I didn't realize it until I started this, but it had been too long since I'd read Baldwin. I forgot a little, with the passage of years, how absolutely gorgeous his writing is; how critically and with what perception he describes human relationships, world conditions. I go around telling everyone and their mother that they should read Just Above My Head (I even got my own mom a copy for Christmas last year; she loved it), but I go seven years without reading Baldwin. And to read Baldwin right now, of course, is as urgent as ever. In fact, while reading Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, which was published in 1968, I wavered between anger and sorrow (but not surprise) because it still felt so relevant, so urgent. But it also felt like a tool, a weapon. As I've considered the events of the last couple months, of people who think the protesters are demanding too much -- again and again I keep hearing a line from Nina Simone in my head: "They keep on saying 'go slow!". She wrote Mississippi Goddam in 1964. Sixty years should be slow enough for anyone, but we all know it was never about incrementalism, it was about preserving the status quo. So, when while reading this book, I found myself in discussions where generational differences were used as a justification for caution around voicing support for Black Lives Matter, I could say, "James Baldwin was born in 1924 and was writing about this stuff more than 50 years ago. Don't talk to me about generational differences. The older generations have had time to learn." (Not that it got me anywhere, really, but I did actually wave the book around on a zoom meeting at one point. It was sitting right there.)As it happens, there are some interesting generational dynamics in Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. The narrator, Leo Proudhammer, is around Baldwin's own age. When the book picks up, it's present day, he's 39 years old, a successful actor, a celebrity. The narrative follows his life from early childhood up to the present. He came of age in Harlem before the Civil Rights movement, during war years (though he didn't go to war), and found his way into a sort of bohemian existence spent largely in downtown Manhattan and among white people, eventually finding success as an actor. As a young man, this gives him an outsider/outsider perspective, and Baldwin articulates this so well. In any case, later on in the book, closer to the present day, Leo starts a relationship with "Black Christopher," who's probably 20 years his junior. Christopher comes from a generation that expects things to be different, that wants to fight to make things different. You can see Leo's admiration and fear as he recognizes this. Leo has learned to live in and navigate a mostly white world, and Christopher has no interest in protecting that world.
I made the mistake, when I was about two-thirds of the way through reading this, of googling the book, and I came across the New York Times review of the book, written by (pre-Godfather!) Mario Puzo in 1968. He did not like it. Puzo says, suggests Baldwin should stick to nonfiction. "It becomes clearer with each book he publishes that Baldwin's reputation is justified by his essays rather than his fiction," he says. I am deeply offended on behalf of Another Country, the book that sealed my love for Baldwin (and the novel he wrote before this one), and I thought Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone was truly beautiful.
