Podcast

Poured Over: Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. on Begin Again

By Miwa Messer / July 27, 2021 at 12:01 am

Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

Paperback $19.00

Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

In Stock Online

Paperback $19.00

James Baldwin died in 1987, but his work still speaks to us — as if it was written last year, or last month, or even last week. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. joins us on the show to discuss leaving the U.S. in order to write about Baldwin (and why Baldwin came back from Paris); why we’re reaching for Baldwin now, more than three decades after his death; what Baldwin has to teach us about the intersection of memory, history, identity and race — and more. Featured books: Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.; No Name in the Street, Nothing Personal and Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin. Produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang.
Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: Eddie Glaude, Thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over: The Barnes and Noble podcast began again his memoir, its history, its literary criticism. And like Baldwin himself, you needed to leave the US in order to write this book and to see the US more clearly. What was that like, for you?

Eddie Glaude: It was a challenge, because I had not quite figured out what I was writing about. Initially, I thought I was going to write this intellectual biography. And the sources just weren’t lending themselves to a book like that, in the sense that I knew I wasn’t saying much. That was new, because a lot of the material has been embargoed. And I knew I wanted to do something that was more than just simply write about Jimmy. And so when I found myself in Heidelberg, initially, actually, I was in St. Thomas, and had this wonderful flat, I was going to write looking at the Caribbean Sea, and then hurricane Maria blew me back home. So I had to go to Heidelberg. And I wasn’t in Heidelberg, an hour, and there was a Black man on the ground screaming at the top of his lungs. And I didn’t have to go on MSNBC to talk about it. I didn’t have to be a pundit. So I went back to my flat, and I started writing and writing. And that’s where I found the hope for the book. It was as if getting the requisite distance from the place was the precondition to understanding what I needed on the page.

B&N: Baldwin delivered some of his most powerful work almost 50 years ago, he died in 87. And yet, so much of his work reads as if it could have been written last year, or last month or last week. So where do you start with the volume of work like that, the body of work that Baldwin produced, but also the fact that it is so timely and so of the moment, and yet sits firmly in history?

EG: Yeah, such a great question. I’ve been struggling and grappling with no name in the street for decades. And I teach it every year. And the book just speaks to me and speaks to the moment I happened to be teaching my Baldwin seminar during the Clinton/Trump campaign. And I’m reading Baldwin and my students. They’re overrun, not overwhelmed. I mean, literally, Baldwin is running over the, with the insight, and part of what I wanted to do is to kind of, he’s trying to teach me something here with no name. I have to figure this out. What is the riddle? What is the answer? And so it was actually me trying to figure out no name that gave me the key to the corpus. And it also allowed me to break loose from this old kind of dichotomy of early Baldwin late Baldwin. And as if the late Baldwin, he had gone bad in the teeth, that he had succumb to propaganda that he had lost a hold of his craft. And then it comes out of James Campbell’s very troublesome and problematic biography of Baldwin. But reading no name backwards, reading, from no name, back to Notes of a Native Son, suddenly, everything started opening in a different sort of way, as a teacher of Baldwin. Now writing began again, though, was a different sort of process. By unlocking no name, I think I unlocked the nonfiction, I got a better sense of the way in which he’s thinking about memory, how he’s thinking about history, the ways in which identity and how he’s thinking about race and identity and those sorts of things. Then, I remember talking with Angela Davis, about the book. And she said to me, in some ways that it might be the first carceral studies book, oh, he is responding to the Safe Streets Act. And he sees Ronald Reagan on the horizon. So he’s seeing the collapse, he’s seeing the betrayal. And then, oh, oh, my God, this book is helping me understand, not just simply his corpus, but my moment. Mm hmm. And so now I’ve got I’ve come out of interpreting Jimmy to actually walking with him to see and understand and interpret my moment to answer another feature of your question. Baldwin seemed always one step ahead of his time. So he is the preeminent thinker, at least to my mind, about race and democracy, in our tradition of letters, so if you’re going to teach to Tocqueville, if you’re going to teach Emerson, you’ve got to teach him because he’s thinking about democracy and race at that level. In fact, they’re trying to think about democracy at his level in some ways. And so he, to my mind, belongs with not only to Tocqueville and Emerson and Whitman, he’s one of our premier thinkers about democracy and race. So it makes sense that one would reach for him in this moment.

