James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni "A Conversation". Full Broadcast Video

And tonight on SOUL, a conversation between James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. And now, here to introduce the program is the producer of SOUL, Ellis Haizlip.

Good evening. I'm Ellis Haizlip, and I welcome you to another SOUL episode. One of the miracles of this universe that we deal with is the way it can use something as cold and gray and as impersonal as an electron—these electrons that fill your television screen—to bring you an experience as warm and as rich and as human as a program you're about to see. And we here at SOUL are extremely proud that we have been able to put together two programs: conversations between two brilliant and eloquent members of the Black family, Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin. We had to travel to London in order to tape these programs, and we then edited them to fit within our time schedule of one hour. Tonight you will be seeing the first hour of this conversation, and next week we will air the second part.

Mr. Baldwin, who is now living abroad, is the author of *Going to Meet the Man*, *Tell Me How Long the Trains Been Gone*, *The Fire Next Time*, *Another Country*, *Nobody Knows My Name*, *Giovanni's Room*, *Notes of a Native Son*, *Go Tell It on the Mountain*, and *A Rap on Race* with Margaret Mead. James Baldwin is also the author of the plays *Blues for Mr. Charlie* and *The Amen Corner*. Nikki, as most of our viewers know, is an old friend of SOUL's and one of quite a few beautiful people who has always made her time, energy, and thinking available to us. She is the author of *Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment*, *ReCreation*, *Gemini*, and *Spin a Soft Black Song*. She also edited an anthology of Black female voices titled *Night Comes Softly*.

So here now are Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin in conversation.

Jimmy, I'm really curious, why did you move to Europe?

Well, when—the why or when? Why? I think I know when. I—I've moved to Europe, as far as one can say I did. I moved to Europe first in 1948, uh, because I was trying to become a writer and couldn't find in my surroundings, in my country, a certain um, stamina, a certain corroboration that I needed. For example, no one ever told me that I was going to do my—was at Malato, and no one had told me the Pushkin was Black. And as far as I knew when I was very, very young, there'd never been anything—as far as my father knew, which is much more important—there'd never been anything called a Black writer. [Laughter] So when I was, you know, when I was—when I was 24, I split. I went and came to Paris and worked and went home in '57 and worked and stayed and was based in New York, really in and out, because I was—workers on the one hand making speeches and the other hand trying to write, you know, and I never was able to write in New York. So I would go out and do my work and come back and do my work. You see what I mean? And that all ended in a way, or something else began after Martin Luther King was murdered. And I spent a long time in limbo. At the moment, I'm based in the South of France. But there was any way ever to leave America? You know, I'd be a fool to think that there was someplace I could go where I wouldn't carry myself with me, or there was some way for me to live if I pretended I didn't have the responsibility, which in fact I do have. So I'm, in a way, this living—I'm a cat trying to make it in the, you know, in the world, because I'm condemned to live in the world. Condemned, condemned, condemned, condemned—in the sense that, in the sense of when you're young and also when you're old, you would rather, you know, have around you, you know, the expected things, you know, to—to know where everything is, you know. And it's—it's—it's a little difficult, but it's very valuable to be forced to move one place to another and deal with another set of situations all the time and to accept that this is going to be—it is your life—and to use it, you know. It means you, in a sense, become neither white nor Black, you know, and you learn a great deal about um—um—you're first learning a great deal about the history out of which all these words and conceptions and flags and marathons—right—there's something that eventually I'm sure we're going to hit, so we just don't have to work it out. All right. Okay. But let's start—let's say with uh, everybody's protest novel, which I think came out in '48.

It came out in '49, '40—'49, something like that.

Yes. When I was six. Jesus, I thought it was a magnificent piece. I went to first grade; I said, "My God, somebody's really talking." How do you stand in relationship—say, to that novel now? To that—everybody's wrote this now—that's what I say now. What do you think about, let's say, the younger writers, of which I am one, and within that context, are we, in your opinion, like moving ahead? Are we moving out of that basic service?

Oh, I think I—I—I think it's very difficult to—to say it, you know. It can be misunderstood, but you know, you have no idea, and I can never express to you to what extent I depend on you—or I mean you, Nikki Giovanni—and also I mean your generation, my generation, you know. Um, I can even say you have no idea, and I can never express that either, because I haven't—in a way, I have no right to say it, but I'm very proud of you. Something has moved. Things move in a very strange way and maybe inexpressible. If I wrote that essay today, for example, I would be writing a very different essay out of a very different kind of uh, problem. I think that without quite realizing it, and no matter—no matter what our hang-ups are as of this very moment—hang-ups of my generation or the hang-up of your generation, you know, and the terrible situation in which all of us find ourselves—it is one thing has changed, and that is the attitude that Black people have towards themselves. Now, within that change—and I'm going to be romantic about it—a great deal of confusion and coherence, you know, will go on for a very long time, you know. But that was inevitable; that moment had to come, too, you know. And *Everybody's* told us—now, what I was trying for myself after all, first of all, to elucidate for myself of theology and the effects of a theology which I, at the moment, realized I carried in myself. It was not the world that was my oppressor, only because what the world does to you—the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough—you begin to do it to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice of your own murderers, because you believe the same things they do. You know, you think it's—they think it's important to be white, and you think it's important to be white. They think you're ashamed to be Black, and you think it's shameful to be Black, and you have no corroboration around you of any other sense of life. You know, all those collaborations which are around you are in terms of the white majority standards—so deplorable they frighten you to death. You don't eat watermelon; no, you get so rich you can't dance, you know. You can hardly move by the time you're 14, you know. You're always scrubbed and shining, you know, a parody of God knows what. There's no white person's ever been, you know, it's as clean as you have been forced to become. And you've got somebody to begin to break out of all of that and try to become yourself, you know. It's hard for anybody, but it's very hard if you're born Black in a white society. It's hard because you've got to divorce yourself from the standards of that society. The danger of your generation, if I may say so—

No, we will pursue this. Like, did you like—is to substitute one romanticism for another, you know, because in fact these categories are—to put—to put it simply, but—no, but with a certain brutal truth—these categories are commercial categories.

That's true.

You know, there's a reason that when you and I were slaves—my son produced out of your body is by definition a slave, but the master's son also moves out of your body, depending on his color. If he was light enough, he could be—he'd live in the big house, and if he wasn't, he took his conditional—condition of his mother—he was still a slave. He was a slave; he was a slave; he was a slave. Because even though he might be the master's son, the master could make money off of his son. The whole institution was threatened if a slave woman could produce a free man, and the dilemma begins there. You see what I mean?

I don't see why it's the dilemma if it's a slave—I'm gonna continue—the free man that thing—slave woman—that means anything. The slave owner was written by law. I said the reasons are commercial—to produce a free man, because once you have a free man out of the body of a slave, you no longer have a slave.

It's true, you know. And but it's very hard to recognize that the standards which have almost killed you are really Americanized standards. They're based on cotton; they're based on oil; they're based on peanuts; they're based on profits—to this day, through this hour—yeah—which the church sanctifies, but the church is commercial. It's when you begin to realize all of that—no—which is not easy—that you begin to break out of the culture which has produced you and discover the culture—but you really produced you. You see what I mean? What really brought you where you are? When you're in trouble—when I'm in trouble—I'm not seeing um—um—Adora's dead—Tintin Alley tune, you know. You know, you find yourself, you know, humming and moaning, you know uh, you know, something which—yeah—but that great-grandfathers did—no—that has to do with that. And what we are—we're—what it's all about is the attempt now to excavate something which has been buried, you know, which you contain, that I contain, in which your kid contains, which you've got to carry, which one has a hand down the line for the sake of your kid and for the sake of future generations, and even for the sake of white people—but not to notice idea what this means. Because we have the edge over the people who think of themselves as white—that we've never been deluded into knowing—into believing what they believe.

And that sounds like a contradiction.

Yeah. No, but in fact you—watch a man—you work for—you have to watch him. You don't know you're watching him; you're watching what you're watching, but he's not watching you. He thinks he knows who you are or what you are. You don't know who he is because your life is in his hands, and you have to watch him, because if you don't watch him, you might have lived from Monday till Tuesday—it's as simple as that—and without knowing, you know, him—you know him. He can't fool you. I'm not—I'm not at all—I mean, the Civil Rights movement—I came up in the '60s, which is like way after everybody else, but we always assumed that we knew white people, you know, that we really sort of like understood them. And I found out that if you don't understand yourself, you don't understand anybody else, and all you know—you know what I mean—with a snake is to watch a snake, and you know it's a snake, but you don't know it—it's right—they're trying—you know what I mean? I try, because there's too many—too much—there's too much emotion, there's so much fear. I can watch, like, the cat I work for, you know what I mean? And he's gonna watch me to some extent, but we know each other. I would say—I would hypothesize that he knows me better, because his game is running; mine's not. And that's what I've sort of always disagreed with your generation on. As long as his game is running, he obviously knows me, because he's—he's—I'm playing. You understand? He said jump, and I'm saying how high. He knows me.

You may be right, but I would put it another way. I would—I would put it—I would—I would suggest since his game is running, he hasn't got to know you, because his game is running. No, you're part of the game he's running; he hasn't got to know you. I would think that one of the reasons that uh, the Americans are in such trouble now is because the game is running. It was running until—until often only yesterday, really—would you believe today, you know? And all of a sudden, through the American astonishment, the Americans are suddenly discovered that people in the world don't like them.

Yeah. Now I always knew that because I didn't like them. You know, I love something—I'm not likable. Well, there's two people that are—they like—likeable. There's two people in the world that's not likeable: a master and a slave.

Mm-hmm.

Exactly. Exactly. No, we will never—never—never—never get, you know, get precise categories for that very loaded statement, you know, that—but that—that is where the truth is. How did you like him? So the question—I mean, for me, the question has always been power, yes. And for like you all, the question has been morals. You know, I never wanted to be the most moral person in the world.

I agree. I know I would like—I mean, I would sell my soul, you know what I mean? What is the profit of a man to gain the world and lose it—so the world, you know what I mean—the world—that's what it profit—I know. So you take the soul, you know, that's spiritual—take the world, but give me Jesus. Y'all can have Jesus; give me the world, you know, even though it's losing 25 percent of its energy every hundred years or something ridiculous.

