James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni "A Conversation". Full Broadcast Video + Transcript

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James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni "A Conversation". Full Broadcast Video + Transcript

Nike Marshall's [https://www.am*zon.com/Persistence-Vision-Nike-Binger-Marshall/dp/0984325514]  author of persistence of vision ,favorite Nikki Giovanni words 

 

 

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and tonight on seoul a conversation between james baldwin
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and nikki giovanni and now here to introduce the program is
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the producer of soul ellis hazel
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good evening i'm ellis haystep and i welcome you to another soul episode
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one of the miracles of this universe that we deal with is the way it can use something as cold and gray and as
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impersonal as an electron these electrons that fill your television screen to bring you an
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experience as warm and as rich and as human as a program you're about to see
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and we here at seoul are extremely proud that we have been able to put together two programs conversations between two
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brilliant and eloquent members of the black family nikki giovanni and james
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baldwin we had to travel to london in order to tape these programs and we then edited
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them to fit within our time schedule of one hour tonight you will be seeing the
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first hour of this conversation and next week we will air the second part
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mr baldwin who is now living abroad is the author of going to meet the man
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tell me how long the trains been gone the fire next time another country
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nobody knows my name giovanni's room notes of a native son go tell it on the
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mountain and a wrap on race with margaret mead james baldwin is also the author of the
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plays blues for mr charlie and the amen corner nikki as most of our viewers know is an
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old friend of souls and one of quite a few beautiful people who has always made
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her time energy and thinking available to us she is the author of black feeling black
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talk black judgment recreation gemini and spin a soft black
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song she also edited an anthology of black female voices
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titled night comes softly so here now are nikki giovanni and james baldwin in
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conversation
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jimmy i'm really curious why did you move to europe well when the
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why or when why i think i know when i would i've moved to europe as far as
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one can say i did i moved europe first to 1948.
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uh because i was trying to become a writer and
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couldn't find in my surroundings in my country
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a certain um stamina a certain corroboration that i
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needed for example no one ever told me that i was going to do my was at malato and no one had told me the pushkin was black
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and as far as i knew when i was very very young there'd never been anything
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as far as my father knew which is much more important there'd never been anything called a black writer
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[Laughter] so when i was you know when i was when i
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was 24 i split i went and came to paris and
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worked and went home in 57 and worked and stayed and was based in
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new york really in and out because i was workers on the one hand making speeches
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and the other hand trying to write you know and i never was able to write in new york so
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i would go out and do my work and come back and do my work you see what i mean and that all ended in a way or something
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else began after martin luther king was murdered and i spent a long time in limbo
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at the moment i'm based in the south of france but there was any way ever to leave america you know i'd be a fool to think
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that there was someplace i could go where i wouldn't carry myself with me
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or there was some way for me to live if i pretended i didn't have the responsibility which in fact i do have
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so i'm in a way this living i'm a cat trying to make it in the you know in the world because i'm condemned
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to live in the world condemned condemned condemned condemned in the sense that
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in the sense of when you're young and also when you're old you would rather
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you know have around you you know the expected things you know to to know where everything is
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you know and it's it's it's a little difficult but it's very valuable to be forced to move one place to
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another and deal with another set of situations all the time and to accept that this is going to be
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it is your life and to use it you know it means you in a sense become neither
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white nor black you know and you learn a great deal about um um
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you're first learning a great deal about the history out of which all these words and conceptions and flags
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and marathons right
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there's something that eventually i'm sure we're going to hit so we just don't have to work it out all right okay but let's start let's say
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with uh everybody's protest novel which i think came out in 48. it came out in 49 40 49 something like that yes when i
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was six jesus i thought it was a magnificent pieces i went to first grade i said my god somebody's really talking how do you
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stand in relationships say to that novel now to that everybody's wrote this now that's what i say now
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what do you think about let's say the younger writers of which i am and one and within that context are we in your
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opinion like moving ahead are we moving out of that basic service oh i think i i
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i think it's very difficult to to say it you know it can be misunderstood
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but you know you have no idea and i can never express to you
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to what extent i depend on you or i mean you nikki giovanni
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and also i mean your generation my generation you know um i can even say you have no idea and i
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can never express that either because i haven't in a way i have no
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right to say it but i'm very proud of you something has moved things move in a very strange way and
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maybe inexpressible if i wrote that essay today for example i would be writing a very different essay
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out of a very different kind of uh problem i think that without quite realizing it
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and no matter no matter what our hang-ups are as of this very moment hang on my generation or the hang-up of your
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generation you know and the terrible situation in which all of us find ourselves it is
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one thing has changed and that is the attitude that black people have towards themselves now
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within that change and i'm going to be romantic about it a great deal of confusion and coherence
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you know will go on for a very long time you know but that was inevitable
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that moment had to come too you know and everybody's told us now what i was trying for myself after all
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first of all to elucidate for myself of theology and the effects of a
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theology which i at the moment realized i carried in myself it was not the world that was my
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oppressor only because what the world does to you is the world does it to you long enough
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and effectively enough you begin to do it to yourself you become a collaborator
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an accomplice of your own murderers because you believe the same things they do
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you know you think it's they think it's important to be white and you think it's important to be white they think you're