B&N: And I want to go back to something you said a minute ago to about the reception for No Name in the Street, there were critics who did not take this book seriously. And that happened with the bulk of his later work where critics decided that he had put politics ahead of his art. But Baldwin, he couldn’t separate the two, he saw his moral calling as an artist to speak to what was happening in the world. And it seems like we’re still having this conversation. Where does the art begin? Where does the art end? How do you separate that, and you mentioned this in begin again, but it never really got credit for the way that Baldwin talks about trauma. And the way he cuts it up into fragments, there’s an artistic statement that is made in that book that other writers have leaned very heavily into, especially in recent years, where it’s this idea that you can do very short chapters where you can do very quick takes, and it’s almost cinematic, even in an essay.

EG: That’s absolutely right. And I didn’t pay attention to the formal intervention until when I found the mistake. When I said, Wait a minute, this, the Dorothy counts thing couldn’t have happened at all, but he’s already told me not to trust his memory. He’s already telling me that what drove him back to the account is sorrow is a sense of dread. So what does it mean? What does it mean to remember, from a space of trauma? Well, the memories are going to be fragmented, right? He’s gonna miss remember to use Toni Morrison’s language in some ways. And then the fact that Baldwin struggled so mightily with writing the book, right, he called it this mighty motherfucker, trying to figure out how to offer this account of this compressed history that was literally killing it, in some ways, right? He’s writing, no name, tries to commit suicide, and 69. And so he’s in Istanbul in ’70. The book comes out in ’72. And you know, he’s working on several projects at once. So you’re absolutely right, Baldwin by ’72. He’s already trying to give this account of black power. And people are already resisting Black Power, because they’re trying to put in place this narrative of the black freedom struggle in real time where Black Power is declined. And Baldwin is resisting that. Or balding in the 80s. This is the age of comedy. This is the moment with the black middle class. And Baldwin is still saying, as he says, he’s a broken motor still saying that people don’t want to hear it. People don’t want to hear it. So again, it makes sense to me that in this moment that people would be reaching for him because he figured it out, at least, as he put it, he knew he was right. He was there. I saw it happen. As he told Quincy true.

B&N: And Baldwin was always a fierce critic of the US. We’ve all seen that name on social media, we’re going around, I reserve the right because I love this country. And you even mentioned in the book that he was profoundly disillusioned, and yet he wasn’t ready to give up on the idea of America. And this was sort of his great struggle. And I want to bring up something that you mentioned. That’s really the heart of the thing. But it’s the lie that Baldwin sought to expose about America and the lie that we are built on in many ways and thing that he really honed in on quickly and stayed honed in on. Can we talk about the lie for a minute?

EG: Sure. I think it’s 1964, publishes an essay titled The White Problem. And I quote the passage, I think, on page nine in the hardback where, and I’m paraphrasing here when he says the Christians who founded the nation had a fatal flaw. They saw themselves as coming to found a Christian nation and democracy, but they held chat. And they had to reconcile the role that this channel that these people were playing in their lives and the way they did that, saying that they weren’t human being that because if they were not human beings bodily rights, then no crime would have been committed. Here’s the line. That lie is the basis of our President Trump. So it is this broad architecture, about the American project that protects our innocence that allows us to distort and bend history when history reveals that we are not who we say we are, that allows us to be willfully ignorant, so that we can maintain that innocence. By some ways. The lie is what sustains America as never Neverland, this place populated by lost boys and lost girls who don’t want to be responsible or don’t want to be held to account for anything. And you see, you see this trope, running throughout the work out this demand to grow up this need for maturation. Perpetual adolescence is a sign of corruption as it were for him. So the lie is this area, The late Sakmann bercovich At Harvard, describes it as the American ideology that we are this example of democracy achieved. And the only way you can say that is that you have to turn a blind eye to what we’ve done. And what we continue to do. The irony, of course, is that we are living in a moment where the lie is being reasserted in real time, right now. That’s another conversation.