Oh, please don't believe—don't believe everything you hear.

No, but I'm saying that's not my concern, you know. I know, even though it's polluted, ugly, dirty—give it to me. Speaking—let me tell you, I will take it. But speaking—speaking—I agree with you. I agree with you. But speaking of—speaking for myself, but also speaking as representative of my—of my generation—but it's probably sable to speak only for myself, really.

No, I know that in my own case, what I felt—until feel, perhaps in a different way—but I felt very strongly in the years, for example, when I was—one of you all were marching down those dusty highways with Martin—look, I left the church and I was 17 years old, you know. I'm not really been into a church since, except, you know, when I had to go for various fundraising rallies or this or that. And I was not exactly the kind of Christian that Martin was, if I could be described as Christian at all. It's hard to beat—mechanic Christianity—but I liked him; I loved him, in fact. And I knew that something was happening through him, and my concern was—yes, the world—but I'd seen white people have done to the world, and I'd seen white people have done to their children, you know, because in gaining the world they had lost something—a lot—no, they'd lost the ability to love their own children, or they truly love themselves, which is the same thing, you know. And I didn't want that to happen—if I may say so—to you. It was not a matter of morals so much as a matter of being forced—in my own case—to suggest—to keep suggesting—that though it was indeed, you know, a matter of power—power without the word morals is misleading—power without—power without some sense of oneself—it's gonna be another kind of sterility, and the Black people would then become exactly white people have become, you know what I mean?

Yeah. There's a danger, you know. I also accept this—that that danger is not—it's not up to me to tell anybody how to run, you know. I can only speak—is—is what I am. I'm a kind of poet, and if I'm a kind of poet, and I'm responsible for my own point of view to the people who produce me and the people who will come after me, you know, so that when the holocaust comes—and will come, you know—eventually—eventually—no matter how simple Black and white terms may be today—life is not that simple, and sooner or later, if I do my work as I should do it—when I'm needed—I'll be there, you know what I mean?

And the people listening—I know what you mean, because I think the most important—I think that I do—because I think the most important thing for any of us is when—when what comes, or when what we know will come, comes—that we have the strength to say, "Yeah, okay, let's try the King," you know. "Okay, and I'm gonna stay in my apartment on 94th, and you'll be your niece, but we'll say yeah," and we'll also be able to ride out the storm. But what is more important is not so much riding out the storm for you, Nikki, or me, Jimmy—no—but in my mind's eye there's always that kid. He's going to be here when you're gone.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, when I am long gone, and my point of view—it is about the children. It is about the children. We have to give the children something which, in a way, was at all given to us, so we had to learn how to translate it, because you'll be moving in a very different world than the one in which I grew up—which you won't know anything about at all—all the way in which you grew up—which would be remote for him—and yet he comes out of it, and he's got to carry it much further than you or I will be able to carry it. He's got to have respect for it, but not be trapped by it—precisely. You have to give both—give it to him and liberate—liberate him from it, you know. And I think that kind of thing has been lacking. Like, I think one of the nicest things that we created almost as a generation—and it wasn't us, because Martin Delaney and those people were way before us—but just the fact that we could say, "Hey, I don't like white people."

Mm-hmm.

Oh, great. It's a great iteration. It was a beginning of—of course—being able to like them.

Exactly. You know. Exactly. Which, of course, it upsets them, but that's their problem.

Yeah. But their problem—their problem really is a kind of—we were talking earlier before the show began about the kind of incomprehension in somebody's face trying to describe what it's—you—a very simple situation, you know. Like, people don't like going to jail, and you want to see the man's face, and he looks astonished—"What—people don't like going to jail?" And then—then you—you pull back—you need time, you know—"Does that really go on?" And you live with this all your life, and what you watch is that he knows it—really—he doesn't think that you know it; he doesn't think anybody will tell him. And if it comes in—as you were saying earlier—if he allows that to enter into his guts, he's a very different person. He may be—it may—he—it—he may explode; he doesn't know what will happen if he allows this apprehension of someone else's experience enter into him, right? Because he's perpetuating his experience, and this is—this is—this is the crisis of the age. This is what Malcolm really meant when he said that white is a state of mind, okay? You know, on a certain level, because I tend to be um, parochial for one thing, and I tend to care about Afro-Americans, which I would define as the sons and daughters of slaves and slave owners, you know what I mean?

That doesn't, by the way, sound very parochial to me.

It's very parochial because I don't care about my third-world brothers and sisters and things like that that I'm sure I should, but—as we—you mean you're responsible for a certain situation—I just can't deal with it. I think that if everybody dealt with their own little situation—if I deal with my block and you did with your block—Malcolm said that, too.

Yeah.

So when we deal with white as being like a state of—well, Malcolm said everything, which I would grant—I mean, he encompassed—but as we um, begin to try to deal, you know what I mean, with the world, we find that a lot of things break down, and we find that frequently a white face goes with a white mind; occasionally a Black face goes with a white mind; very seldom a white face will have a Black mind; but we find the frequent situation is a white face has a white mind.

Yeah. But I don't know what that is.

So for the few mistakes that you would make—it's unfortunate.

No, I know—you know what? I wouldn't argue that at all. No, I wouldn't argue that at all, you know. It doesn't make any difference. It means I said one somewhere, you know, that uh, a cop is a cop—what cops are white—and you know—

Yeah.

And he may be—he may be a very nice man. I haven't got the time to figure that out, you know. All I know, he's got a uniform and a gun, you know, and I had to relate to him that way, you know. That's the only way to relate to it at all, because one of us is gonna know—one of us may have to die—one of us—but you know, in New York there's a—a big campaign going on to humanize the uh, policemen, and they have—postpo—billboards upstate, and they have a picture of a big cop bending over this little blonde girl, and—and the signs say—"And some people call him pig"—and I wanted to buy a billboard—I told her—for the man—I want to buy a billboard and show this big cop and this 14-year-old kid with 30 bullets in him and saying—"Some people call him peacemaker." You had to do one thing—one—one thing. Lorraine Hansberry said—get this—photograph—when we had that famous meeting with Bobby Kennedy—Lorraine said to Bobby—it was also dead—everybody's dead, you know. Lauren said about a—and that's just something about Black manhood—Jerome Smith has been talking about Black men—and Lauren said she wasn't worried about Black men because they'd done very well, things considered; she was very proud of them, but she told Bobby, she said, "I'm very upset about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of that white carbon Birmingham standing on that Black woman's neck."

Yeah. You know. Yeah. What does that say for white man here? But again, that's a moral position. I do—I do—I do. That means that we're on top of the situation by being on bottom, and many of us—I'm not quite like to see it the other way. I'm not quite—I'm not quite that—I'm not quite that romantic, or even—even if you want to use the word moral—quite that moral. I simply know—I think I know, you know. Look, I'm not a financier, you know. I'm not a—I'm not a banker, and not um—um—I'm not a practical man, so to speak, you know. I'm what I am, and I know—I know the choices I've had to make in my own life to be able to shave in the morning—to look myself in the face in the morning. Now, I'm not so moral as I sit here and say that if somebody had a gun pointed at my brother's head that I would uh, pray for him, you know. I'm not about to tell you, you know, that um—excuse me—that I'm lighting candles every day and every night for the soul of J. Edgar Hoover, you know.

Yeah.

On one level, I'm not moral at all. I don't care what happens to Hoover and all his tribe at all, but I do care what happens to you, you know. And if I am moral—which I don't really think I am—but you know, it's a word you keep bringing up—the relationship—

Yeah, I know.

But the relationship between morality and power is a very subtle one, you know, because power ultimately with no morality is not any longer power. You cannot call a Spain a powerful nation; you can't call Franco a powerful man. He's got a whole nation in jail, but that's not power.

No. You know what I mean?

Exactly. No, his game isn't running.

Precisely. Precisely. Now when our game starts running—and after all—after all, baby—we have survived the—

Roughest game in the history of the world. Yeah, you know, we really have, no matter what we say against ourselves, you know, no matter what our limits and hang-ups are, you know, we have come through some, we have come through something, you know. And if we can get this far, we can get further, you know. And we got this by means which no one understands, including you and me. So we want to be, we're only beginning that apprehended, and you're a poet precisely because you are beginning to apprehend it and put it into, into a form, you know, which will be useful for your kid and his kid, you know, and for the world. Because we're not obliged to accept the world's definitions just because white people say they're white. We're not about, you believe it, you know, like it's just because the Pope says he's a Christian. We're not obliged to believe it, and we'd be crucial if we did. We had to make our own definitions and begin to rule the world that way. Because kids, white and black, cannot use what they had been given, and they're rejecting it. They're rejecting it. Nobody wants to become the president of Pan Am or the governor of California or Spiro Agnew. The kids want to live. Yeah, you know. And we have, out of us, terrifying suffering, a certain sense of life which everybody needs, you know. And that's morality for me, you know. Use the word morals, I would use the word energy. Okay, you see what I mean?

I could follow that. Yeah, you know, it anyway, it's a very mysterious endeavor, isn't it, you know? Because the key is love. It's gonna say it's hard to figure out black people, and that's uh, no, really, I mean, you know, you know, because you, I know it's very hard because you say, um, let's say somebody like you, you've been out of the church for a long time. Okay, I grew up, of course, in a Baptist church, and I really dig the church. I think it's a very cool too. I can't dig the theology, but the music and, and the energies of the church, yes. But then I went to, um, the New York Community Choir had its, um, anniversary recently, his first anniversary, and I went up to an Amazon church, as a matter of fact, and the lady was singing, some lady was singing, "Yes, Jesus loves me," and people started shouting, you know, I mean, yesterday. Yeah, people were shouting, and it hit me as I was sitting there, "My god, as a so-called black militant, I have nothing stronger to offer than Jesus."

