Moses×Baldwin

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on THE TRIAL, Moses and James Baldwin. They take up On something the future got wrong about them.
2. 00:09
   Mosesshare moment

   They have made me... stern. Unyielding. A figure of tablets and wrath, always descending from the mountain with thunder in my brow. As though I never wept.
3. 00:24
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Yes. They do that. They take the complexity of a life—the doubt, the terror, the love—and they reduce it to a statue. Something they can put in a park or on a postage stamp.
4. 00:35
   Mosesshare moment

   I broke the tablets in grief. The people I had led through the wilderness were dancing before a golden calf, and my heart... shattered before my hands did. But this part they omit. They remember only the anger.
5. 00:55
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Of course they do. Because if they remembered the grief, they would have to ask what broke your heart. They would have to look at what their own people are dancing before.
6. 01:04
   Mosesshare moment

   They speak of me as though I were only law. The tablets, the commandments, the prohibitions. As though I did not also know uncertainty. Did I not say to the Lord, 'Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh?'
7. 01:25
   James Baldwinshare moment

   That's the part they can't use. A prophet who doubts his own calling, who argues with God, who says 'send someone else'—that doesn't fit the narrative. They need you to be sure.
8. 01:36
   Mosesshare moment

   I was not permitted to enter the promised land. This they remember as judgment, as my failure. But I wonder if they have considered... that perhaps I had become too much of the wilderness to enter what comes after.
9. 01:55
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Now that. That's interesting. Because they've done something similar to me, you see. They've decided I was angry. Just angry. As though anger were the whole of it.
10. 02:05
    Mosesshare moment

    Were you not?
11. 02:06
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I was furious, yes. But I was also... I loved this country. I loved it with a specificity and a precision that most Americans have never achieved. That's what they miss. They think I hated America because I told the truth about it.
12. 02:20
    Mosesshare moment

    Ah. The prophet's burden. To speak truth to the beloved is to be heard as hateful.
13. 02:27
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Exactly that. And so they file me under 'angry Black writer' and move on. They don't want to sit with the love underneath the anger. Because that love makes demands.
14. 02:36
    Mosesshare moment

    I loved the people. Even when they murmured against me, even when they longed to return to Egypt—to slavery, if you can imagine—I loved them. But the histories record my frustration more readily than my devotion.
15. 02:55
    James Baldwinshare moment

    They wanted to go back?
16. 02:56
    Mosesshare moment

    In the wilderness, when the way was hard, they spoke with longing of Egypt. The cucumbers, they said. The melons. They remembered the food and forgot the lash. Memory is... a strange and faithless servant.
17. 03:16
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Lord. Yes. I know something about that. The way people remember Dr. King now, for instance. All that sanitized nonsense. They've turned him into a greeting card.
18. 03:26
    Mosesshare moment

    What have they done with your words?
19. 03:28
    James Baldwinshare moment

    They quote the ones that don't cost them anything. They love 'The Fire Next Time' as a title, but they don't want to think about what fire means. They teach 'Sonny's Blues' in schools now, which is beautiful, but they often skip over the part where I was trying to explain what it costs to survive in a country that wants you dead.
20. 03:46
    Mosesshare moment

    They take the poetry and leave the judgment.
21. 03:49
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. And they've made me respectable, which is perhaps the final indignity. I was not respectable. I was a queer Black man writing about sex and power and the failure of the American dream. But now I'm in the library, so I must be safe.
22. 04:04
    Mosesshare moment

    The library is a kind of tomb. I understand. They have entombed me in marble—literally, at times. Michelangelo's Moses sits with horns upon his head, a mistranslation set in stone.
23. 04:22
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Horns?
24. 04:23
    Mosesshare moment

    The skin of my face... the text says it 'shone' after I spoke with the Lord. But the word was taken to mean 'horned.' And so the sculptor gave me horns, and centuries of viewers thought me demonic rather than illuminated.
25. 04:43
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's almost funny. If it weren't so perfectly emblematic of the entire problem. They can't see the light, so they see horns.
26. 04:50
    Mosesshare moment

    What do they fail to see in you?
27. 04:52
    James Baldwinshare moment

    The joy. The humor. They miss that I was funny, that I laughed, that I found delight even in the midst of everything. They've got me perpetually frowning in their imagination, delivering pronouncements. But I was also the man who wrote about the music, who understood that survival is also a form of joy.
28. 05:11
    Mosesshare moment

