Another COUNTRY

Searching for James Baldwin in the South of France

- Jimmie Briggs

SINCE JAMES BALDWIN'S death nearly 40 years ago, the literary lion's final home, in the South of France, has drawn a procession of acolytes to the Provençal community of Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent the last 17 years of his life.

The 300-year-old villa in which he resided no longer exists: By 2019 developers had converted the site into a luxury apartment complex. But that hasn't deterred generations of admirers, inflamed and enlightened by Baldwin's prose, from making a pilgrimage.

Including me. Seizing the occasion of the writer's centennial year, I paid a visit in April. My first stop was a table at a Baldwin hangout, the Café de la Place on Place du Général de Gaulle, for a croque monsieur and a double espresso.

My entry point into Baldwin had been his first, arguably greatest work of fiction, Go Tell It on the Mountain.

I devoured his oeuvre as a student and journalist and author. He became my muse and my specter. At times I wasn't sure if I was looking over his shoulder or he over mine. Like countless other Black writers confronting Baldwin, I grappled with what literary critic Harold Bloom termed the "anxiety of influence," the artist's internal burden of trying to overcome the relentless tug of a predecessor's literary gravity.

As Toni Morrison put it in her eulogy at Baldwin's funeral in 1987, at Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine: "You gave me a language to dwell in-a gift so perfect it seems my own invention. I have been thinking your spoken and written thoughts for so long, I believed they were mine. I have been seeing the world through your eyes for so long, I believed that clear, clear view was my own."