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ashamed to be black and you think it's shameful to be black and you have no corroboration around you of any other
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sense of life you know all those collaborations which are around you
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are in terms of the white majority standards so deplorable they frighten you to death
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you don't eat watermelon no you get so rich you can't dance you know you can hardly move by the time
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you're 14 you know you're always scrubbed and shining you know a parody of god knows what
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there's no white person's ever been you know it's as clean as you have been forced to become
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and you've got somebody to begin to break out of all of that and try to become yourself
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you know it's hard for anybody but it's very hard if you're born black in a white society
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it's hard because you've got to divorce yourself from the standards of that society the danger of
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your generation if i may say so no we will pursue this like did you like
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is to substitute one romanticism for another you know because in fact
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these categories are to put to put it to simply
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but no but with a certain brutal truth these categories are commercial categories that's true you know
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there's a reason that when you and i were slaves my son
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produce out of your body is by definition a slave
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but the master sun also moves out of your body depending on his color
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if he was light enough he could be he'd live in the big house and if he wasn't he took his conditional condition of his mother
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he was still a slave he was a slave he was a slave he was a slave because
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even though he might be the master's son the master could make money off of his
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son the whole institution was threatened if a slave woman could produce a free man
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and the dilemma begins there you see what i mean i don't see why it's the dilemma if it's
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a slave i'm gonna continue the free man that thing slave woman that means anything the slave owner was written by
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law i said the reasons are commercial to produce a free man because once you have a free man out of the body of a slave
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you no longer have a slave it's true you know and but it's very hard to recognize that the standards which have almost killed
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you are really americanized standards they're based on cotton they're based on oil they're based on peanuts they're
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based on profits to this day through this hour yeah which
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the church sanctifies but the church is commercial
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it's when you begin to realize all of that no which is not easy that you begin to
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break out of the culture which has produced you and discover the culture but you really produced you
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you see what i mean what really brought you where you are when you're in trouble when i'm in trouble i'm not seeing um
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um adora's dead tintin alley tune you know you know you find yourself you know
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humming and moaning you know uh you know something which yeah but that great grandfathers did no
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that has to do with that and what we are we're what it's all about is the attempt now to excavate
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something which has been buried you know which you contain that i contain in which your kid contains
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which you've got to carry which one has a hand down the line for the sake of your kid and for the
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sake of future generations and even for the sake of white people but not to notice idea what this means
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because we have the edge over the people who think of themselves as white that we've never been deluded into
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knowing into believing what they believe and that sounds like a contradiction yeah
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no but in fact you watch man you work for
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you have to watch him you don't know you're watching him you're watching what you're watching but he's not watching you
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he thinks he knows who you are or what you are you don't know who he is because your life is in his hands
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and you have to watch him because if you don't watch him you might have lived from monday till
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tuesday it's as simple as that and without knowing you know him you know him
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he can't fool you i'm not i'm not at all i mean the civil rights movement i came up in
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the 60s which is like way after everybody else but we always assumed that we knew white people you know that we really sort of
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like understood them and i found out that if you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else and
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all you know you know what i mean with a snake is to watch a snake and you know it's a snake but you don't know it it's
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right they're trying you know what i mean i try because there's too many too much between there's too much emotion
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there's so much fear i can watch like the cat i work for you know what i mean and he's gonna watch me to some extent but we know each other i would say i
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would hypothesize that he knows me better because his game is running mine's not and that's what i've sort of always
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disagreed with your generation on as long as his game is running he obviously knows me because he's he's i'm
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playing you understand he said jump and i'm saying how high he knows me you may be right but i would put it
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another way i would i would put it i would i would suggest since his game is running
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he hasn't got to know you because his game is running no you're part of the game he's running
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he hasn't got to know you i would think that one of the reasons that uh the americans are in such trouble now
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is because the game is running it was running until until often only yesterday really
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would you believe today you know and all of a sudden through the american astonishment
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the americans are suddenly discovered that people in the world don't like them yeah now i always knew that
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because i didn't like them you know i love something i'm not likable well there's two people that are they like likeable there's two people in
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the world that's not likeable a master and a slave mm-hmm exactly exactly no we will never never
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never never get you know get precise categories for that very loaded statement you know that but that that is
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where the truth is how did you like him so the question i mean for me the
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question has always been power yes and for like you all the question has been
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morals you know i never wanted to be the most moral person in the world i agree i know i would like i mean i would sell my soul
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you know what i mean what is the profit of a man to gain the world and lose it so the world you know what i mean the world that's what it profit i know so
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you take the soul you know that's spiritual take the world but give me jesus y'all can have jesus give me the world
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you know even though it's losing 25 percent of its energy every hundred years or something ridiculous oh please don't believe all don't believe
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everything you hear no but i'm saying that's not my concern you know i know even though it's polluted ugly dirty give it to me speaking let me
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tell you i will take it but speaking speaking i agree with you i agree with you but speaking of
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speaking for myself but also speaking as representative of my of my generation
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but it's probably sable to speak only for myself really no i know that in my own case
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what i felt until feel perhaps in a different way but i felt very strongly
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in the years for example when i was one of you all were
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marching down those dusty highways with martin
