James Baldwin Goes to Jail (Video)

By: Joseph Evans, Ph.D.

Something For Sunday

“On December 19th in 1949, when I had been living in Paris for a little over a year, I was arrested as a receiver of stolen goods and spent eight days in prison.” James Baldwin

James Baldwin goes to jail –and for stealing a hotel sheet. He met an American tourist, a fellow New Yorker – they became acquaintances which is not unusual for wayfarers from similar soil. Together they were pilgrims in the Parisian strange land.  This led to Baldwin’s dilemma. Sometimes, he made questionable decisions.  Baldwin’s housing arrangements were as such “I was living on the top floor of a ludicrously grim hotel on the rue du Bac, one of those enormous dark, cold, and hideous establishments in which Paris abound that seem to breathe forth, in their airless, humid, stone-cold halls, the weak light, scurrying chambermaids, and creaking stairs, an order of gentility long [,] long dead” (“Equal in Paris” in Baldwin Collected Essays, 101).  

Still Baldwin’s accommodations were better than the newest American immigrant to France (at least the newest one Baldwin knew).  Perhaps Baldwin wanted to impress the alien. We often do the same. The high school senior knows all the ropes or so the freshmen believe. Or maybe, Baldwin is returning a favor. Others helped him too when he arrived in Paris.  In the early years, he borrowed money from friends and acquaintances and sometimes crashed in their quarters especially during times when he had little to not having any money for his rent. 

The Baldwin Series: https://www.reelurbannews.com/notes-of-a-native-son-dr-cornel-west-on-the-unpopular-baldwin-video/

Baldwin may have been motivated to help the American because he felt that it was his reasonable duty and obligation.  When same-soilers are abroad, this is not uncommon.  Baldwin, whether he acted for some gratuitous aggrandizement; he does not make clear and neither does he write of personal regret for doing so, despite the waiting ordeal.  Besides, the housing of the newest American in Paris was worse than that of Baldwin’s own.  So Baldwin tells the newest American exile that his own hotel accommodations were better slightly.  So the stranger packed his few belongings and moved into Baldwin’s hotel. And he took the sheet that was on his bed. When he arrived in Baldwin’s hotel, the newest American in exile gave his sheet to Baldwin.

As the story goes, a French policeman knocked on Baldwin’s door.  The policeman asked for entry and without apprehension Baldwin agrees and accommodates him.  “Then he moved to my bed [the police officer] and in a terrible flash, not quite an instant” Baldwin writes, “Before he lifted the bedspread, I understood what he was looking for.” Then Baldwin’s laisse faire romanticism, that which many romantics want – that is, to try to escape from present and past realities. In Baldwin’s case, he had much that he wanted to misunderstand in order to cope – it’s the trauma that causes critical memory block is it not?

We who are traumatized want to believe that our traumatic experiences will not follow us to a strange land (Psalm 137:4). Of course, it is a trap. Our traumas do follow us. We remember, Baldwin wanted to escape his stresses and strains caused by Americanisms.  Those are endless stresses and strain that surface in our resistance or compliance to subjugation.  Baldwin had stresses and strain around being black in America. Black in America is code words for humiliations and added here; this is a way to describe Baldwin’s psyche bruises.  Those stresses and strains of blackness, black maleness, and black identity crisis and black queerness were present alongside the pain of his emerging brilliance.  His immaturity and his search for his personhood identity, his escapism and denialism all trapped the young Baldwin in exile. 

The Baldwin Series:https://www.reelurbannews.com/james-baldwins-exile-his-conflicts-and-the-prophetic-writings-that-lead-to-liberation-video/

In fact, Baldwin was romanticizing his exile – he thought of himself as invisible or perhaps he thought of himself as a tourist in a theme park surrounded by cartoon characters, wacky rides and weirder stuff confused with fun. Like those international tourists who visit America (Before Trump’s fascism and COVID 19 America). The tourists make sure that they visit Walt Disneyland – that’s where European tourists go when they visit the States right?  This is the land of Mickey and Minnie Mouse; the land where mice have unlimited opportunities and the land of loose women right?  That’s what Italians told me about American women, (I lived in Italia for five years. I was an American soldier).  The Italian men told me how they perceived American women were “fast” women.  Why I asked?  They said that they watched religiously American Soap Operas. I laughed. I thought. “You’re delusional” I said.  

Perhaps Baldwin thought Paris was his Disneyland – delusional:   

We looked at the sheet, on which I read, for the first time, lettered in the most brilliant scarlet I have ever seen, the name of the hotel from which it had been stolen. It was the first time the word stolen entered my mind. I had certainly seen the hotel monogram the day I put the sheet on the bed. It simply meant nothing to me. In New York I had seen hotel monograms on everything from silver to soap and towels. Taking things from New York hotels [1948] was practically a custom, though, I suddenly realized, I had never known anyone to a sheet… Sadly, and without a word to me, the inspector took the sheet from the bed, folded it, under his arm, and we started back downstairs.  I understood that I was under arrest.  

