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On the centennial of his birth, James Baldwin remains relevant today
The author James Baldwin would have turned 100 on Aug, 2.
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James Baldwin would have celebrated his 100th birthday Friday — on Aug. 2. On NPR and elsewhere, you can find deep examinations of his legacy – as everything from an orator, a fashion icon, to civil rights activist. But he was, of course, a writer first and foremost.
So, we thought: Why not spend a moment breaking down a few of his sentences to figure out what made his writing so affecting, so indelible, so good that it’s still worth reading today?
We’ve chosen a few lines from two of his most well-known books — his essay collection The Fire Next Time and his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. In many ways, these books are in conversation with each other. The opening essay to The Fire Next Time is Baldwin’s letter to his 14-year-old nephew describing the faulty institutions that make up his life — his family, his faith, and his country. And the second essay opens like this: “I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis.” In Go Tell it on the Mountain, Baldwin writes a bit of fiction drawn from his own life, about a 14-year-old boy who is finding out those very same faults, as well as figuring out his own sexuality. And it opens on a very similar day of crisis.
For each book, we’ve enlisted the help of an expert to talk about what they find interesting about Baldwin’s writing style, and what legacy each work leaves. The interviews, which follow below, have been edited for length and clarity.
The Fire Next Time
The two essays in The Fire Next Time were published in the 1960s. But they still sounded new in the early 2000s when Jesmyn Ward first read them. Ward is the author of a number of books including Sing, Unburied Sing and her memoir The Men We Reaped. We called her up for this book in particular because she edited a 2016 collection of political essays and poetry titled The Fire This Time, as a nod to Baldwin. “I wanted to let him know, wherever he may be, that there are those of us who look up to him and who are attempting to do the same work that he did with the same honesty and same fearlessness” said Ward. The first essay, titled “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” starts like this:
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Dear James:
I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody – with a very definite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you are soft.
What tone is he setting here?
JW: That first sentence in the first sentence – “I’ve begun this letter five times and turn it up five times.” Right there, he’s signaling to his nephew, we’re about to talk about something that’s very difficult. But softens that with the next line, “I keep seeing your face.” Following up with such a careful, close sort of observation about his nephew’s characteristics in the way that they sort of echo his father and his grandfather. That’s love, right? Because I love you enough to see you clearly.
You were born where you were born and face the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.
This is another example of his straightforward honesty with his nephew. But what did you make of it?
JW: It’s all still true. That’s one of the things that is so genius about specifically this letter. There are these moments in the texts where he doesn’t use his nephew’s name and he just uses you. And in those moments, especially in moments like this, when he is so straightforward about what he sees in America. And where he is so straightforward about how the world has been constructed to jail, or to confine in some ways. And it feels like he’s speaking to me. It feels like this wise, older wise person is sitting with me and they’re telling me something about my life and about the circumstances of my life that I dimly understood, but was not able to articulate.
This entire country has been constructed in a way that it is very easy to be terrified and bewildered and to sink into despair and hatred. And so I think that often when we return to Baldwin, what we want is we want someone to acknowledge our emotions. But then also just to say at the same time, you feel this way because this place has been constructed in this way and it is all predicated on this false understanding of your not being human. And in this section, he just makes room for your emotions. For you to feel what you feel. But then also gives you something of a gift that you can take out into the outside world and use it to help you navigate this really difficult reality.
In the next essay, titled “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” he goes to interview Elijah Muhammad, the head of the Nation of Islam, and has this dinner. And it’s rare to read something where Baldwin is not the big dog in the room. What do you make of James Baldwin the reporter being packaged inside Baldwin the essayist?
JW: I felt for Baldwin at that moment. There are so many levels of awareness that he’s sort of struggling with. He’s not the most important person in the room and in the minds of the people around him. He’s not the most erudite person in the room. And he’s also aware of the fact that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is courting him. [Muhammad] wants [Baldwin] to buy into his philosophy. And Baldwin is aware of the fact that he can’t.
