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young steps like my grandfather, counting fatigue at the end of each day. Starved with pain, he left, came back. He questioned and answered in gold. He wept in disbelief at himself and his country and pardoned us all.
    When I first read James Baldwin’s
Go Tell It on the Mountain
I knew I was home: Saw my sisters and aunts and mothers and grandmothers holding up the children and churches and communities, turning their collective cheeks so that we could survive and be. And they settled down on his pages, some walking disorderly, others dressed in tunics that hid their nakedness. Ladies with no waists. Working double time with the week. Reporting daily to the Lord and their men. Saw his Black males walking sideways under an urban sky, heard their cornbread-and-sweet-potato laughter, tasted their tenement breaths as they shouted at the northern air, shouted at the hunger and bed bugs, shouted out the days with pain, and only the serum of the Lord (or liquor) could silence the anger invading their flesh.
    When I first saw him on television in the early sixties, I felt immediately a kinship with this man whose anger and disappointment with America’s contradictions transformed his face into a warrior’s face, whose tongue transformed our massacres into triumphs. And he left behind a hundred TV deaths: scholars, writers, teachers, and journalists shipwrecked by his revivals and sermons. And the Black audiences watched and shouted amen and felt clean and conscious and chosen.
    When I first met him in the late sixties, I was stricken by his smile smiling out at the New York City audience he had just attacked. I was transfixed by his hands and voice battling each other for space as they pierced, caressed, and challenged the crowded auditorium. I rushed toward the stage after the talking was done, I rushed toward the stage to touch his hands, for I knew those hands could heal me, could heal us all because his starting place had been the altar of the Lord. His starting place had been an America that had genuflected over Black bones. Now those bones were rattling discontent and pulling themselves upright in an unrighteous land. And Jimmy Baldwin’s mouth, traveling like a fire in the wind, gave us the songs, the marrow and the speech as we began our hesitant, turbulent and insistent walk against surrogates and sheriffs, governors and goons, patriarchs and patriots, missionaries and ’ministrators of the status quo.
    I was too shy too scared too much a stutterer to say much of anything to him that night. I managed to say a hello and a few thank-you’s as I ran out of the auditorium back to a Riverside Drive apartment, as I carried his resident spirit through the coming nights, as I began to integrate his fire into my speech. No longer slavery-bound. No longer Negro-bound. No longer ugly or scared. But terrifyingly beautiful as I, we, began to celebrate the sixties and seventies. Opening and shutting with martyrs. A million bodies coming and going. Shaking off old fears. Laughing. Weeping. Hoping. Studying. Trying to make a colony finally into a country. Responsible to all its citizens. I knew finally as the Scriptures know that “the things that have been done in the dark will be known on the housetops.”
    The last time I saw Jimmy Baldwin was at Cornell University. But it is not of that time that I want to speak, but of the next to the last time we spoke in Atlanta. An Atlanta coming out from under serial murders. An Atlanta that looked on him as an outsider attempting to stir up things better left unsaid.
    A magazine editor motioned to me as I entered the hotel lobby at midnight, eyes heading straight for my room, head tired from a day of judging plays. He took me to the table where Jimmy was holding court. Elder statesman. Journeying toward himself. Testifying with his hand and mouth about his meeting with professors and politicians and preachers. He had listened to activists and soothsayers and students for days, and his hands