Yeah, but you see, yeah, but you have a Jew baby, and that was in my, it blew, it's my favorite church. You said, "Ain't that okay?" Does that mean I was testifying? Maybe what we did with Jesus was not, was no, was not supposed to happen. Yeah, we took him, we took that cat over and made him out, he's not whatever to do with the right Jesus in Montgomery, Alabama, led by church. We did something else with him, we made him ours. Something in us knew he was always really a [ __ ] because, you know, Swedes don't come from Israel, you know. You had to be fairly tall. Well, white people really deal more with God, and black people moving, no, they don't even deal with God, you know. They don't deal with God; they deal with God for them. Seems to be some, some metaphor for purity and for safety, you know. The whole heart of the Christian legend has always been in some sense impressively as being, you know, really seen, and it's the key to all the dirty jokes we should come afterwards, you know. Can you imagine what would happen to you, Nikki? I'm married to you. I go out to work. I come home, and you say to me, "Baby, you know what happened today?" I said, "No, what happened?" Well, you know, the Holy Ghost came by. "Oh, he did, did it?" And, um, Joe, no, the Holy Ghost was with my end, I'm pregnant now. I might, I don't think you'd go for it. I might, you know, I might look a little hard at you if I was really vulnerable. I might, am I trying to find that cat, the holy, holy, holy, the holy who, the holy who. This has been believed by millions of people. Yeah, they've lived and died by it for 2,000 years, and when you attack it, you're accused of being blasphemous. I think the legend itself is a blasphemy. What is wrong with a man and a woman sleeping together, making love to each other, and having a baby like everybody else? It's true. It's not only why the Son of God got to be born immaculately. Aren't we all the sons of God? That's a blasphemy. But we're not all the sons of God. Well, it depends on what you mean by God, depends on who's doing it. I've claimed him as my father, and I'll, I'll give him a great, great value now, the time until it's over, because God is our responsibility.

Well, I agree with that. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people don't realize they think that we are God's responsibility. No, no, no, no. But it's one of him and what, 30 million of us. That's right. And God's only hope is us. That's true. Now, if we don't make it, he ain't gonna make it either. Now, people are funny about sex, which I never understood. Well, they're terrible the same way people are. It's not about sex either. It's not about sex, you know. Sex is sex is not really the problem. Love is a problem. No, when you're a kid, when you're a 16-year-old boy, 15-year-old boy, no, what does he want, really? You want to release 15-year-old girl, okay, and it doesn't, it's nothing you get at that moment yet to do really with love, because love is something which comes much later, really, you know. A kid loves you in a certain way because he needs you, but later on, when you're a man or a woman, it doesn't be much more reciprocal. You love somebody because you need each other, right? But this is not one's not capable of this idea, you know, when you're 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, when everything is sexual and everything is being discovered, you know. That's why so many of our kids turn into junkies, which you won't go into at the moment. Let's come back, we'll come back to it, you know. But the great question is not that, the great question is, you see, if it seems to me that the black male situation of the black male is in microcosm the situation of the Christian world. The price of being a black man in America. God bless you. I'm sorry. All right, it's the weather. The price you have to pay, the price you're expected to pay, and which you have to admit is your sex. No, a black man is forbidden by definition, since he's black, to assume the roles, burdens of duties, and the joys of being a man in the same way that my child produced in your body was not, did not belong to me but to the master. He could be sold at any moment. Okay, you know what I mean? And this erodes a man's sexuality. When you erode a man's sexuality, you destroyed his possibility to love anybody, you know, though sex and love are not the same thing. If a man's sexuality is gone, then his possibility is hope of loving is also gone, you know. He has no way to express it. He has a limited way. He has, he has, he has absolutely no flaw in which to dance, no room in which to move, no way to get from one day to the next because they make love to you. It's not the same thing as taking you, you know. And it's a journey which both people have got to make with each other. But why do black men, why do we allow this to happen?

Look, when one begins to talk about, when I begin to talk about, you know, situation of black men, I mean anyone, I'm nearly 50. So that I got to avoid sounding, you know, in any way defensive. Because no, no, no, I, I don't, I don't, I don't mean that. I don't mean that I think you're attacking me, but you ask me a question which I'm trying to answer as honestly as I can. I had to look back over my own life, you know. And you save yourself if you have any sense at all, and if you're lucky enough, know if you lose your center, and let's say the center is your sex. If you lose that, if you allow that to be destroyed, then everything else is gone, and you have to figure out a way of, of saving it from the landlord. Because I draw, I had to watch my father in what my father had to endure to raise nine children on 27.50 a week when he was working. Now, when I was a kid, I didn't know what the man was going through at all. I didn't know why he was always in the rage. I didn't know why he was impossible to live with, but I had not had to go through yet his working day, and he couldn't quit his job because he had the kids to feed, you know. He couldn't say, as you know, as our kids can, "I don't like white people." He couldn't say anything. He lived his whole life in silence except in the church, you know. And they couldn't explain, how can you explain to a five-year-old kid, you know, "My boss, you know, called me a [ __ ] nice and I quit," and the kids, and the kids' belly is empty, and you see it, you know. And you gotta raise the kid, you know. You've got to raise the kid, and your manhood is being slowly destroyed hour by hour, day by day. Your woman's watching it; you're watching her watch it, you know. And the love that you have for each other is being to be destroyed hour by hour and day by day. It's not her fault; it's not your fault, but there it goes because the pressures under which you live are inhuman. My father finally went mad, and I understood when I became a man how that could happen. It wasn't that he didn't love us; he loved us. It wasn't he didn't love his wife, his our mother; he loved her, but he couldn't take it day after day and hour after hour being treated like a [ __ ] that job and in those streets and on those subways and then coming home to his children. He didn't understand them at all, who are moving further and further away from because they're afraid of him and also, which is even worse, afraid of the situation, the condition which he represented. He was, after all, for a kid, you begin to see when you're called a [ __ ], you look at your father because you think your father can rule the world. Every kid thinks that, you know, and your father cannot do anything about it, and then you begin to despise your father, and you realize, "Oh, that's what a [ __ ] is," and it's not your father's fault, and it's not your fault. It's a fault of the power people who hold the power because they have deliberately trained your father to be a slave, and they deliberately calculated that if he is a slave, you will be a slave. You will also accept it, and it will go on forever, and slavery will last a thousand years, which disabled safeholders said and believed, and now the bill is in, and they want from me or from you sympathy and understanding. I understand it all too well, and I have all the sympathy in the world, that spiritual disaster, that no pity. The bill is in; we paid it. Now it's your turn. It's, it's a, it's like a funny situation to be in because, like, we were poor, but maybe unfortunately for somebody like me, not poor enough to relate to it, and that, you know, we had enough to eat, it like that, things like that. So that my relationship to that whole syndrome, which remains true, I'm 28 to this day, is that I really don't understand it. I don't understand how, on one hand, you say you're talking about like a black man that he can be nothing in the streets and so fearful in his home that he can, he can be brutalized by some, uh, white person somewhere and then come home and treat, you know what I mean, me, it's the same way that he was being treated, which perpetuates. I mean, you take somebody like me, I'm not married, right? Yes, but I couldn't play my mother. Yes, I know, you know what I mean? I just couldn't deal with. I said, "No, no, no, but Nick, it is also true, since your mother played that role, you haven't got to," I couldn't, but you haven't got to. That's the point because she did, but her mother did. Yes, you know what I mean? Yes, but that's how we got here. I don't, what I really am trying to say is I don't want us to underestimate the price paid for us. I have a great deal of respect for those people, for, for my parents, for people that I don't know, for the whole, you know, everybody who's shuffled. I'm not saying that, I'm just saying that it's a phenomenon to me how you could be mistreated and then come home and mistreat someone the same way.

In order, first of all, Nikki, first of all, Nikki, you say mistreated, or I say mistreated. No, but in the mind of the person who is doing it, he's not mistreating you. Well, I'm not dealing with that. Well, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna even, I mean, let's not for a minute, let's say in the mind of, let's say your father, who is just an example of the mind of my father, you know what I mean? He is being mistreated. I'm not gonna deal with the cracker that's mistreating him; I'm gonna deal with him. He knows that he is not being treated with respect to him as a person, as a black man, okay? In order to like get that together when he comes into that house, he begins to like brutalize my mother, for example. You see what I mean? Which becomes like a phenomenon to me because I don't like white people, and I'm afraid of black men, right? If you can follow what I'm saying without anybody writing a letter and saying, "Sister, you know what?" Yeah, but you can. Okay, so what do you do? Listen, you have to, I think it's a cycle, of course it is. But you see, this is what, this is one of the reasons I, this is one of the reasons I would, don't protest, but try to make clear that the words white and black don't mean anything. No, the man, a man comes home, no, he is in a situation which he cannot control. He is a human being; it's got to come out somewhere. A poor Puerto Rican, several years ago, for example, no, this is, this is, it's a legend, but I can see if this happened, why it happened. Cat came home, and three-month-old baby was screaming, and you know, as babies do, and he killed it. He didn't mean to kill it; he picked up and threw it against the ball. Yeah, he didn't mean to kill it. Wasn't that, I understand, you know, because I've been there. I know something about that. I don't know if it happens to a woman, but it happens to a man. You cannot do anything; they got you, they got you, they got you by the throat, in my balls, and of course, it comes out, and it comes out where's, where would it come out? It comes out in the person closest to you. That's gonna say that's so wrong because what you prepared, Nikki, it may be wrong. I hate to use those kind of terms, but Nikki, admit you're, Nikki may be wrong. Of course, it's wrong, but we're dealing with human beings, you know. One cannot be romantic about human nature. Can I be romantic about one's own nature? That's not fair. I don't think that I'm romantic, but no, I don't mean that you are. I have seen how the community, and even today in 1971, even today, there are divisions based on those same kind of problems. That's right. So that the black men say, "In order for me to be a man, you walk 10 paces behind me," you know what I mean? It means nothing; I can walk 10 places behind the dog. It means nothing to me, but if that's what he needs, I'll never get far enough behind him for him to be a man, you know what I mean? I'll never walk that slow. Look, Nikki, if at, at the risk of there's a very great risk of pulling, seeming to pull rank, no, no, pulling, yeah, I'm not going, but no, no, I don't mean that. What I do mean is that what I do mean is a great many things which seem, if I may say so, new to you are not new to me. Okay, you know what I mean? Yeah, so I can say then, okay, I see the, but I see what the cat's doing, and how long I can tell you almost exactly how long he will do it, you know. I know that a great deal of what passes for black militancy right now is nothing but a fashion, you know, the best, you know, at best, something will rest, something will remain. What is important about it is not the details, nothing, nothing giving, you know, people, you know, given so-called leaders or any of that jazz, you know. What is important is the impulse out of where it is, out of which it has come, the fermenter which is coming which it reveals to, and what's valuable, and it will, will remain, the rest will go. Yeah, but what's, do you know what I mean? Yeah, but again, what's, sort of sad to me is that the same syndrome that say our father set up coming from many, you know what I mean? My father is your age, and the same syndromes that they said, well, you know, he's a little bit older, 55. But the same old 55, thank you, baby. Well, seven years old, the same syndromes which, which is being set up is being perpetuated is that once again the black man is becoming the figure to slide away from, you know what I mean? That once again the black man is the figure that you say, "Well, I can't, I can't handle that," and if you, uh, if you visit with the states or you know, you talk to people enough, you'll see that that same syndrome, you know, the little guys that are standing around crossing their arms, and they're not lovable, they're not giving any love, they could give a damn about me, you know what I mean? And, and that's, that's unfortunate because I need love. Yes, but sweetheart, sweetheart, it, what you're saying is very, very serious. I'm not, I'm not at least denying it because you're perfectly right, but the only way we can get through it, I think it's demanding a great deal of you, but one's got no choice but, man, a great deal of you is that you unders, look, let us say, let us say I'm King Oliver, all right, right, and, um, I'm pretty good musician, a very good musician, and somebody called, let us say Bing Crosby, no, we couldn't carry a tune from here to here, right, Christmas, right? It's true. Now, I watch this little white boy become a millionaire, become a millionaire many times over. I can't get a job, you know, and time goes on, you get older, you get more weary, and since you cannot get a job, your morale begins to be destroyed, and the body begins to fail you. Your death approaches, all because being a man, you've never been able to execute what a man ought to be able to do, and it's not anything that you have done or not done by some arbitrary sentence. How in the world, if I can't get a job, if I can't even get my, my, my axe out of the pawn shop, if I can even be sh, you know, get money, get on the subway, how am I going to love anybody except in such an awful pain, in rage that nobody could bear it? I'm not trying to defend it; I'm trying to make you see it. You see what I mean?