B&N: Which we will get to. I have some notes on that, too. He never loses faith in the idea that people are capable of change. And yet he’s the one standing on the hill saying, Well, I see what you do. I see what you do. And yet, I still have hope. And that’s an extraordinary place to be standing. And that’s an extraordinary statement. For me, at least from my point of view, to say, I do believe that we are capable of change that we can move forward, he has survived the assassination of three dear friends, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King, Jr. And in fact, was left extremely distraught after King was assassinated. And yet here he is saying, I see what you do America, I see what you do. And yet, I believe there is reason to hope that we can change.

EG: Yeah, you know, he doesn’t hold on to this idea of America. He’s very critical of that. Mm hmm. But, but if we hear that my pronouns are, we don’t hold on to that, and what what is left? Either we just take the bribe, and just pursue our own self interest, or we give up on it all. And to me, that is suicide, right? Why stick it out. So Baldwin’s hope he has this line that comes out of I came across this in an interview in in 1970, in Istanbul, at a party in Ebony Magazine. And he has his wonderful line, he says, hope is invented every day. And you know, if hope is invented every day, that means you have to hold off despair every day. And that’s so blue soaked. And I use this example, in my interviews, I mean, when I say, imagine an enslaved woman or man, and there’s nothing about her, or his condition, that would lead them to believe that their lives could be anything but that of a slave. But then, in a moment, in an experience, they may be looking in the eye of someone who loves them. And they see that love, they see it, they see absolute adoration, even though it could be torn asunder by the violence of the institution, or they hear the innocence of laughter of children outside the cabin. And those moments become space for the imagination to do the work of thinking beyond the immediacy of now, because if that didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be Jimmy wouldn’t have made it at the end of nothing personal. He talks about that journey. And so hope is blue soaked. There’s no naivete about this place. It’s not sentimental. Baldwin loads sentimentality. He says it’s the mask of cruelty. But he’s still a romantic. And when I say romantic, I mean in the sense that there is on breakable faith in the capacity of human beings to be otherwise. So there’s an unshakable faith in us. And he has that I have to, I couldn’t survive if I did.

B&N: Yeah, youI think it’s especially important now to really focus on that attachment to hope, because there’s so many readers who look at Baldwin, and they attach themselves to the rage, they attach themselves to the grief. You know, rage is another way of expressing grief. But I don’t think Baldwin necessarily has gotten the credit that he should, for being as vulnerable as he is on the page, especially in that time as a gay man as a black gay man in America in the 1950s and 60s and 70s. And even into the 80s, the way that he was able to capture his emotion, and you even write about this, you say it would make my white classmates profoundly uncomfortable, which made me profoundly uncomfortable. And I haven’t read Baldwin in a classroom setting, probably, for reasons not dissimilar to that, to be honest, but he’s been a touchstone for me as a reader since I was a teenager. And I was very fortunate that I came to him very early uncle who was a librarian, and let me have the run of the place. No, I was very lucky. But all of that heavy, heavy vulnerability that he’s able to express and all of the nuance and all of the complexity, and he doesn’t actually get credit for.

