James Baldwin’s influence continues to inspire generations of intellectuals, rising artists, academics, and writers. The “Authors’ Corner” gives writers of recent works on Baldwin’s life in St. Paul de Vence an opportunity to share messages they hope visitors will embrace after exploring the Chez Baldwin digital exhibition.

An internationally renowned James Baldwin scholar, Magdalena J. Zaborowska collaborated with the Museum on this exhibition which serves as a companion to her second book on Baldwin Me and My House. A celebrated scholar of African American Studies, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. has explored the writings of Baldwin for decades and has captured some of Baldwin’s keen insights in his book Begin Again. From the 1970s until Baldwin’s death in 1987, writer and Stanford University lecturer Cecil Brown spent substantial periods of time at Baldwin’s house in St. Paul de Vence as Baldwin’s friend and literary comrade. Jules Farber, a noted American writer who has spent much of his life living in Europe, settled in the South of France and became interested in Baldwin while visiting nearby St. Paul de Vence.

Chez Baldwin

By Magdalena J. Zaborowska

Through my research on James Baldwin, I have learned that he was a great, unique human being, who was supported and nurtured at the home he forged in St. Paul de Vence. I document my knowledge of his experience there in my book Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France, which I published in 2018. In his lifetime, Baldwin suffered the markings of difference, yet insisted that our unique origins and selves are something that make all people kin. He spoke often about the need for a metaphorical touching and being touched by others, for human contact that acknowledges and celebrates connection, commonality of suffering, and understanding despite difference, politics, and the ravages of history. This message is one that this exhibition intends to convey.

At a time when few African Diaspora artists have their material legacy commemorated through brick-and-mortar sites, this digital James Baldwin exhibition invites visitors to imagine walking through Baldwin’s last residence. With images of the inside of the house and images of objects salvaged from the house before its demolition, this exhibition explores how his house framed and elucidated Baldwin’s complex works and life story as a black gay man with roots in Harlem. There he fled the dual discrimination of racism and homophobia by settling in Europe. By showcasing artifacts that were originally abandoned after his death as debris and refuse, this exhibition makes a larger case for salvaging remnants of black lives and for using computer technology to preserve them as part of a national cultural heritage that belongs to us all.

Begin Again

By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

James Baldwin insisted that the nation confront itself—its horrors and tragedies, its joys and triumphs—and, in doing so, demonstrate a kind of maturity that no longer required the illusion of innocence. We must grow up. That confrontation would necessitate grappling with the fears and panic at the heart of this place. It would require a struggle with that which the idea of America hides and obscures—a struggle with the darker souls of this nation. Baldwin gave us the blueprint for doing so in searing prose and with intense love.

He reminded us until the day he took his last breath that the quest for safety over truth would seal our fate, snuff out the dynamism of life, and leave us hollow and grim. He urged us to accept our vulnerabilities and to take responsibility for life. To say yes to life. That lesson has been deposited in my gut.

Reading Baldwin has been and remains an exacting enterprise. He demands so much: that you look unflinchingly at the ugliness inside of you; that you confront your fears and the scaffolding of lies that provide you safety so that you may be released into a new possibility. Run towards your fears, he commands, and understand that it is “in the going towards” that salvation is to be found.

With Baldwin at the Welcome Table

By Cecil Brown

It was oppressively hot that summer of 1973, when I had taken a train from Paris to St. Paul de Vence to visit James Baldwin. I had recently published my first novel with the politically incorrect title, The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, which was being translated into French.

I arrived in Nice in the dark of night, and Baldwin met me in a Mercedes filled with his friends, en route to a party. We arrived at the party, and I noticed the mix of white and black people and that everybody seemed to like everybody else. I was a bit in awe of Baldwin’s presence and the ease with which he conducted himself. They started to pass around a marijuana joint. While dancing to the loud music, Baldwin handed me the joint. “I’d like to read about this in your next novel!” he said.

At Baldwin’s medieval villa in St. Paul, I awoke at four o’clock in the morning to the clanking of the electric Adler typewriter in Baldwin’s studio beneath my guest room. I looked out the small window into the distance, and I could see a little village at the foot of the mountains. Baldwin’s villa was high on a hill with a sweeping view of the Mediterranean. I went downstairs and sat down at an outdoor table. Baldwin called this the “welcoming table.” I learned a lot about Baldwin at this table and during the ensuing years that we became friends. I learned about who and what mattered most to him. I wrote about some of my conversations with him in St. Paul in my 2019 article “With James Baldwin at the Welcome Table.”

What I hope visitors to this digital James Baldwin House exhibition will learn about Jimmy, as everyone called him, is that he loved young people. He loved the vision that they held about the world. He respected their curiosity, and their willingness to take a chance, and he admired that young people were often reaching for something else in life. He always wanted to know their thoughts and their hopes for the future.

I think this affinity for youth was derived from his own experience as a young person living in Paris. From age 24 into his thirties, he lived the life of a poor young person in Paris. At times, he slept on cobblestone and rooftops and was always bumming cigarettes from his white American friends. The experience of being young and broke stay with him all of his life.

James Baldwin in Saint-Paul de Vence

By Jules B. Farber

James Baldwin was a remarkable man, who left a literary legacy that is currently experiencing a global renaissance. This digital Baldwin exhibition, which highlights Baldwin’s life and work through the lens of his house in Saint-Paul de Vence, should reveal Baldwin’s strong, determined character and his courage to make friends and make a place for himself in a walled-in, medieval village in the South of France.

Originally from the United States, I have lived the past decade in France, in a town not terribly far from Baldwin’s residence. I first learned about Baldwin while dining in the iconic la Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul. I had spotted a photo of Baldwin pinned up in a hallway. When I queried our waiter, a big smile came across his face as he responded, “Our Jimmy was part of the family.” At that moment an idea struck, “Write about Baldwin’s little-known self-exile in Saint-Paul in the South of France!” From this idea, my book was born—James Baldwin: Escape from America, Exile in Provence, which I published in 2016.

Long before I began research for the book, I was a devotee of Baldwin’s writing but was never aware that he had spent the last seventeen years of his life in the region of France where I was living. He had arrived in 1970 and died here in 1987. His settling in an all-white village, which had never had a black person in its midst, was an incredible challenge he was ready to take, even remembering the racism and taunts during an earlier sojourn in cosmopolitan Paris. With his charm and big, toothy smile, he quickly won acceptance from the locals, while his elderly landlady, an Algerian French woman, who distrusted people of color, was finally charmed and ended up in love with him. Everyone from the area whom I interviewed for my book confirmed that he had firmly found his place as “Jimmy” among them.

I came to realize that the house and village provided the tranquility for Baldwin to produce barrier-breaking work about racism, sex, religion and intolerance. The forcefulness of his writing was criticized on all sides, even from antagonistic young black writers. Despite the searing, personal attacks, he remained through his fury a gentle soul. Unfortunately, his predictions that racism would escalate were scoffed, but his predictions proved to be accurate. With fortitude, he never gave up his stride against racism. Fear of criticism never daunted him, not in the power of his fiction or the elegance of his words.