The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

by James Baldwin, edited and with an introduction by Randall Kenan
Pantheon Books, 320 pp., $26.95

James Baldwin, the oracular writer and spectacular wordsmith of mid-20th century America, is revivified in this new collection of unpublished work. Though there remains little of Baldwin’s written material that has not been previously released, editor Randall Kenan has scrupulously combed the records for essays, lectures, letters, magazine reviews, and interviews that have previously escaped anthologizing, making The Cross of Redemption a crucial companion work to the Library of America’s posthumous and definitive release of James Baldwin: Collected Essays in 1998. The opportunity to further bask in Baldwin’s readably precise prose is a welcome gift, but Kenan’s collection also offers the chance, nearly 25 years after Baldwin’s death, to recognize the author’s recurring themes and prescience in his analysis of race relations in America.

What was termed the “Negro problem” in postwar America, Baldwin regarded as a white problem: the country’s denial of its racist past. In order to achieve a post-racial society, Baldwin consistently argued that there needed to be a “reckoning” with the past, with the history of slavery and the Dred Scott residue that allowed white Americans to view black citizens as less than equal human beings. The Negro problem was a white invention that wasn’t going to be resolved with the end of legal segregation and the rise of the black power movement.

Prophetically, in a 1961 speech, Baldwin recounts then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy promising him that “one day – thirty years, if I’m lucky – I can be president too.” However, one needn’t wonder what Baldwin would make of present-day America, led by a black president. “It never entered … the country’s mind – that perhaps I wouldn’t want to be. … What really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro ‘first’ will become the first Negro President. What I’m really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.”

Despite astute revelations such as this, it must be said that there is a certain repetitiveness in these essays’ themes and language, and some of the material is second-rate Baldwin. Yet his moral force can also be witnessed in his many writings about the responsibilities of the artist. Profiles of Sidney Poitier and the Floyd Patterson vs. Sonny Liston heavyweight bout are singular portraits. But The Cross of Redemption shows why Baldwin should never be allowed to go out of fashion.

This article appears in August 20 • 2010.

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Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.