A couple of times throughout the essay he talks about the fact that, after this dinner, he’s going to meet up with some white friends and he’s going to have drinks. And these are people who he cares about and who he loves and who are part of his social circle. And who he can’t just relegate to the category of white devil. It’s very interesting to me how Baldwin is juggling all these different awarenesses and how, at the same time, there are things about the Black Muslims philosophy that he understands.
And I looked around the table. I certainly had no evidence to give them that would outweigh Elijah’s authority or the evidence o f their own lives or the reality of the streets outside.
He’s a writer. So he sees the human. He observes the human. He understands. He’s able to look at each of these people that he’s interacting with and he’s able to understand something of what they are struggling with and something of what they brought to this moment. All of that is what makes him the great writer who he is.
Go Tell It on the Mountain
When it comes to Baldwin’s fiction work, there are plenty of books worthy of examination. But there’s something special about Go Tell It on the Mountain. “He describes this as the book he had to write if he was ever going to write anything else,” says McKinley Melton, associate professor and chair of Africana studies at Rhodes College. “I often think of it as a revisitation of his childhood with a narrative perspective that knows and understands all of the things a young Baldwin wishes he had known and understood when he was 14.”
The novel follows a boy named John undergoing that same crisis of faith Baldwin described in The Fire Next Time. But he opens it a little differently in fiction.
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Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.
That last clause kind of reads like a horror story.
MM: There’s something deeply ominous about the way that that opening paragraph closes. You open with this idea of, oh, this is just an introduction to a young man who’s stepping into a role that the father has laid out. You come into it feeling kind of hopeful and optimistic and, oh, what a beautiful thing that everybody’s envisioning this future for this young man. And we think about everything that it means when people say, oh, that kid’s going to be a preacher. We see him as an orator, we see him as an intellectual, we’ll see him as charming, we see him as engaging. We see a leader when we look at this kid. And so there’s something very optimistic about that opening that then turns by the end of the novel into. But that was actually the source of his doom.
I want to jump ahead a few pages. There’s this guy named Elijah. He’s a couple years older, and he teaches Sunday school.
John stared at Elisha all during the lesson, admiring the timbre of Elisha’s voice, much deeper and manlier than his own, admiring the leanness, and grace, and strength, and darkness of Elisha in his Sunday suit, wondering if he would ever be holy as Elisha was holy.
MM: This is another sentence that I often will pause with students to kind of think about and say, what’s going on here? And then they just say, “Oh, my God, he has a crush.” Yeah, he has a crush. Absolutely. But then we look at it and, I look at this passage and, because of all of the ways that the different clauses bounce off of one another throughout the sentence, you’re kind of leaving this saying, well, does John have the hots for Elisha? Because John is learning that he’s probably gay. Or is John admiring Elisha because he is all of the things that John has been told he’s supposed to be in terms of this kind of striving toward being a preacher when he grows up and the kind of idea of being saved in the idea of being holy, in the idea of looking good in a Sunday suit.
The middle chunk of the book goes into the lives of his aunt, his mother, and his step father. And I want to focus on his step father, Gabriel. And if you grew up in the church you know that the people who are sinners and then find God are often the most vociferously faithful. And Gabriel definitely fits that mold. There’s a bit where he has an affair with a woman named Esther, and he gets Esther pregnant.
Near the end of that summer he went out again into the field. He could not stand his home, his job, the town itself – he could not endure, day in, day out, facing the scenes and the people he had known all his life. They seemed suddenly to mock him, to stand in judgement on him; he saw guilt in everybody’s eyes.
John is scared of hell and eternal damnation. Gabriel seems more scared of other people, and very earthly judgements, right?
MM: I often think about the unfolding of this novel. We start with John in this moment of chaos and a lack of understanding. And then the novel takes us back through each of these characters who we come to understand better. We come to understand John better. He’s struggling with sin in a space that feels deeply private, deeply unspoken. Gabriel is differently positioned because he’s already in that position of prominence. He’s standing at the pulpit. He’s you know, they’re both afraid of judgment. Right. But John is afraid of revelation. And Gabriel fears that everybody already knows. Gabriel is afraid of the judgment that comes based on the fact that, like, oh, they already know who I’ve always been.