EG: Yeah, you know, because oftentimes, when especially when we read the nonfiction, we lose sight of him as an artist. And there’s an understanding of the artist that Baldwin has, you got to run towards your feet, you can’t run away from it, you have to plumb the depths of that cellar, you know, you got to get in into the muck, if these characters are going to be real. One of the ways in which we often misread his criticism of Richard Wright, is that he’s saying, we tend to reduce Black life to a tangled web of pathology, we only want to read us read our lives in this very materialist way, which wouldn’t allow us to account for how Richard Wright emerges out of matches, we can’t account for you, Richard. So Baldwin wants to give voice to the interior life of Black Folk. What Toni Morrison tries to do in her fiction, which Baldwin said was too dark, you go into Toni’s world, and it’s difficult to come out. And so this sense of the depth of our wound of our suffering, the complexity of our love, our need for touch, those empty spaces Maldon wants to be true to that, because it’s in the music, it’s, it’s in the way we inhabit space and time. But he also wants to keep track of the material conditions he wants to do both at the same time. So when people say the later Baldwin becomes the very object of his criticism of the early ball, they’re missing the whole point. So I say all this to say is that rage and grief, they like to kill, you can’t run past and rage or the grief. Can you imagine? He grew up in a Pentecostal family. Obviously, his sexuality was the source of wound, in relation to his stepfather, the only father he knew. You when you read closely, then the material, his writings, he’s been sexually abused. He’s in Greenwich, and a grown man is his boyfriend. And he’s still a teenager, and to crush a serpent. The last essay, the freaks essay in the Toni Morrison edited volume, it’s clear he’s experienced sexual violence, wound are the stories of him returning to his apartment in Istanbul beaten, as so wound is at the heart of it. And Baldwin is thinking through it, that line that you get in the price of the ticket, but I never thought, paraphrasing, because someone could love, you know, an ugly boy like me. So the need for love standing alongside the feeling of being unlovable. That’s not reducible to sociology. At that point, we’re getting at the heart of what it means to be a human being trying to live a life between those two momentous breaths, the first one in the last one. So oftentimes, when we read his nonfiction, we lose sight of the fact that he’s an artist of the highest order of the highest orders. He brings that same sensibility to his political commentary.

B&N: You also talk about Baldwin as a critic of the after times, yeah, in Begin Again, and I’d love to take a minute and just talk about what that means to you. As a reader and a writer and a professor.

EG: I get the phrase from Whitman’s Democratic diesters. And Whitman is trying to make sense of what has happened in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. And he sees greed everywhere. Whitman is, of course, deeply troubling, because at this time he’s redacting the abolitionist elements from Leaves of Grass where he doesn’t believe Black people should be accorded the benefits of citizenship. As he writes in his editorials in Brooklyn. That were baboons and barbarians. We don’t have the capacity to be citizens, although he was anti slavery. But the after times is this moment when a world is dying in a world is desperately trying to come into being in the ghost hunt. So something is dying, something is trying to be born, but ghosts have you by the throat. And so here we are, I’m like thinking about our own moment. Obama’s elected folks are talking about, you know, we’ve turned the corner. And you see all of this stuff, all of the detritus, from the Tea Party to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to the election of Donald Trump. And what you see is in interesting sorts of ways is the ugliness of the interregnum. That blues crossroads isn’t a great place to be. Right? So if something is dying, and something is trying to be born in the ghost have you around the throat, no wonder Robert Johnson makes a deal with the dumb to get out from underage. So it became this moment for me Baldwin is seeing, he’s seeing that folks are turning their backs on the civil rights movement. So they have these extraordinary paragraph in No Name in the Street, where he compresses the history. From the moment he lands in McDonald’s with that big typewriter to the fact that at this time, Angela was still A baby, that these Panthers were still crawling around on their knees. I mean, you get this amazing compression of history, then you end with Angela. Most Wanted for the FBI. And you know what has happened? Not over a course of a century, but over the course of 567 a decade, you know. So he sees and then he also sees what happened to those babies. I mean, it’s so fascinating. Stokely Carmichael was one of the best organizers in snip, Kwame Touray, one of the most fearless non violent organizers in the south, that Howard contingent of students who join snick, they went to my hometown in Mississippi, and they get radicalized not because, you know, they come to hate. White people get radicalized, because as Carmichael said, they stay experience raw terror. And Baldwin’s saw them turn their backs on them. I begin the book with this story of Baldwin talking to those kids in that apartment, because they are the ones who met and in the story with me, with those people smoking weed in the because I’m trying to say something about these two moments. And these kids, Baldwin refuse to turn his back on them. And then he continues to grow. So he sees Reagan on the horizon. He sees it. But he’s screaming at the top of his lungs. So he’s writing in this period, where one world is dying. Another World is desperately trying to come into being and the country doubles down on its ugly. And so this is why writing with him in Begin Again. I had a language to describe our own current Mo.