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look i left the church and i was 17 years old you know i'm not really been into a church since except you know when i had to go for various fundraising
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rallies or this or that and i was not exactly the kind of
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christian that martin was if i could be described as christian at all it's hard to beat mechanic christianity
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but i liked him i loved him in fact and i knew that something was happening through him
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and my concern was yes the world but i've seen white people have done to
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the world and i'd seen white people have done to their children
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you know because in gaining the world they had lost something a lot no they'd lost
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the ability to love their own children are they truly love themselves which is the same thing you know
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and i didn't want that to happen if i may say so to you it was not a matter of morals so much
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as a matter of being forced in my own case to suggest to keep suggesting that
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though it was indeed you know a matter of power power without
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the word morals is misleading power without power without some sense of oneself
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it's gonna be another kind of sterility and the black people would then become exactly white people have become
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you know what i mean yeah there's a danger you know i also accept this that that danger is not it's not up to
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me to tell anybody how to run you know i can only speak is is what i am i'm a
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kind of poet and if i'm a kind of poet and i'm responsible for my own point of view
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to the people who produce me and the people who will come after me you know so that when the holocaust
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comes and will come you know eventually eventually no matter how simple black
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and white terms may be today life is not that simple and sooner or later if i do my work
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as i should do it when i'm needed i'll be there
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you know what i mean and the people listening i know what you mean
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because i think the most important i think that i do because i think the most important thing for any of us is when when what comes or when what we know
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will come comes that we have the strength to say yeah okay let's try the king you know okay and i'm gonna stay in
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my apartment on 94th and you'll be your niece but we'll say yeah and we'll also be able to ride out the storm but what
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is more important is not so much writing out of the song for you nicky or me jimmy no but
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in my mind's eye there's always that kid
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he's going to be here when you're gone yeah yeah you know when i am long gone
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and my point of view is it is about the children it is about the children we have to give
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the children something which in a way was at all given to us so we had to learn how to translate it
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because you'll be moving in a very different world than the one in which i grew up which you won't know anything about at all
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all the way in which you grew up which would be remote for him and yet he comes out of it and he's got to carry it much
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further than you or i will be able to carry it he's got to have respect for it but not be trapped by it precisely you have to
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give both give it to him and liberated liberate him from it you know
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and i think that kind of thing has been lacking like i think one of the nicest things that we created almost as a generation and it
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wasn't us because martin delaney and those people were way before us but just the fact that we could say hey i don't like white people mm-hmm oh great it's a
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great iteration it was a beginning of of course being able to like them exactly you know exactly which of course it
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upsets them but that's their problem yeah but their problem their problem really is a kind of um we were talking
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earlier before the show began about the kind of incomprehension in somebody's face trying to describe what it's you a very
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simple situation you know like people don't like going to jail and you want to see the man's face and
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he looks astonished what people don't like going to jail and then
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then you you pull back you need time you know does that really go on
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and you live with this all your life and what you watch is that
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he knows it really he doesn't think that you know it he doesn't think anybody will tell him
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and if it comes in as you were saying earlier if he allows that to enter into his guts
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he's a very different person he may be it may he it he may explode he doesn't know what
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will happen if he allows this apprehension of someone else's experience enter into him right because
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he's perpetuating his experience and this is this is this is the crisis of the age this is what malcolm really meant when
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he said that white is a state of mind
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okay you know on a certain level because i tend to be um parochial for one thing
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and i tend to care about afro-americans which i would define as the sons and daughters of slaves and slave owners
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you know what i mean that doesn't by the way sound very parochial to me it's very parochial because i don't care about my third
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world brothers and sisters and things like that that i'm sure i should but as we you mean you're responsible for a certain situation i just can't
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deal with it i think that if everybody dealt with their own little situation if i deal with my block and you did with your block
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and malcolm said that too yeah so when we deal with white as being like a state of well malcolm said everything
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which i would grant i mean he encompassed but as we um begin to try to deal you
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know what i mean with the world we find that a lot of things break down and we find that frequently a white face
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goes with a white mind occasionally a black face goes with a white mind very seldom a white face will have a
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black mind but we find the frequent situation is a white face has a white mind yeah but i don't know what that is
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so for the few mistakes that you would make it's unfortunate no i know you know what i wouldn't do i wouldn't argue that at all no i
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wouldn't argue that at all you know it doesn't make any difference it means i said one somewhere you know that uh a cop is a cop
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what cops are white and you know yeah and he may be he may be a very nice man i haven't got the time to figure that
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out you know all i know he's got a uniform and a gun you know and i had to relate to him that
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way you know that's the only way to relate to it at all because one of us is gonna know one of
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us may have to die one of us but you know in new york there's a a big campaign going on to humanize the uh
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policemen and they have postpo billboards upstate and they have a picture of a big cop bending over this
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little blonde girl and and the signs say and some people call him pig
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and i wanted to buy a billboard i told her for the man i want to buy a billboard and show this big cop and this 14 year old kid with 30 bullets in him
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and saying some people call him peacemaker you know you had to do one thing one one thing
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lorraine hansberry said get this photograph when we had that famous meeting with bobby kennedy
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lorraine said to bobby it was also dead everybody's dead you know
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lauren said about a and that's just something about black manhood jerome smith has been talking
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about black men and lauren said she wasn't worried about black men because they'd done very well things considered she was very proud of
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them but she told bobby she said i'm very upset about the state of the civilization which produced