But ultimately, both of them are struggling with this sense of judgment and condemnation and the fear of being, quote unquote, discovered for being less than the holy men that they have aspired to be. But I think what Baldwin is saying is: I’m not just critiquing the church, or the Black church, or the fundamentalist church. I’m asking us to think about what damage does it do to us when we are so deeply, deeply wedded to certain beliefs that don’t allow us the fullness of our humanity? And if you’re going to be sympathetic for John, you have to figure out a way to be sympathetic for Gabriel, even if his actions don’t invite sympathy in the same way.
Tracy Morgan, left, and Daniel Radcliffe star in The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins.
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Tracy Morgan, as a presence, as a persona, bends the rules of comedy spacetime around him.
Consider: He’s constitutionally incapable of tossing off a joke or an aside, because he never simply delivers a line when he can declaim it instead. He can’t help but occupy the center of any given scene he’s in — his abiding, essential weirdness inevitably pulls focus. Perhaps most mystifying to comedy nerds is the way he can take a breath in the middle of a punchline and still, somehow, land it.
That? Should be impossible. Comedy depends on, is entirely a function of, timing; jokes are delicate constructs of rhythms that take time and practice to beat into shape for maximum efficiency. But never mind that. Give this guy a non-sequitur, the nonner the better, and he’ll shout that sucker at the top of his fool lungs, and absolutely kill, every time.
Well. Not every time, and not everywhere. Because Tracy Morgan is a puzzle piece so oddly shaped he won’t fit into just any world. In fact, the only way he works is if you take the time and effort to assiduously build the entire puzzle around him.
Thankfully, the makers of his new series, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, understand that very specific assignment. They’ve built the show around Morgan’s signature profile and paired him with an hugely unlikely comedy partner (Daniel Radcliffe).
The co-creators/co-showrunners are Robert Carlock, who was one of the showrunners on 30 Rock and co-created The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Sam Means, who also worked on Girls5eva with Carlock and has written for 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt.
These guys know exactly what Morgan can do, even if 30 Rock relegated him to function as a kind of comedy bomb-thrower. He’d enter a scene, lob a few loud, puzzling, hilarious references that would blow up the situation onscreen, and promptly peace out through the smoke and ash left in his wake.
That can’t happen on Reggie Dinkins, as Tracy is the center of both the show, and the show-within-the-show. He plays a former NFL star disgraced by a gambling scandal who’s determined to redeem himself in the public eye. He brings in an Oscar-winning documentarian Arthur Tobin (Radcliffe) to make a movie about him and his current life.
Tobin, however, is determined to create an authentic portrait of a fallen hero, and keeps goading Dinkins to express remorse — or anything at all besides canned, feel-good platitudes. He embeds himself in Dinkins’ palatial New Jersey mansion, alongside Dinkins’ fiancée Brina (Precious Way), teenage son Carmelo (Jalyn Hall) and his former teammate Rusty (Bobby Moynihan), who lives in the basement.
If you’re thinking this means Reggie Dinkins is a show satirizing the recent rise of toothless, self-flattering documentaries about athletes and performers produced in collaboration with their subjects, you’re half-right. The show feints at that tension with some clever bits over the course of the season, but it’s never allowed to develop into a central, overarching conflict, because the show’s more interested in the affinity between Dinkins and Tobin.
Tobin, it turns out, is dealing with his own public disgrace — his emotional breakdown on the set of a blockbuster movie he was directing has gone viral — and the show becomes about exploring what these two damaged men can learn from each other.
On paper, sure: It’s an oil-and-water mixture: Dinkins (loud, rich, American, Black) and Tobin (uptight, pretentious, British, practically translucent). Morgan’s in his element, and if you’re not already aware of what a funny performer Radcliffe can be, check him out on the late lamented Miracle Workers.
Whenever these two characters are firing fusillades of jokes at each other, the series sings. But, especially in the early going, the showrunners seem determined to put Morgan and Radcliffe together in quieter, more heartfelt scenes that don’t quite work. It’s too reductive to presume this is because Morgan is a comedian and Radcliffe is an actor, but it’s hard to deny that they’re coming at those moments from radically different places, and seem to be directing their energies past each other in ways that never quite manage to connect.