Fast-forward and for his transgressions, – for his placing the stolen sheet on his bed, Baldwin was placed in a cell.  He described his cell as small in size and he recounts that it resembled a chicken coop.  While in the cell, he began to feel frightened and focused on keeping his panic under control.  Baldwin writes in “Equal in Paris:”

I began to realize that I was in a country I knew nothing about, in the hands of people I did not understand at all. In a similar situation in New York I would have had some idea of what to expect…But I was not in New York. None of my old weapons could serve me here. 

Baldwin’s weapons would not work because he romanticized that he had escaped over- policing in New York. He had permitted himself to become disarmed, living under a grand illusion. Baldwin wanted to believe that all of this was behind him. “It was a strange feeling, in this situation, after a year in Paris, to discover that my weapons [righteous indignation and a game of pride and contempt] would never again serve me as they had.”

What Baldwin experienced was a deep sense of humiliation that comes from being black. However; he developed awareness that he was black everywhere and all the time. He was not only black in America; he was black in the world. But what do readers make of this event?  A resource that all literati may rely well upon is Eddie Glaude‘s magnum opus Begin Again (It has a long subtitle but you can read that for yourselves).  It’s an intoxicant for those who enjoy the intoxication of reading. I read the Bible too, when Baldwin came to himself – he’s must have found himself to be akin to the New Testament prodigal son (Luke 15: 17)! Baldwin grew in this moment and I think he says it best (“Equal in Paris,” 106-107):

The Baldwin Series: https://www.reelurbannews.com/beyond-the-obvious-many-voices-are-like-muted-violins/

It was quite clear to me that the Frenchmen in whose hands I found myself were no better or worse than their American counterparts [I wonder too, if Baldwin was he alluding to their similar Eurocentric shared heritage, their shared hegemonic superiority complexes? That is, their shared abuse of power and authority that comes with the permission of their citizens to over – police blacks?].  Certainly their uniforms frightened me quite as much, and their impersonality, and the threat, always very keenly felt by the poor, of violence, was as present in that commissariat as it had ever been for me in any police station. And I had seen, for example, what Paris policemen could do to Arab peanut vendors.  The only difference here was that I did not understand these people, did not know what techniques their cruelty took, [and] did not know enough about their personalities to see danger coming, to ward it off, did not know on what ground to meet it.  That evening in the commissariat I was not a despised black man. They would simply have laughed at me if I had behaved like one.  For them, I was an American. And here it was they who had the advantage, for the word, Americain, gave them some idea, far from inaccurate, of what to expect from me. In order to corroborate none of their ironical expectations I said nothing and did nothing – which was not the way any Frenchmen, white or black, would have reacted. The question thrusting up from the bottom of my mind was not what I was, but who. And this question, since a [-] what can get by with skill but a who demands resources, was my first intimation of what humiliation must mean [Of course, sheep cannot speak for itself; Baldwin is like Jesus before Caiaphas. See Matthew 26:63, in this instance, Jesus said nothing].   

As you recall, this happened to Baldwin in 1949.  His incarceration, it seems accomplished several things and one of which is important here.  Baldwin learned that black skin was and is the international and universal sign of what Franz Fanon described as The Wretched of the Earth.  Wherever black folks are located in the Diaspora, we are subject to oppression and wherever black folks are located there is Anglophile hegemonic supremacy.  It is painful and humiliating to lack representation which is nothing less than misrepresentation.  To be misrepresented and treated as a universal scapegoat is broader than an American master/slave narrative or a colonizer/colonized narrative.  More than that where blacks and increasingly browns are concerned, the universal narrative has become a globalized oppressor/oppressed narrative (and maybe, it’s been always this way.). Baldwin came to understand that his incarceration in Paris was an extension of American Empire. Black in Paris is Black in America at least soon after the end of World War II.  Parisian over -policing was nearly as incurable as incarceration in America. 

For example, there are more than 38,000 people from South Carolina who are incarcerated. 21, 000 of whom are in its State’s prisons, another 11, 000 are kept in local jails and still another 4,600 are in federal prisons that are located in South Carolina. “Today, South Carolina incarceration rates stand out internationally. South Carolina incarceration rates compared to founding NATO countries, exceed, The United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, Luxembourg, Canada, France, Italy, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark and Iceland” according to prison policy (See prisonpolicy.org).   In a similar study, blacks are over- policed and overrepresented in prisons and jails.  Take for instance South Carolina incarceration rates by race/ethnicity in 2010.  The following number is incarcerated per 100,000 people in that racial group: Whites 433/100,000, Hispanic 1,205/ 100,000, Blacks 1,996/100,000 and American Indian / Alaska Native 1,055/100,000.  Of course there are more whites in South Carolina than all people of color combined.  South Carolina according to the same researchers;

•  We have graded states response to the coronavirus in prisons and jails, South Carolina got an F+
• Cruel and unusual punishment: When South Carolina prisons don’t provide air conditioning.
• South Carolina prisons charge $5 copay to incarcerated people putting health and risk.
•  New data: Low incomes – but high fees – for people on probation in South Carolina (32,000 people are currently on probation in South Carolina).
• When graded the parole release systems of all 50 states – South Carolina gets an F.
• Calls from county jails in South Carolina are far more expensive than calls from the state prison. 