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that photograph of that white carbon birmingham standing on that black woman's neck
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yeah you know yeah what does that say for white man here
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but again that's a moral position
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i do i do i do that means that we're on top of the situation by being on bottom and many of us i'm not quite like to see
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it the other way i'm not quite that i'm not quite that romantic or even even if you want to use the word moral quite that moral
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i simply know i think i know you know look i'm not a financier
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you know i'm not a i'm not a banker and not um um
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i'm not a practical man so to speak you know i'm what i am
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and i know i know the choices i've had to make
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in my own life to be able to shave in the morning to look
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myself in the face in the morning now i'm not so moral as i sit here and
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say that if somebody had a gun pointed at my brother's head that i would uh pray for him
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you know i'm not about to tell you you know that um excuse me
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that i'm lighting candles every day and every night for the soul of j edgar hoover you know yeah on one level i'm not moral
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at all i don't care what happens to hoover and all his tribe
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at all but i do care what happens to you
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you know and if i am moral
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which i don't really think i am but you know it's a word you keep bringing up the relationship yeah i know but the
24:59
relationship between morality and power is a very subtle one you know because power ultimately with no
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morality is not any longer power you cannot call a spain a powerful nation you can't call franco a powerful man he's got a whole
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nation in jail but that's not power no you know what i mean exactly no his game
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isn't running precisely precisely now when our game starts running and after all
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after all baby we have survived the roughest game in the history of the world yeah
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you know we really have no matter what we say against ourselves you know no matter what our limits and
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hang ups are you know we have come through some we have come through something you know and if we can get this far we
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can get further you know and we got this by means which no one understands including you and me
25:46
so we want to be we're only beginning that apprehended and you're a poet precisely because you are beginning to apprehend it and put it into into a form
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you know which will be useful for your kid and his kid you know and for the world
26:00
because we're not obliged to accept the world's definitions just because white people say they're white we're not about you believe it
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you know like it's just because the pope says he's a christian we're not obliged to believe it and we'd be crucial if we did
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we had to make our own definitions and begin to rule the world that way because kids
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white and black cannot use what they had been given
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and they're rejecting it they're rejecting it nobody wants to become the president of pan am or the governor of california
26:31
or spiro to agnew the kids want to live yeah you know
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and we have out of us terrifying suffering a certain sense of life which everybody
26:43
needs you know and that's morality for me you know use the word morals i would use the
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word energy okay you see what i mean i could follow that yeah you know it
26:56
anyway it's a very mysterious endeavor isn't it you know because the key is love it's gonna say it's hard to figure out black people
27:02
and that's uh no really i mean you know you know because you i know it's very hard because you say um let's say
27:08
somebody like you you've been out of the church for a long time okay i grew up of course in a baptist church and i really
27:13
dig the church i think it's a very cool too i can't dig the theology but the music and and the energies of
27:20
the church yes but then i went to um the new york community choir had its um anniversary recently his first
27:26
anniversary and i went up to an ama zion church as a matter of fact and the lady
27:31
was singing some lady was singing yes jesus loves me and people started shouting you know i mean yesterday yeah people were shouting and it hit me as i
27:38
was sitting there my god as a so-called black militant i have nothing stronger to offer than
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jesus yeah but you see yeah but you have a jew baby and that was in my it blew it's my
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favorite church you said ain't that okay does that mean i was testifying
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maybe what we did with jesus was not was no was not supposed to happen
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yeah we took him we took that cat over and made him out he's not whatever to do
28:08
with the right jesus in montgomery alabama led by church we did something else with him we made him ours
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something in us knew he was always really a [ __ ] because you know swedes don't come from israel
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you know you had to be fairly tall well white people really deal more with god and black people moving no they don't even
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deal with god you know they don't deal with god they deal with god for them seems to be some
28:34
some metaphor for purity and for safety you know the whole heart of the christian legend has always been
28:39
in some sense impressively as being you know really seen and it's the key to all the dirty jokes we should come
28:45
afterwards you know can you imagine what would happen to you nikki
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i'm married to you i go out to work i come home
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and you say to me baby you know what happened today i said no what happened
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well you know the holy ghost came by oh he did did it and um joe
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no the holy ghost was with my end i'm pregnant
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now
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i might i don't think you'd go for it i might you know i might look a little hard at you
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if i was really vulnerable i might am i trying to find that cat the holy holy holy the holy who
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the holy who this has been believed by millions of people
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yeah they've lived and died by it for 2 000 years and when you attack it
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you're accused of being blasphemous i think the legend itself is a blasphemy
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what is wrong with a man and a woman sleeping together making love to each other and having a baby like everybody
30:01
else it's true it's not only why the son of god got to
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be born immaculately aren't we all the sons of god
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that's a blasphemy but we're not all the sons of god well it depends on what you mean by god
30:19
depends on who's doing it i've claimed him as my father and i'll i'll give him a great great
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value now the time until it's over because god is our responsibility well i
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agree with that yeah yeah a lot of people don't realize they think that we are god's responsibility no no no no but
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it's one of him and what 30 million of us that's right and god's only hope is us that's true now
30:43
if we don't make it he ain't gonna make it either
30:48
now people are funny about sex which i never understood well they're terrible the same way people are
30:54
it's not about sex either it's not about sex you know sex is
30:59
sex is not really the problem love is a problem no when you're a kid when you're a 16 year old boy 15 year old boy
31:06
no what does he want really you want to release 15 year old girl okay
31:13
and it doesn't it's nothing you get at that moment yet to do really with love because love is something which comes much later really you know a kid loves
31:20
you in a certain way because he needs you but later on when you're a man or a woman
31:26
it doesn't be much more reciprocal you love somebody because you need each other right but this is not one's not
31:31
capable of this idea you know when you're 12 13 14 15 16 when everything is sexual and everything
31:38
is being discovered you know that's why so many of our kids turn into junkies which you won't go into at the moment
31:43
let's come back we'll come back to it you know but the great question is not that the
31:49
great question is you see if it seems to me that the black male
31:54
situation of the black male is in microcosm the situation of the christian
32:01
world the price of being a black man in america god bless you i'm sorry all right
32:07
it's the weather the price you have to pay
32:13
the price you're expected to pay and which you have to admit
32:19
is your sex no a black man is forbidden by definition since he's black
32:25