Precious Way as Brina.
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It’s one reason the show flounders out of the gate, as typical pilot problems pile up — every secondary character gets introduced in a hurry and assigned a defining characteristic: Brina (the influencer), Rusty (the loser), Carmelo (the TV teen). It takes a bit too long for even the great Erika Alexander, who plays Dinkins’ ex-wife and current manager Monica, to get something to play besides the uber-competent, work-addicted businesswoman.
But then, there are the jokes. My god, these jokes.
Reggie Dinkins, like 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt before it, is a joke machine, firing off bit after bit after bit. But where those shows were only too happy to exist as high-key joke-engines first, and character comedies second, Dinkins is operating in a slightly lower register. It’s deliberately pitched to feel a bit more grounded, a bit less frenetic. (To be fair: Every show in the history of the medium can be categorized as more grounded and less frenetic than 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt — but Reggie Dinkins expressly shares those series’ comedic approach, if not their specific joke density.)
While the hit rate of Reggie Dinkins‘ jokes never achieves 30 Rock status, rest assured that in episodes coming later in the season it comfortably hovers at Kimmy Schmidt level. Which is to say: Two or three times an episode, you will encounter a joke that is so perfect, so pure, so diamond-hard that you will wonder how it has taken human civilization until 2026 Common Era to discover it.
And that’s the key — they feel discovered. The jokes I’m talking about don’t seem painstakingly wrought, though of course they were. No, they feel like they have always been there, beneath the earth, biding their time, just waiting to be found. (Here, you no doubt will be expecting me to provide some examples. Well, I’m not gonna. It’s not a critic’s job to spoil jokes this good by busting them out in some lousy review. Just watch the damn show to experience them as you’re meant to; you’ll know which ones I’m talking about.)
Now, let’s you and I talk about Bobby Moynihan.
As Rusty, Dinkins’ devoted ex-teammate who lives in the basement, Moynihan could have easily contented himself to play Pathetic Guy™ and leave it at that. Instead, he invests Rusty with such depths of earnest, deeply felt, improbably sunny emotions that he solidifies his position as show MVP with every word, every gesture, every expression. The guy can shuffle into the far background of a shot eating cereal and get a laugh, which is to say: He can be literally out-of-focus and still steal focus.
Which is why it doesn’t matter, in the end, that the locus of Reggie Dinkins‘ comedic energy isn’t found precisely where the show’s premise (Tracy Morgan! Daniel Radcliffe! Imagine the chemistry!) would have you believe it to be. This is a very, very funny — frequently hilarious — series that prizes well-written, well-timed, well-delivered jokes, and that knows how to use its actors to serve them up in the best way possible. And once it shakes off a few early stumbles and gets out of its own way, it does that better than any show on television.
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
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Andy Richter has found his place.
The Chicago area native previously lived in New York — where he first found fame as Conan O’Brien’s sidekick on “Late Night” — before moving to Los Angeles in 2001. Three years ago, he moved to Pasadena. “Now that I live here, I would not live anywhere else,” he says.
There are some practical benefits to the city. “I am such a crabby old man now, but it’s like, there’s parking, you can park when we have to go out,” Richter says. “The notion of going to dinner in Santa Monica just feels like having nails shoved into my feet.”
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
But he mostly appreciates that Pasadena is “a very diverse town and just a beautiful town,” he says.
For Richter, most Sundays revolve around his family. In 2023, the comedian and actor married creative executive Jennifer Herrera and adopted her young daughter, Cornelia. (He also has two children in their 20s, William and Mercy, from his previous marriage.)
Additionally, he’s been giving his body time to recover. Richter spent last fall training and competing on the 34th season of “Dancing With the Stars.” And though he had no prior dancing experience, he won over the show’s fan base with his kindness and dedication, making it to the competition’s ninth week.
He hosts the weekly show “The Three Questions” on O’Brien’s Team Coco podcast network and still appears in films and TV shows. “I’m just taking meetings and auditioning like every other late 50s white comedy guy in L.A., sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.”