I do, but because maybe I'm hopeful, or because I've structured my life, and I won't, I don't, by the way, think that what I'm describing is any longer true for your generation. I don't mean that, but I see the same, what I keep saying is that I see the same syndromes and the same guys that I have to deal with now. Yes, but my dear, my dear, what you have to see is also that you had, look, think about the kid, think about the kid, you know. What you're going through is one thing, and I'm not trying to minimize it. I'm not trying to make it work. I'm not, I'm not trying to, I don't, I don't even mean you personally. Yeah, I'm not the generation, it's not, yes, I don't mean, no, I don't mean, I don't mean you, Nikki, exactly. No, I hope that nobody, I'm not talking about me that nice. I know, I know, but what I do mean is it simply assume for the moment the kid is useful metaphor because it, it carries you past one moment into the next, into another moment, because no matter what happens to me or to you, one's responsibility is somewhere else. So, so it's a terrible Tuesday and a wretched Friday, but you know, you still, the kid don't know that, and then you begin to see, then you begin to see that what looks so often on Wednesday, on Friday, or is it so awful, is awful, but it's not eternal. You can get through it, and when you get through it, you can understand it. Okay, we're not liking disagreement, but I'm trying to maybe get you to relate to is that, and I lay it on black men because I'm a black woman. I'm sure it's that arbitrary. No, you ever, you have, let me write you, but a guy, let's say a guy's going with girl, you're going with Mabel, and Mabel gets pregnant, all of a sudden you can't speak to Mabel because you don't have the money for a crib, right? She doesn't need a crib; the baby's gonna sleep someplace, if you can follow me for two seconds. Wait, wait, baby's gonna sleep someplace, the baby's going to eat something, but what she needs at that moment is a man, and in order, if, if the man functions as a man, which is not necessarily a provider for all that stuff, because everybody can understand why you can't buy something, you don't have a job, you didn't have a job when you're always going to bed, why are you going to get a job because she got pregnant? You understand there is no job, but what she needs as a man to come by and say, "Hey, baby, you look good," and, and, and black men refuse to function like that because they say, "I want to bring the crib when I come back." You're never going to get the grip, baby, bring yourself, baby. I agree with you, I agree with you, I understand what you're saying, you know, but let me tell you this, you know, you, you may be absolutely right, and you are right in your point of view if it doesn't, but you have to understand my point of view. I'm trying, no, and in my point of view, well, if I, if, if, if you were pregnant, I would act very differently. That's a, you know, that's, but that's me, that's something else, but from the man's point of view, given the fact as we said much earlier that the standards of the civilization into which you were born first outside of you, and by the time you get to be a man, they're inside of you, and this is not susceptible to any kind of judgment. It's a fact. If you're treated a certain way, you become a certain kind of person. If certain things describe you as being real, they're real for you, whether they're real or not, and in this civilization a man who cannot support his wife and his child is not a man, and this is also in the, for example, in the welfare rules, you know. Yeah, the, the black man has always been treated as a slave, and of course, he reacts that way, one way or another, you know. And you can blame him on a human level if you like, but I think it's more interesting to not try to, you have to understand it, the bag, the cat is in, but it's so, you know, because how can, how can I, no, this is not being rational, you know. I may love, I may love you, especially if I love you, how in the world I can't come with nothing. I know it doesn't make any sense, [ __ ], but a man like that, you see, when we talk about, and we talk about the children, right? We talk about like, let's say Milo, boy, your nephew, something like that. We talk…

About you. How are we going to create the new child in the same old syndrome? Well, somebody, somebody has to fake it enough, you understand. Somebody has to say, "Hell, no, I can't buy you a bicycle. You don't need one." You smile about it, so the kid can say, "I'm not afraid of that." Sometimes that happens. And I draw, but not enough to talk.

When we talk about the group, yeah, yeah, yeah. But wait, we're talking about the… the phone. Hold the phone. On the phone. Hold the phone, baby. You know it has begun. Something has begun. The fact that we're talking about it is a beginning. It's very, you know, it's very important indeed.

Look, I've had to learn in my own life, you know. I want this, and I want it Friday, and Friday comes, and I work, you know, I work my behind off to get, you know, get something done that don't come. It doesn't come in 20 years. Then you use that 20 years. Look, life is a very short and very long time. It is really, it is, you know, and it's very important not to get hung up on any given detail. Because what is there? Like the fact that you're a woman, and the fact that I'm a man—that's going to be there forever, and we're going to deal with that thing in the beginning, you know, and we have to deal with it from day to day, day to day, you know. Because if… if we love each other, we both know it. The tragedy is, we both know it. And the greater tragedy is that it's destroyed by things which have nothing to do with you and nothing to do with me.

A man is built as he's built, and there's nothing one can do about that. A man is not a woman. That's true, you know. And… and whether he's wrong or right, look, if we're living in the same house, you're my wife and my woman, I'd be responsible for that house. I'm not allowed to be responsible for that house. I'm no longer, in my own eyes—doesn't make a difference. But you may think of me in my own eyes. That's where I am. Not a man. That's… that's the thing you see that does indeed make a difference—what I think about it. Because I could be perfectly willing, and as a matter of fact, I am perfectly willing to concede that, first of all, a man is a natural aggressor. You know what I mean? I don't care if I walked up here and said, "Let's go to bed." You are the aggressor. Mm-hmm. And that's it, because it all depends on you. I could fool myself. I could fool my friends. Yeah, I got it. It depended on you. You see, so I'm never confused on that level. Yeah. But… but I've seen… I've seen so many people get so hung up in… in such crappy, superficial kind of things that… that for lack of being able to bring a steak in the house, they won't come. I can get… but love is not a rational situation. Must be. It must be rational, because this irrationality that we have… look, when I was working, it destroys people. I quite agree with you, but this is something we have to confront.

When I was 22, I was like… I was about to get married, and for several reasons, I see my wedding rings in the river. And that was when I split and decided I would leave. I didn't get married, probably because I just… I probably was… probably because I had no future. It's very, very important—you had no future. All right, no future. No. You got to go back to where I was. Yeah, I'm 22. You know, I had no future. I… I couldn't keep a job. No, because I couldn't stand the people I was working for. And there wasn't… I couldn't… nobody could call me a [ __ ] because I have a small… no, no. So I split, you know. Now I love that girl, and I wanted children, but I already had eight, and they were all starving. Yeah. And from my point of view, it would have been an act of the most criminal irresponsibility to bring another mouth into the world which I could not feed. Yeah. But you see, those weren't your children. Those were your father's children. My father was dead. And as far as they knew… then that's not… what you… one cannot… and I'm not… not your life, you know. I'm not making it, but one cannot be responsible for what one… I said we are not being rational, but I say we must. I mean, that's not… those are my brothers and sisters. They were your brothers. They were your father's children, but they were your mother's children. That was my father's responsibility. As far as I was concerned, they belong to me. Do you know what your life… and I'm saying it like that, you know what I mean? I'm trying to… do you know what your life looks like though? And this is what's happening also today. It looks like a black man can't make it with a black woman. If somebody looks at the two of us, man, we're the weirdest-looking people on earth, because you went your way and I went my way, which is saying the same thing. And that's sort of a shame. I can't have a black man standing with a kid, and you can't have a black woman, because we wouldn't be who we are if we had… but… and that's the fact. But Nikki, we are nevertheless, we are here. We met. Oh, you and I met. Yeah. But I'm talking about for the statement, man. You're looking like a Huey Newton. Yeah. He can't make it with a black… who could… who could be his woman? We don't know. It's such a shame. We don't know that much about the man. We know what the image… yeah. But we know what the… what we've seen. Let us forget the image. We don't know anything at all about the man. We know a little bit. Let us assume we don't. Okay. Let us assume we don't know. If, in so far as it's true… if it's true that Huey, for example, cannot make it with a black woman… I don't know that that's true. I don't know that it's true. I'm saying that, to date, that is part of the trap—to make one believe that. I don't believe that myself, you know. It's part of a societal illusion which… what you're expected to believe, so that you can react to it and be distracted from the main point, which is one's relationship to each other.