to assume the roles burdens of duties and the joys of being a man in the same way that my child produced in your body
32:31
was not did not belong to me but to the master he could be sold at any moment okay
32:37
you know what i mean and this erodes a man's sexuality when you wrote the man's sexuality
32:44
you destroyed his possibility to love anybody you know though sex and love are not the
32:49
same thing if a man's sexuality is gone then his possibility is hope of loving
32:56
is also gone you know he has no way to express it he has a limited way he has he has he has absolutely no
33:04
flaw in which to dance no room in which to move no way to get from one day to the next
33:10
because they make love to you it's not the same thing as taking you
33:17
you know and it's a journey which both people have got to make with each other
33:23
but why do black men why do we allow this to happen
33:28
look when one begins to talk about when i begin to talk about you know situation
33:34
of black men i mean anyone i'm nearly 50. so that
33:39
i got to avoid sounding you know in any way defensive because no no no i i don't
33:45
i don't i don't mean that i don't mean that i think you're attacking me but you ask me a question which i'm trying to answer as honestly as i can i had to
33:50
look back over my own life you know and
33:57
you save yourself if you have any sense at all and if you're lucky enough
34:06
know if you lose your center and let's say the center is your sex
34:12
if you lose that if you allow that to be destroyed then everything else is gone
34:17
and you have to figure out a way of of saving it from
34:23
the landlord because i draw i had to watch my father
34:29
in what my father had to endure to raise nine children on 27.50 a week
34:36
when he was working now when i was a kid i didn't know what the man was going through at all i
34:42
didn't know why he was always in the rage i didn't know why he was impossible to live with but i had not
34:48
had to go through yet his working day and he couldn't quit his job because he
34:54
had the kids to feed you know he couldn't say as you know as
34:59
our kids can i don't like white people he couldn't say anything he lived his whole life in silence
35:05
except in the church you know and they couldn't explain how can you explain to a five-year-old kid you know
35:11
my boss you know called me a [ __ ] nice and i quit and the kids and the kids belly is empty and you see it
35:18
you know and you gotta raise the kid you know you've got to raise the kid
35:24
and your manhood is being slowly destroyed hour by hour day by day your woman's
35:29
watching it you're watching her watch it you know and the love that you have for
35:35
each other is being to be destroyed hour by hour and day by day is not her fault it's not
35:40
your fault but there it goes because the pressures under which you live are inhuman
35:46
my father finally went mad and i understood when i became a man
35:55
how that could happen it wasn't that he didn't love us he loved us it wasn't he didn't love his wife his
36:00
our mother he loved her but he couldn't take it
36:06
day after day and hour after hour being treated like a [ __ ]
36:12
that job and in those streets and on those subways and then coming home to his children he
36:18
didn't understand them at all who are moving further and further away from because they're afraid of him and
36:23
also which is even worse afraid of the situation the condition which he represented
36:30
he was after all for a kid you begin to see when you're called a [ __ ]
36:36
you look at your father because you think your father can rule the world every kid thinks that you know and your father cannot do anything about it
36:43
and then you begin to despise your father and you realize oh that's what a [ __ ] is
36:48
and it's not your father's fault and it's not your fault it's a fault of the power people
36:55
who hold the power because they have deliberately trained your father to be a slave
37:00
and they deliberately calculated that if he is a slave you will be a slave you will also accept it and it will go on
37:07
forever and slavery will last a thousand years which disabled safeholders said and believed
37:15
and now the bill is in and they want from me
37:21
or from you sympathy and understanding
37:27
i understand it all too well and i have all the sympathy in the world
37:34
that spiritual disaster that no pity the bill is in
37:41
we paid it now it's your turn it's it's a
37:46
it's like a funny situation to be in because like we were poor but maybe
37:52
unfortunately for somebody like me not poor enough to relate to it and that you know
37:57
we had enough to eat it like that things like that so that my relationship to that whole
38:03
syndrome which remains true i'm 28 to this day is that i really don't
38:08
understand it i don't understand how one hand you say you're talking about like a black man
38:13
that he can be nothing in the streets and so fearful in his home
38:18
that he can he can be brutalized by some uh white person somewhere and then come home and treat
38:25
you know what i mean me it's the same way that he was being treated which perpetuates i mean you
38:31
take somebody like me i'm not married right yes but i couldn't play my mother yes i know you know what i mean i just couldn't deal with i said no no no but
38:37
nick it is also true since your mother played that role you haven't got to i couldn't but you haven't got to that's
38:43
the point because she did but her mother did
38:48
yes you know what i mean yes but that's how we got here i don't what i really am trying to say
38:54
is i don't want us to underestimate the price paid for us i have a great deal of respect for those people for for my
39:00
parents for people that i don't know for the whole you know everybody who's shuffled i'm not saying that i'm just
39:05
saying that it's a phenomenon to me how you could be mistreated and then come home
39:11
and mistreat someone the same way in order first of all nikki first of all nikki
39:17
you say mistreated or i say mistreated no but in the mind of the person who is
39:22
doing it he's not mistreating you well i'm not dealing with that well i'm not gonna i'm not gonna even i mean
39:28
let's not for a minute let's say in the mind of let's say your father who is just an example of the mind of my father
39:34
you know what i mean he is being mistreated i'm not gonna deal with the cracker that's mistreating him i'm gonna deal with him
39:39
he knows that he is not being treated with respect to him as a person as a black man
39:44
okay in order to like get that together when he comes into that house he begins to like brutalize my mother for example
39:52
you see what i mean which becomes like a phenomenon to me because i don't like white people and i'm afraid of black men
39:57
right if you can follow what i'm saying without anybody writing a letter and saying sister you know what yeah but you can okay so what do you do listen you
40:04
have to i think it's a cycle of course it is but you see this is what this is one of the reasons i this is one of the reasons i would don't protest but try to
40:11
make clear that the words white and black don't mean anything no the man a man comes home
40:19
no he is in a situation which he cannot control he is a human being
40:24
it's got to come out somewhere a poor puerto rican several years ago
40:30
for example no this is this is it's a legend
40:35
but i can see if this happened why it happened cat came home and three months old baby was screaming and you know as babies do
40:44
and he killed it he didn't mean to kill it he picked up and threw it against the ball yeah he didn't mean to kill it wasn't
40:52
that i understand you know because i've been there i know something about that
41:01
i don't know if it happens to a woman but it happens to a man you cannot do anything
41:06
they got you they got you they got you by the throat in my balls and of course it comes out and it comes
41:12
out where's where would it come out it comes out in the person closest to you that's gonna say that's so wrong
41:18
because what you prepared nikki it may be wrong i hate to use those kind of terms but nikki admit you're nikki may
41:24
be wrong of course it's wrong but we're dealing with human beings
41:30
you know one cannot be romantic about human nature can i be romantic about one's own nature that's not fair i don't
41:35
think that i'm romantic but no i don't mean that you are i have seen how the community and even today in 1971
41:41
even today there are divisions based on those same kind of problems that's right so that
41:46
the black men say in order for me to be a man you walk 10 paces behind me you know what i mean it means nothing i can
41:52
walk 10 places behind the dog it means nothing to me but if that's what he needs i'll never get far enough behind
41:58
him for him to be a man you know what i mean i'll never walk that slow look nikki
42:03
if at at the risk of there's a very great risk of pulling seeming to pull rank no no pulling yeah
42:10
i'm not going but no no i don't mean that what i do mean is that
42:17
what i do mean is a great many things which seem if i may say so new to you
42:24
are not new to me okay you know what i mean yeah so i can say then okay i see the but i see what
42:31
the cat's doing and how long i can tell you almost exactly how long he will do it
42:37
you know i know that a great deal of what passes for black militancy right now is nothing but a fashion
42:43
you know the best you know at best something will rest something will remain what is important about it is not
42:49
the details nothing nothing giving you know people you know given so-called leaders or any
42:55
of that jazz you know what is important is the impulse out of where it is out of which it has come the fermenter which is
43:01
coming which it reveals to and what's valuable and it will will remain the rest will go
43:06
yeah but what's uh do you know what i mean yeah but again what's uh sort of sad to me is
43:11
that the same syndrome that say our father set up coming from many you know what i mean my father is
43:17
your age and the same syndromes that they said well you know he's a little bit older 55. but the same old 55 thank you baby well
43:24
seven years old the same syndromes which which is being set up is being
43:29
perpetuated is that once again the black man is becoming the figure to
43:34
slide away from you know what i mean that once again the black man is the figure that you say
43:40
well i can't i can't handle that and if you uh if you visit with the states or you know you talk to people enough
43:46
you'll see that that same syndrome you know the little guys that are standing around crossing their arms and they're
43:51
not lovable they're not giving any love they could give a damn about me you know what i mean
43:57
and and that's that's unfortunate because i need love yes but sweetheart sweetheart
44:02