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
7:30 a.m.: Early rising
It’s hard for me at this advanced age to sleep much past 7:30. I have a 5 1/2-year-old, and hopefully she’ll sleep in a little bit longer so my wife and I can talk and snuggle and look at our phones at opposite ends of the bed, like everybody.
Then the dogs need to be walked. I have two dogs: a 120-pound Great Pyrenees-Border Collie-German Shepherd mix, and then at the other end of the spectrum, a seven-pound poodle mix. We were a blended dog family. When my wife and I met, I had the big dog and she had a little dog. Her first dog actually has passed, but we like that dynamic. You get kind of the best of both worlds.
8 a.m.: Breakfast at a classic diner
Then it would probably be breakfast at Shakers, which is in South Pasadena. It’s one of our favorite places. We’re kind of regulars there, and my daughter loves it. It’s easy with a 5-year-old, you’ve got to do what they want. They’re terrorists that way, especially when it comes to cuisine.
I’ve lived in Pasadena for about three years now, but I have been going to Shakers for a long time because I have a database of all the best diners in the Los Angeles metropolitan area committed to memory. There’s just something about the continuity of them that makes me feel like the world isn’t on fire. And because of L.A.’s moderate climate, the ones here stay the way they are; whereas if you get 18 feet of winter snow, you tend to wear down the diner floor, seats, everything.
So there’s a lot of really great old places that stay the same. And then there are tragic losses. There’s been some noise that Shakers is going to turn into some kind of condo development. I think that people would probably riot. They would be elderly people rioting, but they would still riot.
11 a.m.: Sandy paws
My in-laws live down in Long Beach, so after breakfast we might take the dogs down to Long Beach. There’s this dog beach there, Rosie’s Beach. I have never seen a fight there between dogs. They’re all just so happy to be out and off-leash, with an ocean and sand right there. You get a contact high from the canine joy.
1 p.m.: Lunch in Belmont Shore
That would take us to lunchtime and we’ll go somewhere down there. There’s this place, L’Antica Pizzeria Da Michele, in Belmont Shore. It’s fantastic for some pizza with grandma and grandpa. It’s originally from Naples. There’s also one in Hollywood where Cafe Des Artistes used to be on that weird little side street.
4 p.m.: Sunset at the gardens
We’d take grandma and grandpa home, drop the dogs off. We’d go to the Huntington and stay a couple of hours until sunset. The Japanese garden is pretty mind-blowing. You feel like you’re on the set of “Shogun.”
The main thing that I love about it is the changing of ecospheres as you walk through it. Living in the area, I drive by it a thousand times and then I remember, “Oh yeah, there’s a rainforest in here. There’s thick stands of bamboo forest that look like Vietnam.” It’s beautiful. With all three of my kids, I have spent a lot of time there.
6:30 p.m.: Mall of America
After sundown, we will go to what seems to be the only thriving mall in America — [the Shops at] Santa Anita. We are suckers for Din Tai Fung. My 24-year-old son, who’s kind of a food snob, is like, “There’s a hundred places that are better and cheaper within five minutes of there in the San Gabriel Valley.” And we’re like, “Yeah, but this is at the mall.” It’s really easy. Also, my wife is a vegetarian, and a lot of the more authentic places, there’s pork in the air. It’s really hard to find vegetarian stuff.
We have a whole system with Din Tai Fung now, which is logging in on the wait list while we’re still on the highway, or ordering takeout. There’s plenty of places in the mall with tables, you can just sit down and have your own little feast there.
There’s also a Dave & Buster’s. If you want sensory overload, you can go in there and get a big, big booze drink while you’re playing Skee-Ball with your kid.
9 p.m.: Head to bed ASAP
I am very lucky in that I’m a very good sleeper and the few times in my life when I do experience insomnia, it’s infuriating to me because I am spoiled, basically. When you’ve got a 5 1/2-year-old, there’s no real wind down. It’s just negotiations to get her into bed and to sleep as quickly as possible, so we can all pass out.
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