B&N: Baldwin is really clear to throughout the nonfiction that we have to muster the moral strength to reimagine America. To quote you in the book, and yeah, I’d like to take just a second, because respectability politics is still something that is chewing up and down. Communities of Color, whether they’re Black or brown in this country. And I love this idea of Baldwin saying we have a moral obligation as human beings to make things better for everyone. And yes, we have to we have to challenge the lies. And we have to challenge the mythology because we do love our mythology. I grew up in Massachusetts, I know lots of things about pilgrims. And yet, here we are, in a way almost undercutting ourselves. And Baldwin was on the receiving end of this too at one point because he also said, Listen, I don’t have solidarity with Black people just because I’m Black. I have solidarity with the people who want genuine change. And it’s tricky territory to navigate. So how do we do that? How do we get to the other side of this conversation?

EG: Painfully. There’s no easy way. Baldwin found himself caught between the Scylla and corruptness of Black politics. So there’s a sense in which, even as he was embracing Black Power, many of its proponents thought him unworthy sellout, Eldridge Cleaver and that ilk. At the same time, folks were skeptical of him from the Civil Rights side, because of his sexuality in some ways and the like, the only thing you could do is be true to yourself, be true to your witness, and be true to love. So we have to love our way through this gauntlet and not fall for easy comforts. The illusions of easy comforts. You know, he’s a Christian, meaning people might describe him as post Christian, but he’s certainly shaped by a Christian sensibility. He wouldn’t fall for the idolatry of race, even as he understands its significance to the culture that produced it. In a letter to his brother, we have to do something we have to respond to this mystical Black bullshit. He says it in Many Thousands Gone, you use the categories that spring the trap. But he’s also very clear that we can’t just then retreat to some a historical space where we stand above all of the mass. No, no, no. To use a Beckett metaphor, though we’re in the mess. And we just have to slug our way through it. And that means they’re going to be moments of overreach, moments of conflict, as we try to figure out how to be differently, I think. Yeah, but I believe Baldwin is absolutely right. He says, remember that line? Again, I’m paraphrasing where he says I want us to do something unprecedented, to imagine ourselves without the need for enemies. Now that line comes out of a letter of resignation to the liberator, a black However, periodically, that has been anti semitic, I want to imagine, I want to imagine a way of being in the world without the need for every time I say that, in any fashion it gives me to.

B&N:Baldwin writes a lot about his loneliness. You see it everywhere in his work, where he knows he’s in exile. And he’s an outsider no matter where he is. And yet he picks up stakes very famously, and goes to Paris in ’48 and stays there very productively, but comes back to the US in ’57. I know the story of Baldwin. And yet, I was always kind of like, well, why did you come back?

EG: Attachments, loved ones. When I was in Heidelberg, just for that little period, the silence, because you don’t have the language, so you can’t speak. So you’re quiet. So you’re seeing things differently, you’re hearing your own language, in a different way, the longing for home, the way he talks about Go tell it on the mountain, he couldn’t finish it, couldn’t get the book, right, until he connected with the culture that made him who he was, I couldn’t get the language rights, and to listen to my Iranian Bessie Smith and all of these folk to kind of give him some sense. And so now he’s coming back to New York to hawk you know, amen corner. But he’s also coming back to get some greens, some fried chicken, from Mama, to hang out with David, to go to the club, see old friends. And of course, whenever you’ve been away for a while, when you come home, you want to show off, show off who you are, who you become, to reference, nothing personal. One gets a sense of the importance of these communal attachments to surviving it all. You can’t do it alone. So he always wanted his family nearby. So he buys one big apartment building and puts them on every floor. So he needed to get home and see his phone and eat his food and listen to his music and hang out with his peoples in Harlem. Yeah, yeah.

B&N: But isn’t it also an opportunity for him to merge two selves. He’s got the Baldwin of Harlem and the United States and the Baldwin of Paris. I don’t know if they’re entirely equal in his mind. I know he needs both. And maybe place takes precedence. Maybe it’s more defined by where he physically is in the moment. But the way he writes about creating character and finding your space, as it were, it’s kind of fascinating to me.