it what you're saying is very very serious i'm not i'm not at least denying it because you're perfectly right but
44:08
the only way we can get through it i think it's demanding a great deal of you
44:14
but one's got no choice but man a great deal of you is that you unders
44:20
look let us say
44:28
let us say i'm king oliver all right right and
44:34
um i'm pretty good musician a very good musician
44:40
and somebody called let us say bing crosby
44:48
no we couldn't carry a tune from here to here right christmas
44:53
right it's true now i watch this little white boy
44:59
become a millionaire become a millionaire
45:06
many times over i can't get a job you know and time goes on
45:14
you get older you get more weary and since you cannot get a job
45:22
your morale begins to be destroyed and
45:29
the body begins to fail you your death approaches
45:37
all because being a man you've never been able to execute
45:45
what a man ought to be able to do and it's not anything that you have done
45:50
or not done by some arbitrary sentence how in the world if i can't get a job
45:59
if i can't even get my my my axe out of the pawn shop
46:05
if i can even be sh you know get money get on the subway
46:11
how am i going to love anybody except in such an awful pain in rage
46:19
that nobody could bear it i'm not trying to defend it i'm trying to make you see it
46:25
you see what i mean i do but because maybe i'm hopeful or because i've structured my life and
46:33
i won't i don't by the way think that what i'm describing is any longer true for your generation i
46:40
don't mean that but i see the same what i keep saying is that i see the same syndromes and the same guys that i have
46:46
to deal with now yes but my dear my dear what you have to see is also
46:52
that you had look think about the kid
46:57
think about the kid you know what you're going through is one thing and i'm not trying to minimize it
47:02
i'm not trying to make it work i'm not i'm not trying to i don't i don't even mean you personally yeah i'm not the generation it's not yes i don't
47:08
mean no i don't mean i don't i don't mean you nikki exactly no i hope that nobody i'm not talking about me that
47:13
nice i know i know but what i do mean is it simply assume for the moment
47:20
the kid is useful metaphor because it it carries you past one moment into the next into another moment because no
47:26
matter what happens to me or to you one's responsibility is somewhere else
47:32
so so it's a terrible tuesday and a wretched friday but you know you still
47:38
the kid don't know that and then you begin to see
47:43
then you begin to see that what looks so often on wednesday on friday or is it so awful
47:49
is awful but it's not eternal
47:55
you can get through it and when you get through it you can understand it okay
48:02
we're not liking disagreement but i'm trying to maybe get you to relate to
48:07
is that and i lay it on black men because i'm a black woman i'm sure it's that arbitrary no you ever
48:13
you have let me write you but a guy let's say a guy's going with girl you're going with maybelle and mabel
48:19
gets pregnant all of a sudden you can't speak to maybelle because you don't have the money for a crib right
48:24
she doesn't need a crib the baby's gonna sleep someplace if you can follow me for two seconds wait wait
48:30
baby's gonna sleep someplace the baby's going to eat something but what she needs at that moment is a man
48:37
and in order if if the man functions as a man which is not necessarily a provider for all that stuff because
48:43
everybody can understand why you can't buy something you don't have a job you didn't have a job when you're always going to bed why are you going to get a
48:49
job because she got pregnant you understand there is no job but what she needs as a man to come by
48:54
and say hey baby you look good and and and black men refuse to function like that because they say i want to
49:01
bring the crib when i come back you're never going to get the grip baby bring yourself baby i agree with
49:06
you i agree with you i understand what you're saying you know but let me tell you this you know you you may be
49:12
absolutely right and you are right in your point of view if it doesn't but you have to understand
49:18
my point of view i'm trying no and in my point of view well if i if if
49:26
if you were pregnant i would act very differently that's a you know that's but that's me that's something else
49:31
but from the man's point of view given the fact as we said much earlier
49:37
that the standards of the civilization into which you were born first outside of you
49:44
and by the time you get to be a man they're inside of you
49:49
and this is not susceptible to any kind of judgment it's a fact
49:54
if you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person if certain things describe you as being real they're real for you whether
49:59
they're real or not and in this civilization a man who cannot
50:05
support his wife and his child is not a man and this is also in the for example in
50:11
the welfare rules you know yeah the the black man has always been treated as a slave and of
50:17
course he reacts that way one way or another you know and you can blame him on a human level if you like but i think it's
50:23
more interesting to not try to you have to understand it the bag the cat is in but it's so you know because how can how
50:30
can i no this is not being rational
50:36
you know i may love i may love you especially if i love you
50:42
how in the world i can't come with nothing
50:47
i know it doesn't make any sense [ __ ] but a man like that you see when we talk about and we talk about the children
50:53
right we talk about like let's say milo boy your nephew something like that we talk about you how are we going to create the new child
51:00
in the same old syndrome well somebody somebody has to fake it enough
51:06
you understand somebody has to say hell no i can't buy you a bicycle you don't need one you smile about it so the kid
51:12
can say i'm not afraid of that sometimes that happens and i draw but not enough to talk when we talk about the group
51:18
yeah yeah yeah but wait we're talking about the the phone hold the phone on the phone hold the phone baby
51:24
you know it has begun something has begun the fact that we're talking about it is a beginning it's very you know it's
51:29
very important indeed look
51:35
i've had to learn in my own life you know i want this
51:41
and i want it friday and friday comes and i work you know i work my behind off to get you know get something done that
51:47
don't come it doesn't come in 20 years then you use that 20 years
51:57
look life is a very short and very long time it is really it is you know
52:02
and it's very important not to get hung up on any given detail because what is
52:07
there like the fact that you're a woman in the fact that i'm a man that's going to be there forever and we're going to deal with that thing in the beginning
52:13
you know and we have to deal with it from day to day day to day you know because if if we
52:20
love each other we both know it the tragedy is we both
52:26
know it and the greater tragedy is that it's destroyed
52:32
by things which nothing to do with you and nothing to do with me a man is built as he's built and there's
52:38
nothing one can do about that a man is not a woman that's true you know and and whether he's wrong or right
52:47
look if we're living in the same house you're my wife and my woman i'd be responsible for that house
52:54
and i'm not allowed to be responsible for that house i'm no longer in my own eyes doesn't make a difference but you may think of
53:00
me in my own eyes that's where i am not a man that's that's the thing you see that
53:06
does indeed make a difference what i think about it because i could be perfectly willing and as a matter of
53:11
fact i am perfectly willing to concede that first of all a man is a natural aggressor you know what i mean i don't
53:18
care if i walked up here and said let's go to bed you are the aggressor mm-hmm and that's it because it all depends on you i could
53:23
fool myself i could fool my friends yeah i got it it depended on you you see so i'm never confused on that level yeah
53:30
but but i've seen i've seen so many people get so hung up in in such crappy
53:35
superficial kind of things that that for lack of being able to bring a steak in the house they won't come i can get
53:55
but love is not a rational situation must be it must be rational
54:00
because this irrationality that we have look when i was working it destroys people i quite agree with you but this
54:06
is something we have to confront when i was 22 i was like i was about to get married and for several reasons
54:13
i see my wedding rings in the river and that was when i split and decided i would leave
54:19
i didn't get married probably because i just i probably was probably because i had no future it's very very important
54:25
you had no future all right no future no you got to go back to where i was yeah i'm 22. you know
54:31
i had no future i i couldn't keep a job no because i couldn't stand the people i
54:38
was working for and there wasn't i couldn't nobody could call me a [ __ ] because i have a small
54:44
no no so i split you know now
54:50
i love that girl and i wanted children but i already had eight
54:57
and they were all starving yeah and from my point of view it would have
55:02
been an act of the most criminal irresponsibility
55:07
to bring another mouth into the world which i could not feed yeah but you see those weren't your children those were your father's
55:14
children my father was dead and as far as they knew then
55:21
that's not what you one cannot and i'm not not your life you know i'm not making it but one cannot be responsible
55:28
for what one i said we are not being rational but i say we must i mean that's not
55:35
those are my brothers and sisters they were your brothers they were your father's children but they were your mother's children that
55:41
was my father's responsibility as far as i was concerned they belong to me do you know what your life and i'm saying it
55:47
like that you know what i mean i'm trying to do you know what your life looks like though and this is what's happening also today it looks like a
55:53
black man can't make it with a black woman if somebody looks at the two of us man we're the weirdest looking people on
55:58
earth because you went your way and i went my way which is saying the same thing and that's sort of a shame
56:05
i can't have a black man standing with a kid and you can't have a black woman because we wouldn't be who we are if we had but and that's the fact but nikki
56:12
we are nevertheless we are here we met oh you and i met yeah but i'm talking about for the statement man you're
56:18
looking like a huey newton yeah he can't make it with a black who could who could be his woman we don't
56:24