These statistics provide only a black and white snapshot of South Carolina’s grotesque prison industrial complex.  But South Carolina is a muscular example of 21^st century slavery, the American prison industrial complex and a plantation economy or what James Lawson said of it during Congressman John R. Lewis’s funeral. Lawson called it “plantation capitalism.” What is graver in America, there is a startlingly 2.2 million human beings incarcerated. This means for every 100,000 people, 655 Americans are behind bars (See CNN.com).  Of the 2.2 million human beings incarcerated 592,900 are African Americans who comprise 13% of the American population. Comparatively, there are 499, 800 Whites persons and 330,400 Hispanic persons incarcerated according to a recent Pew Research study (See Pew Research.org).  

These are staggering statistics. What makes this palpable, the numbers help us lift the veil over Americanism and its deeply flawed and biased Anglophile jurisprudence and its perishing  justice from the earth.  What is less palpable, we have not begun to process the ramifications and effects of its psychological and financial costs that are necessary to maintain this heinous system and what it does to White America.  The numbers alone describe a violent American culture supported by a violent economic system.  This should scare the Hades out us. 

Baldwin goes to jail and it may have changed his mind about remaining in self quarantining exile at a safe social and political distance from the American (and Western societies) viruses. In 1958 and in Atlanta, Baldwin met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Baldwin writes about this occasion in “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King” which first appeared in Harper’s Magazine. In February, 1961 “I first met Martin Luther King, Jr. nearly three years ago now, in Atlanta, Georgia.”  Baldwin witnessed something peculiar about King.  For him, Martin Luther King, Jr. was unassuming and King’s demeanor gave Baldwin a view of the prophets of revealed religion; a species of religion that he had longed to witness.  By then, Dr. King had been incarcerated several times, something that Baldwin could appreciate and yes – something that he had experienced. 

A question comes to mind. How many James Baldwin’s are incarcerated in cold, dark, dungeon federal, state or local jails in South Carolina alone?  How many people with brilliant minds are rotting away as victims in a plantation economy system? How many people who are common folk like you and I are rotting away without a brilliant mind but caught in the web of the prison industrial complex? Freedom and democracy are not underscored for our brilliance of lack thereof; freedom and democracy is underscored because we are human beings made in the image and likeness of God. 

Still, it is safe to assume there is several of each that are incarcerated in South Carolina jails and countless jails above and across the fruited plain.  Restated here, Baldwin was incarcerated for theft of a hotel bedsheet.  There are similar cases about people incarcerated for similar crimes like Baldwin’s that you and I know about. The numbers of incarcerated people points to an undemocratic democracy in America.  Further it points out that America is not a democracy de jure (a citizen by right) and neither de facto (accepting fact). American democracy is based on social location, color, race, and other disenfranchisements.  

Either way, it is apparent that blacks and browns are known increasingly not to be equal citizens by law or by natural circumstances such as our legal birth in the United States. We face birthers.  Therefore we must reconsider then our vote. Voting is important and a civic duty, I believe.  But I also believe that we must refine our vote. We must do so smartly and precisely with targeted goals in mind.  We must vote for the better candidates who are the lesser of the evils.  We must vote for candidates who will judge fairest – and by this I mean judicial candidates who are bound to remember fairness which in this election cycle, it is voting for candidates who will protect our humanity and our citizenship.  We must vote for legislative candidates who will amend harsh laws that include abolishing the grotesque over- policing pipelines to prisons made for blacks and browns. We must vote for immediate release of our men and women increasingly who are incarcerated currently for nothing more than theft of a bedsheet or a piece of bread. 

Lastly, we must vote for candidates who support economic reparations for black institutions such as our colleges and universities, and I urge every local church to invest in scholarship funds that help send our aspirant children to our closest located historically black colleges and universities.  We can build relationships with the financial aid specialists in this way.  We too must demand economic reparations for diabetes and other health related diseases that harm black people.   

Baldwin’s incarceration taught him that he was a black man wherever earthen soil touched the soles of his feet.  To live in Western societies means harsher legal judgment and there is no escape. Wherever we sojourn in whatever barren land, we are sons and daughters of the Diaspora. And wherever we sojourn in proximity to guardians of hegemony and supremacy, we must grapple with Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” For us, there is no Walt Disneyland.   Baldwin went to Jail and Baldwin came to himself. He experienced an epiphany if not revelation straight from the Lord. You I have to get into the fight for human equality no matter the costs. Somehow through his pain Baldwin found courage to fight against imperial power and empire.  We must do the same.

Joseph Evans forthcoming title “The Act of Eloquence, The Sacred Rhetoric of Gardner C. Taylor” Available August 2020.