Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

Abstract

Reviewed by: Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr L. Benjamin Rolsky Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2020) Traditional renderings of “America” typically begin with the idea that it can be concretely defined. In many instances, the story seems to write itself. It begins with the New England Puritans and their city upon a hill, and it ends with their collective efforts to build a democracy in the proverbial wilderness. But is this narrative really so concrete? “The eyes of all people are upon us,” John Winthrop famously said, “so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work … we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.” Despite centuries of dealing falsely, America and its progeny have survived, even flourished, in what was called “the New World.” How could this be? How could centuries of chattel slavery and human bondage not qualify as false dealings with “our God”? For scholar of African American religious life Eddie Glaude, Jr., such stories continue to be told because they depend on a lie—perhaps the greatest one ever told. Glaude’s latest work, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, relies on the literary imagination of author James Baldwin in order to elucidate what Glaude means by “the lie” that continues to define American public life today. “If what I have called the ‘value gap’ is the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others,” Glaude contends, “then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false [End Page 127] assumptions by which the value gap is maintained” (7). In this sense, whatever America is rests largely on an imaginative move that defines certain bodies as more valuable than others. Through his magisterial reading of Baldwin’s fiction and non-fiction, Glaude offers a particular reading of our public life as an “after time,” one that mirrors Baldwin’s subject: late twentieth-century America following desegregation. As a “critic of the after times,” Baldwin “wrote in another after times—that of the collapse of the civil rights movement, bearing witness to a time when many thought the nation was poised to change, only to have darkness descend and change arrested” (16). Glaude’s decision to use Baldwin’s writings to give shape and texture to such a story is what makes Begin Again such a provocative read. It is part history, part autobiography, part social commentary: a canvas against which Glaude explores his own story, channeling the ghost of Baldwin in a kind of ontological exorcism. But the book is not merely autobiographical or existential. Glaude relies on Baldwin and his writings to help in both understanding and navigating yet another calamitous moment in the history of US empire—our own. “Ours, like the moments after the Civil War and Reconstruction and after the civil rights movement, requires a different kind of thinking,” Glaude contends. “Baldwin, I believe, offers resources to respond to such a dark time and to imagine an answer to the moral reckoning that confronts us all” (xxiv). Balancing careful analysis with creative license, Glaude presents those rhetorical resources to us, his readers. In this sense, it falls on us to choose whether we listen, or not, to Glaude’s moral imperative in yet another after time in America’s history. Curiously absent from Begin Again is any sustained attention to the religion of its subjects, both Baldwin and Glaude, and yet religion is rendered something of a spectre in Begin Again. In Baldwin’s own writings, whether Go Tell It On the Mountain or The Fire Next Time, there is an intimate relationship between notions of “America” and “religion.” Baldwin himself was of Pentecostal background and upbringing. Glaude spends little time actually addressing such religious themes or background in the text. This is especially surprising as he reads Baldwin as a prophetic Christian witness through his complex literary corpus. Perhaps this omission is the result of trauma—something Glaude...