know it's such a shame we don't know that much about the man
56:29
we know what the image yeah but we know what the what we've seen let us forget the image
56:35
we don't know anything at all about man we know a little bit
56:41
let us assume we don't okay let us assume we don't know if in so far as it's true
56:47
if it's true that huey for example cannot make it with a black woman i don't know that that's true i don't know that it's true
56:52
i'm saying that to date that is part of the trap to make one believe that i don't believe that myself
57:00
you know it's part of a societal illusion which you what you're expected to believe so
57:05
that you can react to it and be distracted from the main point which is one's relationship to each other
57:12
we've come to the end of the first part of this two-part dialogue between nikki and jimmy which as i told you earlier we
57:20
taped in london recently and edited for showing at this time we hope you all will be able to be with
57:27
us next week when nikki giovanni and james baldwin continue their conversation
57:32
until next week then this is ellis haystep saying good night from seoul
57:41
if they had known that they were prisoners they would have never been there but they were all you know anybody in prison is a prisoner
57:48
but you have to act on what you know yeah you know the guards didn't know it and still don't know it well know it for
57:53
a very long time they're dead that's what most of them would do because somebody thought they were prison but
57:59
their children are in some sense everybody's problem because i think all children
58:06
are sacred if you see what i mean you know kids are
58:11
okay and i would hate to see a kid seoul a production of net educational broadcasting corporations
58:22
it's sold and this is your announcer joe dennis and tonight on seoul part two of a
58:29
conversation between james baldwin
58:35
and nikki giovanna and here again is the producer of soul
58:40
ellis hazel
58:46
thank you joe and good evening i'm ellis hazel the producer of soul
58:51
and i welcome you to the second half of this conversation between nikki giovanni and james baldwin
58:58
as i mentioned last week we taped this interview in london recently and edited it for showing at this time
59:05
you will see and hear two very gifted and much loved black writers thinking questioning and exchanging ideas with
59:13
all the eloquence and wit and passion that have brought them to national and indeed international
59:19
our prominence so now let us resume this dialogue this conversation between nikki
59:25
giovanni and james baldwin
59:30
how do we as a people begin to to deal what we have to do is a very difficult uphill uphill road
59:37
up uphill uphill job nikki what you have what you have to do is begin to change the bases in which people think
59:44
for example you have to begin to shift the basis of the language because the way people speak is also the way they think yeah and i and i
59:52
point i haven't got to point out to you because you know the english spoken by black americans there's nothing english spoken by white
59:58
americans yeah that's true no and once that so that's given and we have to use it and do something
1:00:05
with it which has not been done before you know we are in great trouble but we have the
1:00:10
great advantage of knowing we're in great trouble you know we're in trouble man to woman
1:00:15
man to man we're in trouble you know father son mother daughter but we know we are
1:00:21
if i can liberate my great nephew
1:00:27
if black people can liberate themselves and since we're talking about a commercial endeavor too by the way you know because the great crisis is where
1:00:34
we have no land in the money but that's right that resides in power yeah
1:00:39
we really found out you cannot purchase anything you can't take it we'll get to that we'll get the guy you must no we're
1:00:44
gonna and the power is not the land or the money i know that is the ability to effect but now you are agreeing with me
1:00:51
of course you will ask me what you're wise man why wouldn't i wow
1:00:58
and one of the strengths of the afro-american certainly the last 20-30 years is that we have recognized we are not americans
1:01:04
on one hand on the other hand we are the only true inheritance of the place called
1:01:13
nobody can do anything about that you will get it if we continue to move
1:01:18
i think it's again in ways in ways that one can't quite see yet we already have it it's one that's one of the reasons
1:01:24
for the panel we have to effect it yes and we have to know it and we have to make sure that everybody else we have to change this yeah it's like the south
1:01:30
lost the civil war but they didn't know it which is why they continued because someone finally said you know you lost
1:01:36
did we you know what i mean they continue to act as if they hit women well they still haven't lost it because that war was kind of
1:01:43
the results of that war are being paid for until today and we'll be paid for it when marcia montgomery governor wallace had the
1:01:51
confederate flag flying the state from the capitol building yes which is legally insurrection
1:01:58
but nobody said a word about it because in fact the south and north simply included a contract between them
1:02:05
to keep you and me in slavery yeah that's all that really happened so the textile mills in manchester in
1:02:11
massachusetts got rich and and the cotton fields got rich whether where the textiles come from except mississippi
1:02:20
but see so many institutions to me are not but so many institutions like
1:02:25
it just doesn't make that much difference that that shirley chisholm is in congress or richard brooke is in what i mean when i say you know the white and
1:02:32
black are really very arbitrary categories which cannot be trusted well certain things have certain color
1:02:38
designations well the fact that ed brooke is a senator from massachusetts or there'll
1:02:44
be some black mayors since it doesn't change the machine it doesn't change the parties which they
1:02:49
allegedly represent doesn't mean anything i'm saying you can't tell a white black
1:02:55
man by the color of his skin or maybe you can't tell maybe that my quarrel is very subtle but maybe i'm
1:03:00
saying you can't tell a white man by the color of his either yeah either in that case
1:03:06
yeah there's a great deal of hope if we figured get a black male to come in and change which i think carl stokes
1:03:11
did change the police department change the way that the city goes without his services then you could have
1:03:17
something but uh if he's not going to change it first of all the militia which means
1:03:23
if he's not willing to to make those kind of changes or if he's not willing to let's say take on the mccarran act then
1:03:29
he's not doing black people any uh all the country well no it's one of the same no it's one
1:03:35
my mind is one of the same it's one of the same because well
1:03:42
that's true i'm not trying to i'm not i'm i'm not being a missionary trying to save um america
1:03:49
but i do know that i do know that we have paid too much for it to be able to abandon it
1:03:55
we can never abandon it i don't think that that's a question because where else are we going to go
1:04:01
i mean nobody else wants to say well in any case anyways my father and my father's father's paid too much for it
1:04:07
i've paid too much for it i'm only 28. yes i deserve it you know to do whatever i want to do with it thomas deserves it
1:04:15
you know whatever that means i just think that like how we go about it and what we're um
1:04:20
well i personally i'm just not interested in many things that people are interested in i'm not interested in a president
1:04:26
or a congress i wouldn't care puerto rican you know what i mean i wouldn't care i'm not i just don't give a damn
1:04:33
because it's still somebody trying to run my life i'm i'm not interested in movements and ideologies
1:04:38
because i think that i would have a difficult time no matter what was terrible yeah i mean personally
1:04:44
it wouldn't change one bit for me except maybe i would even have to go an exile and i could live there yeah but but you would you would you see there's a tight
1:04:50
that's a tight drop that you're wrong it's again if you come back to the question of you know of of
1:04:56
labels white and black
1:05:01
i'm terrified of cultural commissars you know on either side of the line yeah you know
1:05:06
the older you get the more frightening it becomes because you know i i'm not sure i'll be
1:05:12
told how to write you know or what to write about but that's that's a that's a stupid uh
1:05:19
my theory is that the world divides into sort of like intelligent and um
1:05:24
weak and strong which is awful i mean it's really awful for me to say things like that but
1:05:30
there's so many stupid people it divides not so much between the stupid and the bride because most bright most bright
1:05:35
people that i've encountered not most perhaps but many
1:05:42
how wicked i really think it you know really wicked maybe but i think
1:05:47
i think it divides between the people who have a certain kind of daring and the people who don't
1:05:54
and the daring is involved with the price you're prepared to pay for your life for your life
1:06:03
because then you may have been born stupid but if you're willing to live and take your chances on living
1:06:08
you become very bright yeah but then in my world you guys are the right person yes because it's not based on um
1:06:14
iq you know that's like a very weak position people get into when they start well in the states we have a thing i
1:06:20
don't know how familiar you are you are with it but we're going through a whole thing there is no such thing as individual which of course is killing the movement
1:06:26
it's not only not true it's stupid it's killing the movement and when you see the dum-dums perpetuating that you
1:06:31
don't want to be like them so the very bright people are saying okay you all can have and i
1:06:37
hate to watch that because it's destroying what was almost at one point in nation you know it's not
1:06:43
be cool be cool this won't i'm not trying i don't i don't mean be tranquil
1:06:49
no but let it go don't worry what you have to do is concentrate on
1:06:54
what is essential and not and not be sidetracked by
1:06:59
very disturbing details after all you know and i know
1:07:05
that the individual does exist not only does but should in any case whether or not he should he
1:07:11
does i'm concerned about it i guess for particularly because there's so many
1:07:17
young kids who want to believe and for me when i look at like the energy you know i teach school
1:07:22
and when i look at my various classes the few times that i'm there and i see those hopeful little faces and i know
1:07:29