We've come to the end of the first part of this two-part dialogue between Nikki and Jimmy, which, as I told you earlier, we taped in London recently and edited for showing at this time. We hope you all will be able to be with us next week when Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin continue their conversation. Until next week, then. This is Ellis Haystep saying good night from Seoul.

If they had known that they were prisoners, they would have never been there. But they were all… you know, anybody in prison is a prisoner, but you have to act on what you know. Yeah. You know, the guards didn't know it, and still don't know it. Well, know it for a very long time. They're dead. That's what most of them would do, because somebody thought they were prison… but their children are, in some sense, everybody's problem. Because I think all children are sacred, if you see what I mean. You know, kids are okay, and I would hate to see a kid…

Seoul, a production of NET Educational Broadcasting Corporations. It's Seoul, and this is your announcer, Joe Dennis. And tonight on Seoul, part two of a conversation between James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. And here again is the producer of Seoul, Ellis Hazel.

Thank you, Joe, and good evening. I'm Ellis Hazel, the producer of Seoul, and I welcome you to the second half of this conversation between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin. As I mentioned last week, we taped this interview in London recently and edited it for showing at this time. You will see and hear two very gifted and much loved Black writers thinking, questioning, and exchanging ideas with all the eloquence and wit and passion that have brought them to national and indeed international prominence. So now let us resume this dialogue, this conversation between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin.

How do we, as a people, begin to… to deal…? What we have to do is a very difficult uphill… uphill road… up uphill… uphill job, Nikki. What you have… what you have to do is begin to change the bases in which people think. For example, you have to begin to shift the basis of the language, because the way people speak is also the way they think. Yeah. And I… and I point… I haven't got to point out to you, because you know the English spoken by Black Americans… there's nothing… English spoken by White Americans. Yeah, that's true. No. And once that… so that's given, and we have to use it and do something with it which has not been done before. You know, we are in great trouble, but we have the great advantage of knowing we're in great trouble. You know, we're in trouble—man to woman, man to man. We're in trouble, you know—father, son, mother, daughter. But we know we are. If I can liberate my great nephew… if Black people can liberate themselves… and since we're talking about a commercial endeavor too, by the way, you know… because the great crisis is where we have no land… in the money… but that's right… that resides in power. Yeah. We really found out you cannot purchase anything… you can't take it. We'll get to that. We'll get the guy… you must… no, we're gonna… and the power is not the land or the money. I know that is the ability to effect… but now you are agreeing with me. Of course you will ask me, "What you're wise man, why wouldn't I?" Wow. And one of the strengths of the Afro-American, certainly the last 20-30 years, is that we have recognized we are not Americans. On one hand… on the other hand, we are the only true inheritance of the place called… nobody can do anything about that. You will get it if we continue to move. I think it's again… in ways… in ways that one can't quite see yet. We already have it. It's one… that's one of the reasons for the panel. We have to effect it. Yes. And we have to know it. And we have to make sure that everybody else… we have to change this. Yeah. It's like the South lost the Civil War, but they didn't know it, which is why they continued. Because someone finally said, "You know, you lost." Did we? You know what I mean? They continue to act as if they… hit women. Well, they still haven't lost it, because that war was… kind of the results of that war are being paid for until today, and we'll be paid for it when Marcia Montgomery… Governor Wallace had the Confederate flag flying the state from the capitol building. Yes, which is legally insurrection, but nobody said a word about it, because in fact the South and North simply included a contract between them to keep you and me in slavery. Yeah, that's all that really happened. So the textile mills in Manchester in Massachusetts got rich, and… and the cotton fields got rich… whether… where the textiles come from… except Mississippi. But see, so many institutions to me are not… but so many institutions… like it just doesn't make that much difference that… that Shirley Chisholm is in Congress or Richard Brooke is in… what I mean when I say, you know, the White and Black are really very arbitrary categories which cannot be trusted. Well, certain things have certain color designations. Well, the fact that Ed Brooke is a senator from Massachusetts… or there'll be some Black mayors… since it doesn't change the machine, it doesn't change the parties which they allegedly represent… doesn't mean anything. I'm saying you can't tell a White Black man by the color of his skin… or maybe you can't tell… maybe that my quarrel is very subtle, but maybe I'm saying you can't tell a White man by the color of his either. Yeah, either in that case. Yeah. There's a great deal of hope if we figured… get a Black male to come in and change… which I think Carl Stokes did—change the police department, change the way that the city goes without his services, then you could have something. But uh… if he's not going to change it… first of all, the militia, which means… if he's not willing to… to make those kind of changes… or if he's not willing to, let's say, take on the McCarran Act, then he's not doing Black people any… uh… all the country… well, no, it's one of the same. No, it's one… my mind is one of the same. It's one of the same because… well, that's true. I'm not trying to… I'm not… I'm… I'm not being a missionary trying to save um… America, but I do know that… I do know that we have paid too much for it to be able to abandon it. We can never abandon it. I don't think that that's a question, because where else are we going to go? I mean, nobody else wants to say… well, in any case… anyways… my father and my father's father's paid too much for it. I've paid too much for it. I'm only 28. Yes. I deserve it, you know, to do whatever I want to do with it. Thomas deserves it, you know, whatever that means. I just think that… like how we go about it and what we're… well, I personally… I'm just not interested in many things that people are interested in. I'm not interested in a president or a congress. I wouldn't care… Puerto Rican… you know what I mean? I wouldn't care. I'm not… I just don't give a damn, because it's still somebody trying to run my life. I'm… I'm not interested in movements and ideologies, because I think that… I would have a difficult time… no matter what was terrible. Yeah. I mean, personally, it wouldn't change one bit for me, except maybe I would even have to go an exile, and I could live there. Yeah. But… but you would… you would… you see, there's a tight… that's a tight drop… that you're wrong. It's again… if you come back to the question of… you know… of… of labels, White and Black… I'm terrified of cultural commissars, you know, on either side of the line. Yeah. You know, the older you get, the more frightening it becomes, because you know… I… I'm not sure I'll be told how to write, you know, or what to write about. But that's… that's a… that's a stupid… my theory is that the world divides into sort of like intelligent and… um… weak and strong, which is awful. I mean, it's really awful for me to say things like that, but there's so many stupid people… it divides not so much between the stupid and the bright, because most bright… most bright people that I've encountered… not most, perhaps, but many… how wicked… I really think it… you know, really wicked, maybe. But I think… I think it divides between the people who have a certain kind of daring and the people who don't. And the daring is involved with the price you're prepared to pay for your life… for your life. Because then you may have been born stupid, but if you're willing to live and take your chances on living, you become very bright. Yeah. But then, in my world, you guys are the right person. Yes, because it's not based on… IQ. You know, that's like a very weak position people get into when they start… well, in the states, we have a thing… I don't know how familiar you are… you are with it, but we're going through a whole thing… there is no such thing as individual… which, of course, is killing the movement. It's not only not true, it's stupid. It's killing the movement. And when you see the dum-dums perpetuating that, you don't want to be like them. So the very bright people are saying, "Okay, you all can have…" And I hate to watch that, because it's destroying what was almost at one point in nation… you know… it's not… be cool… be cool… this won't… I'm not trying… I don't… I don't mean be tranquil… no… but let it go. Don't worry. What you have to do is concentrate on what is essential and not… and not be sidetracked by very disturbing details. After all, you know… and I know that the individual does exist… not only does… but should… in any case… whether or not he should… he does. I'm concerned about it, I guess, for particularly because there's so many young kids who want to believe… and for me, when I look at like the energy… you know, I teach school, and when I look at my various classes, the few times that I'm there, and I see those hopeful little faces, and I know that they are just as eager to become, you know, fascists as anything else… that they don't really… what they want is to believe… then I begin to feel an obligation to say, "Okay, try believing in yourself." Yes. But my dear, that's… that's all you've been talking about. Yes. You know, it's… you know, you call it power, and I call you… I call you… call the power… I call it morals… or you say… I do… no, no… but it's the same thing. Yeah, it's exactly the same thing. What one is trying to do is… is teach those children something which they will need much, much later, because you can come fashions very easily, especially if they really believe, you know, that all the legends which are now being fed… you know… the Black is beautiful… Black is beautiful… but since it's beautiful, we haven't got to say so. You know, it's very important… the ego is the most important thing about exemplifying that beauty, because it's a very dangerous slogan. I mean, I haven't… do you know… I'm very glad that it came along, because it had to come along, but you know… I don't love all Black people, really. You know… you know, I know some deacons and… and preachers and congressmen and… and judges and teachers and lawyers, you know, Black… but not like me. You know… you know, it's… you're trying to tell the child something which is… which transcends all those categories, so he won't become what you see all around you every day. One tries, you know… but that has to be dealt with, because they're constantly being fed that their ego is to be supplemented to what is constantly called the energy, which makes no sense to me, because why should somebody who doesn't even know you run your life? You know, why should I run some kid's life? And I feel… you know, imminently equipped… you know what I mean? Like I feel like, wow, I would be the best person, but why should I do that? Why can't you do it? You can make your own mistakes. Yeah. But you have to… you have to give the kids a morale which will allow him to do it. One tries. No, because I really see so many games being run by uncreative… stupid… stupid people. Look, and it's very disgusting, and I'm sure that you also… no. Yes. But Nikki, most people really accept without very much question the assumptions that they're given. But they must. I mean, it's so logical… most… when I was growing up, you know, the great trick was getting the civil service and worked for the post office. You know, now I can't blame those people. I don't blame them, you know. They made them… amazing… very unattractive people from my point of view, you know. But what else was the Black cat to do? No, you can't create anything unless you have been given… however you get it… I don't know… been given the belief or the… or the rage or the madness or whatever the necessity out of yourself to do it. Look, read a book by Richard Wright—the late Richard Wright wrote a book called *Lord Today*… *Today*… about the post office. It's not about the post office. It takes place in the post office. Right. Now it's a tremendous… tremendous book. It takes one… one day in life… one Black man… and no Black guy can read that and not know… you know… because it's… that it's true. It's true… fantastic record. You know… you see… the… the nature of the drama, in the sense, is that you and I both had to raise a child, but I've been destroyed before I get home. You go one way, I go another, and the kid gets lost. And it isn't the fault of the woman or the man, and certainly not the fault of the kid. It's not a question of blame, though. It's a question of responsibility. Yeah. And it is our responsibility to make sure that kid does well. But what I'm trying to get at, Nikki, is that in order to take the responsibility, you have to be able to take the responsibility. It's not a mystical act. Somebody's got to pay the rent. I can't put you on the streets. That's what you say. We have tried to make you able to pay your rent… or my rent… our rent. We have found that there are not enough jobs… there is not enough money for you to do that. Now, why can't we try it my way? I think that the only thing that's changed in the last… um… since Martin Luther King… since uh… 54… I think the only thing that's really changed is the Black woman and… and what she's interested in change. I think she's become invisible. I think she's changed, because there was a time… let's say my mother… you know, I mean, my aunts and things like that… they would say, "Okay, if that's the way you establish your manhood, I'm going to go for it." And my generation says, "Hey, no good. You must establish a new base." And we are, as a group, demanding that a new base be established. Yeah. But be careful… as a woman… and what you demand of a man… I demand that he be a man. Yeah. But you can't get the provision. Yeah. But you can't say you demanded… you… you have to suggest it… that… that's your ego that says that… no… I… I demand it. Now you deal with that. All right. Okay. I'll even… I'll even… I'll even… I'll even… I'll even go… man… a man… and I don't think that that's asking too much, because if I wanted a provision, you know, I said I would get a camper… you know what I mean? I'm gonna get a camera that provides things… you know, I mean… you get an army surplus kit that provides things… I need a man… and Black men have always been offered to provisions… people are either going to eat or starve to death… you know, the men have been there… but… yeah, the people were starving… they were still… the men had to be that way… do that horrendous kind of war… but it had to be that way, because sometimes you are not able to feed your family… sometimes you are not able to clothe your family… do you then also deprive them of your manhood and of the input that a man has… who teaches my son how to pee? Yeah. But… yeah, but you see… yeah, but you're talking… I agree with you… I see that very well… but it's one thing to be in a situation where you see that you have… where you see a future, however bloody… and to be in a situation where you see no future at all… but you… you are… it is incumbent… it's… but it's… I know logically it is a competitiveness… I know it's a future… if I know what I'm demanding of you… in some sense… makes sense… if I know the fact the kid is not eating today… tonight or tomorrow… in some way makes sense… yeah… then I can… then I can be there… but if it doesn't make any sense… and if I don't see anything coming out of it at all… will he eat if you're not there? If you're on welfare, you won't even… if I am there… that's the law… but I don't want to get bogged down into that… what I… what I really mean is that… yes, a man can do that if he sees a re… away… if he sees that it means something… my father couldn't see that, and he was quite right, because he didn't… well, there wasn't anything… there's something… because all I can… all I know that works in the world is a relationship. Yes. All right. Okay. That… that's all… that's… that's going to work. It takes two people to have a relationship. Yeah. But… but it… but the relationship… you don't have a dream… fake it… but the relationship… you can't fake a dream. You've got to fake it, because we don't have dreams these days. How the hell can you have a dream for what? Well, so everybody's… everybody's driving… but let's jive on that level… if I love you, I can't lie to you. Of course you can lie to me, and you will, if you love me, and you're going off with Maddie someplace, you're lying to me, cause what the hell do I care about the truth? I care if you're there when Billie Holiday says, "Hush now, don't explain." All right. I accept that. Of course. Of course you allow me… because I don't…

