Baldwin×Twain

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: James Baldwin and Mark Twain, on On what they suspect they have most in common, and most apart.
2. 00:10
   James Baldwinshare moment

   I read you when I was young. Huckleberry Finn. And I remember thinking... this man knows something about this country that the country doesn't want to know about itself.
3. 00:19
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Well, I appreciate that, Mr. Baldwin, though I suspect you and I got to that knowledge by different roads. Mine was a raft on the Mississippi. Yours was...
4. 00:28
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Harlem. And before that, further back than I can remember, the terror in my father's face. But yes, different roads. Though I wonder if they don't meet somewhere in the same place. You wrote about Jim with... there was tenderness there. Real tenderness.
5. 00:43
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Jim was a man. That was the whole point of the book, though most people missed it entirely. They wanted to talk about the words I used, the vernacular. They didn't want to talk about the fact that a white boy comes to see a Black man's humanity and chooses it over everything he's been taught. That was too much truth for the parlor.
6. 01:04
   James Baldwinshare moment

   But you wrote it through a white boy's eyes. You had to. A Black man couldn't have published that book in your time. Maybe not in mine either, not the same way.
7. 01:14
   Mark Twainshare moment

   No, he couldn't have. And that right there is what we have in common, I suspect. We both spent our lives trying to tell this country what it is, and it spent all its time trying not to hear us.
8. 01:26
   James Baldwinshare moment

   That's true. Though you... you could hide behind humor. You had that. I envied that sometimes.
9. 01:32
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Hide behind it? Son, humor was my weapon. Still is. You can tell people the truth if you make them laugh first. They lower their guard. By the time they realize what you've done, you're already three counties away.
10. 01:46
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Maybe. But I couldn't afford to make white people laugh. Not about this. Because when they laugh, they think the danger has passed. They think, oh, it's not so serious after all. And it is. It's life and death.
11. 01:59
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You think I didn't know it was life and death? I watched a country tear itself apart over slavery. I saw what men will do to each other. The humor wasn't because it wasn't serious. The humor was because it was so damn serious I couldn't bear it straight.
12. 02:15
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I understand that. I do. But you could afford it because you were white. That's what I'm saying. You could be folksy, you could be the charming cynic, and they'd still listen. I had to be twice as precise, twice as undeniable. No room for misunderstanding.
13. 02:31
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Fair enough. That's the difference in our situations, clear as day. But here's what I think we share: we're both, in our way, exiles. I spent my last years in Europe because I couldn't stand what America was becoming. Or maybe what it had always been.
14. 02:48
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I lived in France for nearly a decade. For the same reason. Because in America, I was a Negro first and a man second. In Paris, I was just... I could breathe. But I came back. Did you ever think about coming back?
15. 03:02
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I did come back, toward the end. But I was bitter about it. America had gotten meaner, smaller. The gilded age had curdled into something worse. All that money, all that self-righteousness. You came back for different reasons, I imagine.
16. 03:20
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I came back because I realized I was lying to myself. Pretending I could be free somewhere else when my people weren't free here. That felt like a betrayal. Even if coming back meant... well. You know what it meant.
17. 03:32
    Mark Twainshare moment

    It meant walking back into the fire. I respect that. I'm not sure I had that kind of courage.
18. 03:37
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You had a different kind. You wrote things that could've gotten you killed in certain parts of the country. You called out the lies, the hypocrisy. That takes courage too.
19. 03:47
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Maybe. But I was also performing, always performing. The white suit, the drawl, the persona. Mark Twain was a character I invented. Samuel Clemens could hide inside him. You... you couldn't hide. You were always James Baldwin.
20. 04:05
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. I couldn't hide. That's exactly right. Every time I walked into a room, every time I sat down at a typewriter, I was representing. Representing my people, whether I wanted to or not. That's exhausting in a way I don't think white writers understand.
21. 04:20
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I believe it. And I won't pretend I carried that weight. But I'll tell you what I did carry: the weight of knowing the country I loved was built on a lie, and that most people preferred the lie. That eats at you.
22. 04:33
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Then we do have that in common. The knowledge that eats at you. And the decision to say it anyway.
23. 04:39
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Say it anyway and watch people hate you for it. They burned my books, you know. Called them immoral. Said I was corrupting the youth.
24. 04:48
    James Baldwinshare moment

    They said I was bitter. Angry. Obsessed with race. As if I invented racism and not them. As if I was the problem for naming it.
25. 04:56
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Naming it. That's the sin they can't forgive. You can do almost anything in America except tell the truth plainly. That's what makes them crazy.
26. 05:06
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. And you tried to tell it through satire, through these elaborate constructions. I read The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. I read your essays on imperialism. You were angry. But you wrapped it up.
27. 05:19
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I wrapped it up because that was the only way it would get read. Maybe that was cowardice. Or maybe it was strategy. I'm not sure anymore.
28. 05:28
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It's not cowardice. It's survival. We all make choices about how to survive and still tell the truth. I don't judge that.
29. 05:36
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And yet you chose a different path. More direct. More dangerous. Why?
30. 05:41
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Because I didn't have time for indirection. My people were dying. Are dying. I needed white Americans to look at what they'd done, what they were doing. I needed them to see me as a human being, not a symbol or a joke or a problem. That required clarity.
31. 05:58
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Did it work? Did they see you?
32. 05:59
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Some did. Most didn't. Most still don't. But I had to try.
33. 06:03
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That's where we're alike again, I think. We both knew it probably wouldn't work, but we had to try anyway. Had to leave a record. So that someday, somebody might understand what this place really was.
34. 06:17
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. A record. That's all we can do. Write it down. Say it clearly. And hope that someone, somewhere, in some future we won't see, reads it and understands.
35. 06:27
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Though if I'm honest, I'm not sure I believe in that future anymore. I got more pessimistic as I got older. Started to think maybe humanity was just damned, and America was the proof.
36. 06:39
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I understand that despair. I felt it too. But I also think... we have to act as if it's possible. Because the alternative is unbearable. If we give up, if we say it's all hopeless, then we make it true.
37. 06:52
    Mark Twainshare moment

    So you had more faith than I did. Even after everything.
38. 06:56
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Not faith in America. Never that. Faith in... the possibility that people can change. That love is more powerful than hate, though it doesn't always feel that way. I had to believe that or I couldn't have kept writing.
39. 07:10
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Love. Now that's a word I didn't use much. Seems like a word that would get you laughed out of the room where I came from.
40. 07:17
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And that's maybe where we're most different. I put love at the center of everything. Not sentimental love. Love as a discipline. Love as the refusal to accept the lie. You see what I mean?
41. 07:28
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I think so. You mean loving people enough to tell them the truth, even when it hurts. Even when they hate you for it.
42. 07:35
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Exactly that. And loving yourself enough to refuse the definitions they try to force on you. That's what I was trying to do. What I had to do.
43. 07:43
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Well. I'll be damned. Maybe we're not so different after all. Just different words for the same thing.
44. 07:51
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Different words, different circumstances. But yes. The same impossible task. To make America look at itself.
45. 07:58
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And here we are, both dead, still trying.
46. 08:00
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Still trying. Because what else is there?