EG: Yeah, you know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. That wonderful formulation. And nobody knows my name and introduction. It’s fascinating to find that clip, where he’s thinking about what it meant for him to leave. In America, the color of my skin, it stood between myself and me. In Europe, that barrier was down. Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction. But nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. It turned out that the question of who I was, was not solved, because I had removed myself from the social forces, which ministry anyway, these forces have become interior. And I had dragged them across the ocean with me the question of who I was, had it last become a personal question. And the answer was to be found in me. So here, I think that formulation troubles, the distinction between the Baldwin of Harlem and the Baldwin of Paris. Baldwin is engaged in this ongoing effort, arduous task of self creation. And what he says in his interviews with Fern, Margie Ekman is he says, I realized that I did not have to be, I didn’t have to dance with you. I didn’t have to respond to what white folks thought of me. And I learned that in Paris, and once I left Paris, because UC put it I didn’t trade one illusion for another. Now he’s stepping into a different way of being in the world. So the Harlem Baldwin, the Paris Baldwin, the Istanbul, Baldwin, the kibbutz Baldwin, the London Baldwin, all of these are spaces where Baldwin is engaged in that excavation, and creation of the self that he imagines himself to be. That makes sense.

B&N: It does, because there’s a great line from Baldwin that you quote, in the book to accept one’s past one’s history is not the same thing as drowning in it, it’s learning how to use it. And you use this line to transition into a comment from Mel painter. It’s all about the questions, we ask the questions of change. I mean, the questions always change. That’s why we keep writing history. So what are the questions? Yeah, she’s amazing, but what are the questions we need to be asking right now?

EG: Well, one question that we certainly need to be asking is, who do we take ourselves to be who do we who do we want to be? Of course that, to me, is a moral question. Right and The first version of who do we take ourselves to be involves an assessment of our current arrangements, an honest assessment of this place? And who do we aspire to be? To my mind also requires the kind of honesty? Do we genuinely aspire to be a multiracial democracy? Do we, then what does that look like? And it’s detail, or do these folks still believe? Do they still believe that they’re engaged in charity, that they’re just giving us a gift of allowing us to be here? I had this wonderful conversation with Steve Schmidt. And he says, We’re gonna invite you to the table. No, no, no, no, we don’t need invitations to a table that we all we help build. So one of those questions, how do we give an account of the way we live together? How do we honestly give an account of our failures? And that those sorts of questions are really critical? When we think about the debates around critical race theory, as you say to people, hours is the country we have made, racial inequality is not something that just happened. It is a deliberate consequence on decisions. And if we’re going to be otherwise, we’re gonna have to be just as deliberate in our remedy. But to remit the former is to concede guilt. And folk don’t want to do that. And Jimmy knew it. He kept telling us, they can’t admit, as he put it, they can’t admit that what I’m saying is true, because if they do, it says something about. And here we are, in 2021. And the formulation still obtains.

B&N: I see what you do. I see what you do. You have been very open that you came to Baldwin in graduate school as a serious study. But you teach Baldwin at Princeton. Whatever your students taught you about Baldwin?

