James Baldwin

Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin “I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.” When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin’s brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything—Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer’s last chance to speak at length about his life and work. The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin’s career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience. Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin’s life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin’s fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.

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James Baldwin: The Last Interview

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What struck me was the fact that she was singing, as you say, about a disaster, which had almost killed her, and she accepted it and was going beyond it. The fantastic understatement in it. It is the way I want to write, you know. 

You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish. 

It is one thing to demand justice in literature, and another thing to face the price that one has got to pay for it in life. 

It is almost impossible to assess what was lost, which makes it impossible to assess what is gained.

Freedom is a very dangerous thing. Anything else is disastrous. But freedom is dangerous. You've got to make choices. You've got to make very dangerous choices. You've got to be taught that your life is in your hands.

Your troubles are always coming. And Cadillacs don't get you through. And neither do psychiatrists, incidentally. All that gets you through it, really, is some faith in life, which is not so easy to achieve.

James Baldwin: The Last Interview quotes

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