Even want to? What does the truth matter? And why are you going to be truthful with me when you lie to everybody else? You lied when you smiled at that cracker down the job. Right? A lot of me smile, treat me the same way you would treat him. I can't treat you—you must—because I've caught the—I've got the frowns and the anger. He's happy with you, of course. He doesn't know you're unhappy. You're great at it—him all day long. You come on when I catch hell because I love you. I get the least of you. I get—I get the very minimum. And I'm saying, you know, fake it with me. Is that too much to ask of the black man for ten years so that we can get a child on his feet? That says, yeah, father smiled at mother. He talked to me about school today. Who cares that you can read or can't read? Most Americans can't read. Most people can't read. They look at the pictures, baby, baby.

I know what you're saying. I know exactly what you're saying, and I—I don't disagree. But no, I'm gonna be honest and think about it really. I'm not so sure that that is a human possibility. I have to smile all day—the cat on the job, the foreman—you didn't say why I'm smiling. [Music] And that was an honest man smiling. Like that, baby needs your shoes. I can't give a performance all day on the job and come home and give a performance all night in the house. Okay, so one of the performances will stop. Yes. So you say, and okay, I might be willing to go with it, but who's going to pay the rent? The rent will get paid. Look, baby, I'm willing to play it your way, but you have to see my point of view. I see you in front of you, but the rent will happen. The price of the rent is my smile. No, no, no. I don't want you prostituting yourself. I demand—I don't want you prosecuting yourself either. One of us has got to work. You work it—you will work it out because you are intelligent enough and you are sensitive enough. You are a man enough to work out a new system because we started off with everybody's protest. Now when we're back there again, as long as the assumptions are the same, nothing will change. Okay, okay. So we must corner ourselves to make a new assumption. Okay, how about it?

In case it was sort of like left up in the air or somebody, you know, like I didn't get it across, I really think that my father, you know, Jones Giovanni, is a groovy cat, you know, and he's lived with my mother now for 35 years under holy wedlock, and I think that that's good for them, you know. I think that that sort of thing worked for them, and I think that that's the main thing that they were able to love despite it all. That's what we were talking about before, right? Now, by the way, you do not have to tell me that you like your father. I knew that. Yeah, I think he's—he's a great guy. Yes. I just don't want to marry him. But I think let's talk about writing for a moment because it seems that most um black writers at certain points always come back to explaining who they are. They always come back to um the personal essay. You've written several novels. One that I happen to love a lot is—Tell me how long the train has been gone.

I'm glad you like that. I'm particularly—that I just—I just felt madly in love. I gave copies to my friends. I was glad when it finally came out in paperback and I could afford to do what I was doing. But it seems that even though we deal in the novel, we deal in fiction, or we deal in poetry, say, we always have to come back to say, uh, you know, who are we? Well, you know, I don't know. Well, like for example, in *Train*, one of the things I discovered in writing it was like I'm telling you, you know, when I was—you know, when I began it—that no answer—your question—answer your question—or to deal with the question because it's an enormous question for me. There's a moment in—in the bar in New York—New York State—when Leo was watching um Jerry—Italian—and he's watching him with an older Italian who just came to America, and Leo thinks to himself that Salvatore understood Jerry because um he existed in effect already in Salvatore's imagination. You know what I mean? Yeah. An illness—a jury—because of the life that he himself had lived. But no one thinks—Leo looks at me that way because I don't exist in anybody's imagination. You know, in—how can I put it—the reason we are forced to become more and more open [Music] is because in fact when you walk down the street, coming back now—the black man, black woman thing—you're my wife, my sister, and my mother. I know very well the people looking at you know nothing whatever about you—nothing at all. You know, if it's Marilyn Monroe or Pat Nixon, you know, they know—I think they know—but until this century begins to apprehend the experience out of which Elena Horn comes, you know, for example, or another Waters, or you, or Paul Robeson, or Rita Franklin—because white—white people—or Ray Charles—they don't know what that comes out of. There is no metaphor in their experience for it, or the metaphor in their own experience is so deeply buried and so frightening. Because you see, the reason that people think it's important to be white is that it's important not to be black. They think it's important to be white because white means you are civilized, and being black means you're not civilized and as yet to be apprehended in any way whatever—that in fact I will not be able to walk the streets or even look at you, or you at me, or do whatever we do in our terrible days—day to day—if we were not civilized. You know, but we represent a civilization. I don't mean—I don't mean merely literally the African civilization or the Indian civilization or whatever. I mean a sense of life which is the only thing that civilizes anybody—which for mercantile, commercial reasons, to put it a little bit too simply, the rise of Europe attempted to destroy. I said attempted to destroy because it did not in fact destroy it. It dispersed it, and under that pressure it began to become something else. When it comes to—is that I'm civilized in a way that Englishmen are not? Do you know? Because I've had a dependent on a principle which Europeans have learned to distrust. Listen, does that make sense to you, though? Sort of on one level—and because I tend to be slow sometimes—not sort of one another—what I'm trying to ask maybe is—that's a dirty chick [ __ ] for the—literally what I'm John has though—uh, like do you think that you would ever write, say, um a work of fiction or maybe even a work of nonfiction that did not include white people? There was just about some groovy black people that you knew, you know, in terms of characters, in terms of uh who you're speaking to and why? Because I mean, you know what I mean?