EG: Oh, my God, everything. I remember one student charting the evolution of Baldwin’s judgment of his father, which was so helpful for me, in relation to my own father. I remember my students finding formulations and Notes of a Native Son, almost exact sentences, and seeing them echoed in the evidence of things that seem so the continuities and the brakes. I marveled at the way in which they revel in his language, how they squirm how they sit in the discomfort, but also revel in the language, my first assignment, you know, they’ll have the right to papers. And the first paper is a personal essay. I want them to inhabit the genre to use autobiography as a point of entry to social critique. And what he inspires just just mind blowing just the attempt to be right. Sometimes they fall flat on their faces. But other times, it’s just Dunning, so and they’ve taught me to listen to him more carefully. Baldwin is scary as a companion. I’ve said this over and over again. The one that I barely survived writing the book. I drank too much. Every time I wrote. There was a glass of Jameson right next to me, I love Irish whiskey. And so I’m drinking. Because he was asking things of me. And I was answering them in a way that I thought everything was going to collapse around. Because initially, the sentences weren’t dancing. And I remember hearing him say to me, I remember this because you know, I keep a saint’s candle right of him right next to my computer. And I remember him saying to me, if we’re going to do this together, oh, boy, you’re gonna have to deal with you. And so I started dealing with the fact that I’m a wounded child, I still have all of these things going on with my own dad, and or at least I did, and so and then the architecture of my own lives. And it wasn’t until I grappled with the conversation between him and Nikki Giovanni and Nikki Giovanni said to him, brass, Bolden is being generous. He’s these giant Nikki Giovanni, Ro, she just young. And he’s talking about the huge he has to go to work. The man goes to work that have those eyes. She said, Yeah, you go to work that I do coming home and take it out on me a lot of me. And Jimmy was so confused. He didn’t know what to do. And that moment gave me license to say, okay, you’ve gone too far backup off. Let’s keep writing. Let’s keep writing. That’s a long winded tangent. But the students taught me to listen to him and listening to him meant that I opened myself up to my vulnerabilities, which meant that I had to run towards my fear. And in doing that, I drank a lot of damn Irish whiskey.

B&N:We got a really great book. We really did.

EG: Thank you.

B&N: Can we really do this? As a country? Can we begin again? Can we do this?

EG: You ask me that today. I pray that he can. But I’m not sure, to be honest with you. There are some among us who believe that America cannot be imagined any other way. I tweeted the other day that America is much more than an idea America is an argument had over time. And there are those who hold a certain view of America, who backed up that claim with state power and violence. And there are those who have responded with a counter arc, my great grandmother comes out of that tradition. She’s buried on the coast of Mississippi. And I got to fight because she bequeath This to me to this is mine. I’m not going to cede it to them. But it seems to me that there are those who believe I wrote this line in the book, and I remember my editor being scared shitless when I wrote it, I said, the idea of white America is irredeemable. There’s nothing that can be salvaged, of the idea that because you’re white, you ought to be valuable. But the fact that the idea of white America is eerie, doesn’t make us eerie. That distinction for some of our fellows is impossible. And that’s what I get into my darkest hour when people can’t see it, as folks can’t see it, but it keeps going, keep writing, keep talking. Keep back, we have to figure out how to imagine this place differently. And we can’t reach for consensus narratives, that consensus story. The only consensus we have is that we’ve been arguing. That’s the only thing. And how do we render that argument in a way that isn’t just simply shards, fragments? How do we render it in such a way that unleashes a different ground for thinking of the nation and of our relationship to each other?

B&N: How do you write full time though, when you’re also teaching and running the department? You have a lot?

EG: Yeah, I write in my head. So I do a lot of building structure. I get the argument straightened out that I have to craft sentences, so it takes a little bit longer. If I have a superpower, it’s my ability to compartmentalize. So there’s the stuff around the department, there’s the stuff around MSNBC, there’s the stuff around speaking engagements, the stuff around writing, the stuff around life is a different question. But you know, this stuff.

B&N: What’s the thing that you really want readers to know about Begin Again?

EG: It works on at least two levels. The first is something that we’ve been talking about, when I say we need a third founding, I really mean we need to reimagine this place. If we’re going to survive, we have to do this, how many damn calendars have the French had, right in terms of how many times they started over? We have to imagine ourselves differently. So that’s one takeaway. And hopefully, I’ve told a story, or I’ve given an account a description that warrants such a conclusion. The second is much more personal. And I suspect is the lesson learned from walking with Baldwin. And that is what it means to bear witness, no matter the cost to bear witness into bear one. So on the page, I refuse to take the breath. I refuse to even though people think I have, because you’re on television and you wear nice suits, and you know, but no, no, that I refuse to take the breath. And I pray that you do too.

B&N: That seems like a really good place to wrap the interview. Thank you so much, Eddie Glaude. Begin Again is now out in paperback.

EG: Oh, this has been lovely. Thank you so much.