally coaxed into admitting what had happened, the man turned up dead, likely kicked to death by Angelou's uncle. She felt she had cost

that man his life, so she stopped speaking for five years. I thought my voice was such poison that it could kill anyone. Baldwin had had his own silent period. Being in Paris was a kind of limbo. I didn't know anybody here. I didn't have any money. I didn't speak any French. I was deeply and absolutely on my own. And I lived in a kind of silence for more than a year

because, you know, don't speak a language you can't, you know. There's no communication. There's no back and forth. And in that silence, I began to learn something about myself. Baldwin's characters always wrestle, as he did himself, with the urge to hide and stay safe, or reveal the truth and suffer the consequences.

But in the end, he had no choice. He was an artist. And an artist must be willing to face ugliness, confront his own fears, and above all, tell the truth. For Baldwin, this could only come from what he called a place of real love. A state of being, or a state of grace, not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. This kind of love does not come easy. To love like this, one must be loved.

For Baldwin, who never found a domestic partner, and whose life was marked by loneliness, family was sacred. As Angelou asked him in their interview, Could you stay alive, vital, and productive without your family? No way. No way. No way. We have a certain safety because we love each other. Safety. This is why artists need to be in community with other artists. Because there's

something magical about being with someone who knows your truth because it is also their truth. This is what Angelou offered so many with her books. It is also what Angelou and Baldwin offered each other. For all their differences, she was from the South, he grew up in Harlem. She was heterosexual, he was harder to define. What they shared was a deep knowledge that the world would always try to define them in ways they must reject. That color is not a human category. That artists cannot ever be a success. That the truth can be difficult to see and dangerous to tell. That silence can be transformative.

Angelou explained Baldwin's importance in her life in a piece she wrote for the New York Times after he passed away. importance in her life in a piece she wrote for the New York Times after he passed away. I knew that he knew Black women may find lovers on street corners or even in church views, but brothers are hard to come by and are as necessary as air and as precious as love. James Baldwin knew that Black women in this desolate world, black women in this cruel time which has no soundness in it, have a crying need for brothers. He knew that brother's love redeems a sister's pain.

His love opened the unusual door for me, and I am blessed that James Baldwin was my brother. Maya Angelou to life, and to the one and only Larry Powell for giving voice to the one and only James Baldwin. And thank you to Angelica Cherry for voicing the inimitable Lorraine Hensbury. I'd also like to thank my significant other for treasuring great friendships just as much as I do. Check back tomorrow for my conversation with comedian, author, and longtime advocate for racial justice, W. Kamau Bell, where we'll be talking about the importance of affinity groups in the arts and in life. Significant Others is written and read by me, Liza Powell O'Brien. I'm not a historian, and I'm greatly indebted to the work of those who are. a historian, and I'm greatly indebted to the work of those who are. In some cases, I use diaries or newspapers or court records as sources. But most often, I draw from biographies and autobiographies and articles, which represent countless hours of work by people who are far more knowledgeable

than I. Sources for each episode are listed in the show notes. If you hear something interesting and you want to know more, please consider ordering these books from your independent bookseller. And if you are a historian or someone who knows something about the people I'm talking about, and you'd like to take issue with an impression I've made or a conclusion I've drawn, I welcome the dialogue. Finally, if you have an episode suggestion, let us know at significantpod at gmail.com. History is filled with characters, and we tend to focus only on a few of them. Significant Others is produced by GenSamples. Our executive producers are Joanna Solitaroff, Adam Sachs, and Jeff Ross. Engineering and mixing by Eduardo Perez and Joanna Samuel.

Engineering and mixing by Eduardo Perez and Joanna Samuel. Music and scoring by Eduardo Perez and Hannes Brown, with additional help from Emily Prill. Research and fact-checking by Ella Morton. Special thanks to Lisa Berm. Talent booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista. Thank you.