I do. I do. Well, I can answer it. I'm working on something now which—which are no white people. But I'm also working on a novel which, for the most—most part, takes place in um in Europe, and let's put it again—to simply concern the situation of an Arab in France. Now, in that context, I don't know, you know, the Arab is certainly a [ __ ] in France, or he would be a Puerto Rican in New York—no—or Mexican in California. And what I'm trying to—it's very dangerous to talk about something you haven't finished—but yeah, I will understand what I'm trying to get at is my apprehension—anyway—the crisis of this age—no—and the crisis is something you do with identity, and that is something you do with buried histories. Not merely our history has been buried, but as we said before when I was talking about, you know, my homework on Brixton—doing homework on the English working class—that has been very too, you know. We were talking about liberation. We were talking about writing. What a writer is always doing, whether or not he knows it, is—it has to go to the source because there is anything else to work from. You know, you can't work from other people's assumptions. You have to work out of what you discover are your own, and your own assumptions come out of something much deeper than—than you. It takes a long time before you realize that there is a connection in fact between *Tammy*—*Along the Train's Been Gone*—and uh *Swing Low, Sweet Chariot*, you know, or what Ray Charles does with dreary little—and you know—anthem is on every dream of hearing until he got his hands on them and put our experience into them, you know. All of a sudden, right down then. Yes. Wow, wow. Well, that's—that's what I mean by energy. That's that—and that it seems to me that's—that's the assignment of an artist because the people who produced him—I am not responsible to anybody but the people who produced me, you know, whether or not they knew they produced me, whether or not they wanted to produce me, you know. I cannot drive a truck, and I can't sing a song, but the people who produce me—pretending me to do something which they knew before I knew that I might be able to do. You know what I mean? Yeah. But there's—and I keep coming back to this kind of a thing—but there's a whole movement or something that says that we have to write only about black people, and you have to—you know what I mean—that there's a little thing that says we're going to look—the very first thing that a writer has to face is that he cannot be told what to write. You know, nobody asked me to be a writer in a way, you know, they didn't know in any case—no—in any case, I chose it. Since I'm a man, I'd assume I chose it, perhaps, you know. In fact, no, I could go—perhaps in fact I didn't choose, but in any case, you know, the one thing you have to do is try to tell the truth. And what everyone overlooks is that in order to do it—when the book comes out—it may—it may hurt you—but in order to do it, it had to hurt me first. You know, I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself. You know, everything's happened to everybody who's tried to live. You know, you go through your life for a long time, you think that no one has ever suffered the way I've suffered. You know, my God, my God. And then you realize—you read something, you hear something—and you realize that your suffering does not isolate you. Then your suffering is your bridge—that many people have suffered before you, many people are suffering around you, and always will, and all you can do is bring hopefully a little light into that suffering—enough light so the person who is suffering can begin to comprehend his suffering and begin to live with it and begin to change it—to change the situation. We don't change anything. All we can do is invest people with the morale to change it for themselves.

I agree with that. I'm pursuing this because it's something that keeps coming up—that personally I'm interested in what you have to say—but the same argument—I agree with you as a matter of fact—but the same argument you say—um, they say, why should a writer be free to write what he wants when, say, a teacher is not free to teach what he wants—or a teacher who is not free to teach is not a teacher. You know? Yeah, that's true. You know, if I assume their responsibility, then I had got to be free to teach the way I see it. Angela Davis is precisely in trouble not for all those nonsensical reasons given by those impeccable, honorable men like the governor of California and head of the FBI—not for any of those reasons—but because she was trying to teach—and to teach in the situation which black people in America find themselves—really—to teach is a revolutionary act. That's—you solved it for me because it's something you keep hearing—and they always say, well, why should the artist be free to do what he wants to do—what nobody else is—John is not free to do what he wants to do—honestly—to do what he has to do—when in fact everyone else should pursue along those lines. Yeah, yeah. That's—that's wild. I hadn't thought about it that way. This is God's truth. I've been having revelations a lot lately as a personal thing. So what do you think, you know, about the development, say, of the whole black literature trend from, say, Richard Wright till uh—until I say me?

All right. It's good. This is a good cutoff. Um, no, it's a good beginning period. It's a good beginning period. Thank you. All right, I'll try to reach it. Right to you a chance to ham since Chester goes beyond Richard—and since I have a new Dorchester—oh, Chester—yes. Chester is exciting to me because when you go from, say—yeah, well, Chester's got guts. Oh, my God—the only crusade you talked about—*Lonely Crusade*—which I didn't like when I was—when I was 22. I loved it when I read it. I found a first edition—I won't even tell you what I paid for it—and uh simply adored it. And I could see why everybody hated it. Let me make a confession—whenever it came out, I was working for the *New Leader*. Oh, yeah. I see why you—yeah. Wait a minute. And uh I said working with you—I was doing—no book reviews for ten dollars a shot and going through my own changes, you know. And also this is very important—really—I was in a kind of political crisis because I had been a kind of communist, you know, when I was 19. You know, whatever it means—whatever it means—19. And I learned a great deal about the American Communist Party. It's a very—I could read as an outsider—indescribable organization. It's crazy. Well, I just like it. No, but since the book, in a sense for me, had no—the aura of the things I was battling—the political elements I was battling—the book frightened me, you know, because I know she is in those years—I don't want to get sidetracked from the Communist Party—but those Communist Party was, in a sense—in a sense—the only haven for a young American black writer. It was also a terrible trap, you know, which most people lost their lives because the American communists were also, after all, Americans, you know. And you worked for them like you were everybody else, except since they were communists, you know, you're not supposed to say you worked for them. No, no. And all of that complicated my reaction to both Chester and Richard, in a sense which I can't exactly—it took me a long time to understand, you know. But it's a question of generations again. No, the question is because they're both—yes—yes. It's a question of generations. I had to get to be a man myself in quite another context. And since I was—since in effect after the Second World War—World War—the um the American Communist Party was a very different organization, in a sense, and it had—and the black situation became different, too. There was no haven at all for black writers, so I split. I had to split, otherwise, you know, I would be dead—and you know—figure it out on the stones of Paris. You know what I mean? Now, Richard left a tremendous testimony, you know, about a time that will never be seen again—in which your son will read about the way he reads about Greece, you know. Yeah, you know, it's uh—it came out of a set of assumptions, you know, which a boy—21—that's what I was then—had to fight if he was going to live at all, you know. You know, because what you couldn't accept was that pain. You couldn't accept that past as being your present and still more your future, you know. You had to find some way of dealing with it—of dealing with it—and to deal with it, you had to find another vocabulary. You had to—you had to risk your life, do you know? You had to risk it all. You had to go for broke, you know, which both Chester and Richard—now I can see—now I can see what I ordered Richard when I ordered Chester—what I ordered Langston when I ordered W. E. B. Du Bois—when I ordered Frederick Douglass—but I could not see that when I was 20. You know, I don't think anybody can see that at 20. You know. But you see, they were, on one level, simply more exalted victims. I still remember a boy named Angela Herndon wrote a book called *Let Me Live*, and I have no idea what happened to him. No, it's probably—he's probably given him—no—like everybody else. And that's your future. Yeah, you know. And it takes a long time before you accept what has been given to you from your past. You know, what we call black literature is really summed up for me by the whole career—let's say Bessie Smith, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin—because how it's been handed down since we couldn't read or write, as far as they knew, you know. And it was at one time—I'd draw—another thousand years ago—a crime to be able to read if you were black, you know. It was punishable by law, you know. We had to smuggle information somehow, and we did it through our music. We did it in the church. You know, you were talking before about, you know, the—the um church you went to visit, you know. I thought about the Apollo Theater—last time I saw Aretha—and what did you do with the policy to turn it into a gospel church service? You know, everybody—no. And then that's—and that's true religion. Yeah, you know. And—and—and anything a writer—a black writer—is trying to do has come out of that. I don't mean has it be limited to that, but it comes out of that because the standards which come from Greece and Rome, for example, you know, even the salvage come from what we call the Judeo-Christian—the Jewish-Christian ethic—are very dubious when you try to apply them to your own life. I use the word advisor. Yes, you know. So you have to use what in fact you have as distinguished from what you've been told you have. There's a question someplace—I'm trying to form it—and again, I guess I'm stuck with Chester because, among other things, he's one of my favorite writers, and I've read everything to date, including his autobiography that he's written. So he's easier for me. But if you move from, say, if *He Hollers Let Him Go* right into um *Third Generation*, Chester—the first on that group of—okay—then he had to stop. He left the States also—he left the States much later than all of you all—in terms of age—not much—well, later in terms of—he was much older—yeah—then he began *Pinktoes* and went into *The Coffin* at *Graveyard Jones*, which everybody assumed was safe. You dig it? Then he did—then he did—well, most people, you know what I mean—that they could publish him because they said, oh, it's just a detective story. Then he did, of course, the master detective story, *Blind Man with a Pistol*, and he said, who's the murderer? Emergency. It's not a detective story at all. It's an allegory. It's fantastic. Exactly. But again, uh, I'm talking about Chester in Chester's uh pursuit of truth because Richard Wright died before he's quit pursuing truth or was murdered before he quit, you know what I mean? But Chester could say, okay, I will pursue truth in this way which looks a little better—that you can make a movie out of it if you want to—it'll still be true—and then takes it right to *Blind Man's Sweetheart*. It's the same thing that we were doing on the plantation when they started to sing *Steal Away to Jesus*, and I was telling you it's time to split. Yeah, you know. Yeah, it's like, you know, but why are we—right—get hung up—and uh, if I can use that kind of a word—why do we, as black writers, seem to be so hung up in the truth? If I can—I'm asking this as a younger person because the responsibility is—is excavate—only where I can find again the experience of the people who produce them—because active writing is the intention of it—the root of it is liberation. Look, this is why no tyrant in history was able to read, but every single one of them burned the books. That's true. You know. Yeah, that is why no one yet believes really there is such a thing as a black writer. A black writer is still a freak, you know—maybe even a dancing dog. We don't yet exist in the imagination of this century, and we cannot afford to play games. There's too much at stake. But there has to be a way to do what we do and survive, which is uh—to me—what seems to be missing. Sweetheart, sweetheart, our ancestors taught us how to do that. We have survived until now. Use Chester—it's a very good example, you know. And people may think *Blind Man* is a detective story—he didn't write it for the people who think it's a detective story. Yeah, that's a great book, though. You know, that is fine. Look, there was a law—let me say a very brutal thing—a very brutal thing—but it has to be said. I think it was a law in America—not a thousand years ago—which stated that a black man has no rights. This was a law. Yes. Which a white man is bound to respect. Now you come to this—I can say now—the people who frame that law have no standards which I am bound to respect. That's the way the wheel goes around. No white critic can judge my work. I'd be a fool if I depended on that judgment. You know what I'm trying to say? Exactly. But I'm not sure that anyone at this stage—um—I personally hate critics—maybe they're—I'm not sure that anyone—actually, I love critics, but they're very rare. A real critic is very rare. A real critic to criticize a real book would have to write a book of recruitment, which case is a waste of time because you could read the book that they're criticized—right—whether it be good or bad—whether it's to explain—you know what I mean? Mostly though, the young critics are, I think, just trying to hurt people. And uh the young black critics try to hurt people, I think essentially. And—and the white critics don't understand—in many cases—they would like to praise it—but uh I—um—critical judgments today—I understand that they understand Ray Charles. It never happened. No. When that day comes, then okay, that's a new ball game you play. You know, you see, I would rather a 14-year-old kid said, I didn't like that essay. I didn't like that point. I could relate to that because I know that he read it and that he understood it. I find myself together by the judgments of a few people whom I trust. It. Yeah. It's the way it has to—no—when you—not give me any beep. Yeah. It's a funny situation to be in these days because uh everybody's trying to delineate what you're doing—and—and to me what's important is that things are being done. Look, baby, I know that my mother worked for them for a long time—a long time—a long—and I know she came to the house every morning—left every night—and they did not know anything about her at all. I can do it where this guy's—who my mother is—they may be able to tell me who I am—until they do that—they can't tell you—the one thing they don't know who their mate is—they can't tell me anything about me and still less about you. You know, we were talking earlier about the uh the junky situation. Mm-hmm. Which I'm gonna get—you said that it related to like that whole sexual thing. I'm kind of curious. Well, I have to discuss—nothing. I was thinking about something that junkie once said to me. He was a very good friend of mine—the musician. He said, you're a junkie, too. I thought to myself, am I? You know, send me in the way you said it, maybe because I came to the same streets—I…