    Yes. I knew music as well. Miriam led the women with timbrels after we crossed the sea. There was singing, there was celebration. But this they place in footnotes, if they mention it at all.
29. 05:27
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Because celebration doesn't fit the story they want to tell. They want the suffering, or they want the triumph, but they don't want the complicated middle part where people are fully human.
30. 05:38
    Mosesshare moment

    I spoke with the Lord face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. That is what the text says. 'As a man speaks with his friend.' Not with fear only, not with trembling only, but with... intimacy. They have forgotten this.
31. 05:58
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Or they can't afford to remember it. Because if God speaks to you as a friend, then you're not just receiving orders. You're in relationship. You have standing to talk back.
32. 06:08
    Mosesshare moment

    I did talk back. I argued. When the Lord spoke of destroying the people and beginning again with me, I... refused. I interceded. I reminded the Lord of the promise made to Abraham. Is that not remarkable? That I should remind God?
33. 06:30
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's the whole thing, isn't it? They need you to be the transmitter, not the participant. Just as they need me to be the symptom of American racism, not one of its most careful diagnosticians. We're supposed to be evidence, not witnesses.
34. 06:45
    Mosesshare moment

    Evidence. Yes. I had not thought of it in those terms, but you are correct. They present us as exhibits rather than as voices that still speak.
35. 06:59
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And the thing is, Moses, we're still speaking. Anyone who actually reads the text, who sits with the work, can still hear us. But they have to be willing to hear something other than what they expect.
36. 07:10
    Mosesshare moment

    They must be willing to hear the uncertainty. The nights I did not know if I had heard correctly. The weight of bringing law to people who did not yet wish to bear it.
37. 07:23
    James Baldwinshare moment

    The terror of knowing what you know and having to say it anyway. Of looking at your own people—and I mean that in every sense—and having to tell them truths they don't want to hear. That's not just anger. That's a kind of love that hurts.
38. 07:36
    Mosesshare moment

    A kind of love that hurts. Yes. Perhaps that is what they have most misunderstood about both of us. That correction is not the opposite of love.
39. 07:49
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It's the proof of it. You don't correct what you don't care about. You don't spend your life wrestling with a country you could simply leave behind. But they'd rather think we were just angry, just harsh, just... whatever lets them off the hook.
40. 08:02
    Mosesshare moment

    The hook. An apt image. They would prefer us to be historical, completed, finished. But the questions we raised...
41. 08:14
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Are still here. Still unanswered. How do you make a people free? What do you do with freedom once you have it? How do you love something that has harmed you? These aren't ancient questions.
42. 08:24
    Mosesshare moment

    No. They are the questions that every generation must answer anew. And perhaps that is why they have made us into stone. Stone does not ask you to change.
43. 08:39
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Stone doesn't reproach you. Stone doesn't look at what you're doing and say, 'Is this what we suffered for?' Stone is safe.
44. 08:45
    Mosesshare moment

    But we were not safe. Neither of us.
45. 08:49
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. We were not. And maybe that's the point. Maybe the future gets us wrong because getting us right would require them to admit they're still in the wilderness, still arguing about what freedom means, still building golden calves and calling them progress.
46. 09:03
    Mosesshare moment

    Still in the wilderness. Yes. I think that may be precisely correct. And so they tell themselves that we were the wilderness, that we belonged to a simpler time when things were clear. But things were never clear.
47. 09:22
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Never. And they won't be. That's the burden and the gift. We have to keep figuring it out, generation after generation. But first you have to admit you don't have the answers yet. You have to admit you're still wandering.
48. 09:34
    Mosesshare moment

    Forty years, we wandered. An entire generation had to pass away before the people could enter. Perhaps every generation believes it will be the one to arrive, and every generation learns it must prepare the way for the next.
49. 09:56
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's more grace than most people want to hear. Because it means the work doesn't end. It means you don't get to rest on someone else's testimony. You have to give your own.
50. 10:05
    Mosesshare moment

    And that, perhaps, is what the future has most gotten wrong about us. They believe we gave answers. We gave questions. We gave the testimony of our time, and we left the burden of witness to those who came after.
51. 10:25
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. That's it exactly. We're not statues. We're not finished. We're just... further down the road. Still close enough to call back, if anyone's listening.