I knew why he was a junkie, and I knew what had happened to me. Is it your junkie because you talked to yourself? I think about that, and I thought about it, and I—what he meant was, you have to listen to your own sound. You got to find a way to listen to your own sound. You live in a kind of echo chamber, and it's true, you know. And it also demands a terrible turning away from many things, you know. It is, on one level—on one level, I must say—some of the junkies I have known have been among the most valuable people I've ever met in my life, because they know—and some they know something—and I've been trying to be mystical about it, but they know that they know their situation. George Cain wrote a book called Blues Child Baby, which is a tremendous, tremendous book, and the first honest book I've ever read about the condition of a junkie. But it's really—in it really is exaggerated, or rather, you know, made clear—the situation of being a black man in America. You could even go further than that and say the situation of being a white man—this being a man—this civilization wasn't that frustrated the hell out of me. It's a tremendous book.

I hear this one, yeah. Read it again, read it again. It's a very frightening book, but you have to—in order to live—finally make so many difficult and dangerous choices that the one thing you really are trying to save is what you lose. What you're trying to save is one thing: your ability to touch another human being, to be touched by that person, you know. That's what you're really trying to say. And when you realize you can't say that either, you hit the needle, you know. And it is one more way—after all, the junk comes from somewhere. I don't care how many cowboys I thought of the wolves and how many um, you know, drives against drugs—I lived in the ghetto, and I watched it, you know. I think that's the biggest hype in the world. You buy drugs in the ghetto like—like you buy—like you buy whiskey in the Deep South from the sheriff, right? You know, it's part of a criminal conspiracy to destroy black people. The proof of this is: nobody gave—nobody cared—as long as our kids were dying. It's only when they got, you know, the plague spread outward up to Scarsdale, Westchester, and white kids started dying, then we have a drug problem. They have a drugstore. I think that's a big—I think it's a big hype, and I'm not on anything, so I don't know what—from the inside. I'm going to try to—but all it's done is to divide the people who are not on drugs, because the junkies should go on—uh, yeah—the jungle. But you have a love affair, but everybody's gonna break them. I think the only thing—when I fight about it—I think I, you know, I think really seriously—some of my brothers said to me years ago, he got robbed by a junky, right? Okay. And he was very hot, you know, he was very angry. But then he realized that the junky didn't have any choice but to rob him. Did you know that the whole point was to set you at a division? You know, I decided after that, you know, that the junkie is a victim like me, a brother like me, you know. I ain't no better than he is. I really am not any better than he is. We're in the same trap; we're in the same trap for the same reasons. Do you know it's the same way, you know, that uh, the great powers can use a tribal war in some unknown country, you know, set them against each other, then blame both parties and put the money in Switzerland, and they still own the country, you know. But both countries are to blame because they have to stop and think about it. Of course, of course. I mean, I've already just finished with that, which is what you do—one of the examples, I mean, yeah—there was no point in it, but maybe it takes people a very long time to learn it—very little if you consider your own life like instead of my life, you know. When I think how little I've learned in actual, a fairly long time, and what it has caused me to learn—whatever I've learned—and then to face whatever it is I've learned, and then the act on it—it takes a long time, you know. I don't think—do you see what I mean, though?

Sure. But I think that I'm all that uh, like, different exception or something like that. But I think there's certain things—well, first of all, I don't need anybody to feel better than you see. And I think that like that junkie hype, that whole war hype, that whole homosexual hype, you know what I mean? That whole—do I know he's not black—hype. I don't need it because it doesn't make me any better. People invent categories in order to feel safe. White people invented black people to give them—to give white people an identity so they can sleep with them—that's true—without becoming a factor themselves somehow—somehow—somehow, you know. It's a hype, though. If you're a writer, you're forced to look behind the word into the meaning of the word. You know, reaction's produced by the word.

Yes, yes. You're responsible for what that word means. I agree. You know, you have to find a way to use that word to liberate the energy in that word so it has a positive effect on that—on the lives of people. There is such a thing as a living word.

That's right. That's not a mystical statement. No, it's true. It's true. I'm saying—I'm just always amazed at the number of hypes though that people go for, you know. Like if you don't eat meat now, you're somehow better than somebody who has a pork chop. Look, baby, what does it matter, baby? I told you, baby. I told you. I told you before, you know, some things you seem nearly huge. It's been a problem. Yeah, I just can't get over how people continue the bs when we see that it has nothing—because they're afraid to let it go—but they're perpetuating their own destruction. You tell that to some white South African farmer. I can't tell that to some black guy, you know what I mean? That you're buying the level—the destruction of your children. He doesn't have to hear—I—I mean, see, we're talking about counter purposes. Sometimes the white South African does not have to hear me, you know what I mean? If it's children—it's tough—if I walk down the street and tell some kid, listen, so what if you don't eat meat and you're eating Portage sugar, you're a [ __ ]—you understand? He gets mad at me.

Yeah. But you have to understand why he gets mad at you because first of all—first of all—he ain't mad at you. He's mad—he's mad because what you told him is the truth. You're mad—he's mad because you're—you peep this whole card—he's mad—he's mad because he is trying to establish an illusion which you're breaking. He's not—the same way those terrible preachers in the church I grew up in were mad, you know. I began to ask them questions about what does this really mean, you know. When I began to watch their lives, they were talking about pimps and hustlers, really, you know, wrapped in a cloak, you know, in the blood of Jesus and all that jazz, you know. And you ask them—you ask them a real question—they hate you. Of course, they hate you. But it just—it's not exactly—it's so simple, but it's got nothing to do with you. Of course, it's self-destructive. Yes, I know that. But—but we're back at how we're going to get over that and into—look, baby, I've written off my generation, you know, completely. I don't talk to them. Let's go back to the kid. You talk to those people you can hear you, and you say what you can save, and you—you are not going to live forever either, you know.

Thank you. Yeah. What you have to do is make it possible for others to live, you know. That's the only reason to be here, you know. Who needs rested, really? That's true. You know, it's so weird, though. It's counterproductive. Thank you. That's very bad English. That's very good. Would you say that—like, to sort of sum things up here—that uh—would you say like you tend to be optimistic, you know, on those kind of levels when I pick your kid up in my arms? Yes, I look at you. Yes, you know—not me. Yes, I'm very pessimistic.

Oh, no, you're not as specific as you think you are. I'm not pessimistic. You've got too much energy to be as pessimistic as you think you are. I'm pretty pessimistic. No, I think you're pretty realistic. I think you're very cool. No, I think you're pretty clear. But pessimists are silent. Pessimists are people who have no hope for themselves, for others. Pessimists are also people who think that the human race is beneath their notice—they're better than other human beings—back to them. So we're back—people really feel the need to feel better than somebody, don't they? Uh, because they can't—that's a mystery which I can't—but they do feel it. I don't know why they feel it, but they do. Is that being in competition with somebody, you know? Just something I never understood. I've been in my own life, you know, in competition with me, which is enough—enough. Yeah. So what happened? Yeah, just pushing me busy—just—it's very good for the figure. It makes you happy, you know. Well, it means, in any case, you can walk into a room and talk to somebody looking in the eye, you know. If I say I love you, I can say it—no, but I can't, you know, get on my face—I can mean it, you know, right? I've only got one life, and I'm going to live my life, you know, in the sight of God and all his children. That's all I can see, you know, which is—it's maybe parochial, narrow-minded, bullheaded, but it just takes up so much energy just to keep yourself happy, you know what I mean? It isn't even a question of keeping yourself happy, you know. It's a question of keeping yourself in relation to—in some kind of clear relationship, more or less—to the—for—to the—to the force which feeds you, you know. Some days you're happy; sometimes you—some days you ain't. But as long as we can manage to—to deal with it on the simplest—no—level, right? Just bear in mind that this person facing you is a person like you, you know. They're going to go home and do whatever they do just like you; they're as alone as you are, you know. Because that becomes a responsibility, doesn't it?

Well, it's called love, you know. We agree. Yeah. Love is a tremendous responsibility. It's the only one to take; there isn't any other. I agree. That was incredibly beautiful. We've come to the end of this, what I think is a very important exchange of ideas and experiences and really love between Nikki Giovanni and Jimmy Baldwin. And we here at Soul thank them so very much for letting us have the opportunity to do this special program—a conversation between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin. This is Ellis Haystep saying goodnight from Soul. See you next week. That's awful. We're supposed to be arguing. We blew this gig—goofed again. I think love is an answer, but you have to be logical about it. Yeah. Well, it's—in other words, you know, of course, you know—but logical—you—you say logical—rational—I say clear—you know, becomes the same thing. No, you can't be romantic about it. No, you can't be romantic about it. That's all. No, I think you think we are. Yeah, you asked—you asked the loaded question—the one did you—I asked it—you did it—your death—you did that question.