that they are just as eager to become you know fascists as anything else that they don't really what they want is to believe then i
1:07:36
begin to feel an obligation to say okay try believing in yourself yes but my dear that's that's all you've been
1:07:42
talking about yes you know it's you know you call it power and i call you i call
1:07:47
you call the power i call it morals or you say i do no no but it's the same thing yeah
1:07:54
it's exactly the same thing what one is trying to do is it teach those children something
1:08:00
which they will need much much later because you can come fashions very easily especially if they really believe you know that all the legends which are
1:08:07
now being fed you know the black is beautiful black is beautiful but since it's beautiful we haven't got to say so
1:08:12
you know it's very important the ego is the most important thing about exemplifying that beauty because it's a very dangerous
1:08:18
slogan i mean i haven't do you know i'm very glad that it came along because it had to come along but you
1:08:24
know i don't love all black people really you know you know i know some deacons and um and
1:08:31
preachers and congressmen and and judges and teachers and lawyers you know black
1:08:38
but not like me you know you know it's
1:08:44
you're trying to tell the child something which is which transcends all those categories
1:08:50
so he won't become what you see all around you every day one tries you know
1:08:56
but that has to be dealt with because they're constantly being fed that their ego is to be supplemented to what is
1:09:02
constantly called the energy which makes no sense to me because why should somebody who doesn't even know
1:09:08
you run your life you know why should i run some kid's life and i feel you know imminently equipped
1:09:15
you know what i mean like i feel like wow i would be the best person but why should i do that why can't you do it you
1:09:21
can make your own mistakes yeah but you have to you have to give the kids a morale which will allow him to do it one
1:09:26
tries no because i really see so many games being run by uncreative stupid stupid people
1:09:32
look and it's very disgusting and i'm sure that you also no yes but nikki most
1:09:38
people really accept without very much question the assumptions that they're given
1:09:44
but they must i mean it's so logical most when i was growing up you know the great trick was getting the civil service and worked for the post office
1:09:52
you know now i can't blame those people i don't blame them you know they made them amazing very unattractive
1:09:57
people from my point of view you know but what else was the black cat to do
1:10:04
no you can't create anything unless you have been given however you get it i don't know
1:10:10
been given the belief or the or the rage or the madness or whatever the necessity
1:10:17
out of yourself to do it look read a book by richard wright the late richard write wrote a book called
1:10:22
lord today today about the post office
1:10:27
it's not about the post office it takes place in the post office right now it's a tremendous tremendous book
1:10:34
it takes one one day in life one black man and no black guy can read that
1:10:41
and not know you know because it's that it's true
1:10:46
it's true fantastic record you know
1:10:52
you see the the nature of the drama in the sense is that you and i both had to raise a child but
1:10:59
i've been destroyed before i get home you go one way i go another and the kid
1:11:06
gets lost and it isn't the fault of the woman or the man and certainly not the fault of the kid it's not a question of blame
1:11:12
though it's question of responsibility yeah and it is our responsibility to make sure that kid does well but what
1:11:18
i'm trying to get at nikki is that in order to take the responsibility
1:11:24
you have to be able to take the responsibility it's not a mystical act somebody's got to pay the rent i can't put you on the streets
1:11:30
that's what you say we have tried to make you able to pay your rent or my renter our rent we have
1:11:37
found that there are not enough jobs there is not enough money for you to do that now why can't we try it my way
1:11:45
i think that the only thing that's changed in the last um
1:11:50
since martin luther king since uh 54. i think the only thing that's really changed is the black woman
1:11:56
and and what she's interested in change i think she's become invisible i think she's changed because there was a time let's say my mother you know i
1:12:02
mean my aunts and things like that they would say okay if that's the way you establish your manhood i'm going to go for it
1:12:08
and my generation says hey no good you must establish a new base
1:12:14
and we are as a group demanding that a new base be established yeah but be careful as a woman
1:12:20
and what you demand of a man i demand that he'd be a man yeah but you can't get the provision yeah but you can't say
1:12:25
you demanded you you have to suggest it that that's your ego that says that no i i demand it now you deal with that all
1:12:31
right okay i'll even i'll even i'll even i'll even go man a man and i don't think that that's
1:12:36
asking too much because if i wanted a provision you know i said i would get a camper you know what i mean i'm gonna get a
1:12:42
camera that provides things you know i mean you get a army surplus kit that provides things i need a man
1:12:49
and and black men have always been offered to provisions people are either going to eat or starve
1:12:55
to death you know the men have been there but yeah the people were starving they were still the men had to be that way
1:13:01
do that horrendous kind of war but it had to be that way because sometimes you are not able to feed your family
1:13:08
sometimes you are not able to clothe your family do you then also deprive them of your manhood and of the input that a
1:13:14
man has who teaches my son how to pee yeah but yeah but you see yeah but you're talking
1:13:19
i agree with you i see that very well but it's one thing to be in a situation where you see that you have
1:13:25
where you see a future however bloody and to be in a situation where you see no future at all but you you are it is
1:13:31
incumbent it's but it's i know logically it is a competitiveness i know it's a future if i know what i'm demanding of
1:13:37
you in some sense make sense if i know the fact the kid is not eating today tonight or tomorrow
1:13:44
in some way makes sense yeah then i can then i can be there but if it doesn't make any sense and if
1:13:50
i don't see anything coming out of it at all will he eat if you're not there
1:13:56
if you're on welfare you won't even if i am there that's the law but i don't want to get bogged down into that what i what i
1:14:02
really mean is that yes a man can do that if he sees a re away
1:14:08
if he sees that it means something my father couldn't see that
1:14:14
and he was quite right because he didn't well there wasn't anything there's something because all i can all
1:14:21
i know that works in the world is a relationship yes all right okay that that's all
1:14:26
that's going to work it takes two people to have a relationship yeah but but it but the relationship you don't have a dream fake it but the relationship you
1:14:32
can't fake a dream you've got to fake it because we don't have dreams these days how the hell can you have a dream
1:14:39
for what well so everybody's everybody's driving but let's jive on that level
1:14:46
if i love you i can't lie to you of course you can lie to me and you will if you love me and you're going off with
1:14:52
maddie someplace you're lying to me cause what the hell do i care about the truth i care if you're there when billie
1:14:57
holidays say hush now don't explain all right i accept that of course of course you allow me because i don't even
1:15:02
want to what does the truth matter and why are you going to be truthful with me when you lie to everybody else
1:15:08
you lied when you smiled at that cracker down the job right a lot of me smile treat me the same way you would treat
1:15:14
him i can't treat you you must because i've caught the i've got the
1:15:20
frowns and the anger he's happy with you of course he doesn't know you're unhappy you're great at him
1:15:26
all day long you come on when i catch hell because i love you i get least of you i get i get the very minimum
1:15:33
and i'm saying you know fake it with me is that too much of the black woman to ask of the black man
1:15:39
for 10 years so that we can get a child on his feet that says yeah father smiled at mother
1:15:45
he talked to me about school today who cares that you can read or can't read most americans can't read most people
1:15:50
can't read they look at the pictures baby
1:15:56
baby i know what you're saying i know exactly what you're saying and i i don't disagree but no i'm gonna be
1:16:03
honest and think about it really
1:16:09
i'm not so sure that that is a human possibility
1:16:14
i have to smile all day
1:16:23
and the cat on the job the foreman you didn't say why i'm smiling
1:16:30
[Music] and that was a honest man smiling like that
1:16:35
baby needs your shoes i can't give a performance all day on
1:16:42
the job and come home and give a performance on all night in the house okay so one of the performances will stop
1:16:49
yes so you say and okay i might be willing to go with it
1:16:54
but who's going to pay the rent the rent will get paid
1:17:03
look baby i'm willing to play it your way but you have to see my point of view i see you in front of you
1:17:09
but the rent will happen the price of the rent is my smile no no no
1:17:16
i don't want you prostituting yourself i demand i don't want you prosecuting yourself either one of us has got to work
1:17:22
you work it you will work it out because you are intelligent enough and you are sensitive enough you are a man enough to
1:17:29
work out a new system because we started off with everybody's protest now when we're back there again as long as the
1:17:36
assumptions are the same nothing will change okay okay so we must corner ourselves to
1:17:42
make a new assumption okay how about it
1:17:47
in case it was sort of like left up in the air or somebody you know like i didn't get it across i really think that my father you know jones giovanni is a
1:17:55
groovy cat you know and he's lived with my mother now for 35 years under holy wedlock and i think that that's good for
1:18:01
them you know i think that that sort of thing worked for them and i think that that's the main thing that they were able to
1:18:07
love despite it all that's what we were talking about before right now
1:18:12
by the way you do not have to tell me that you like your father i knew that yeah i think he's he's a guest yes i
1:18:17
just don't want to marry him
1:18:22
but i think let's talk about writing for a moment because it seems that most um black writers at certain points always
1:18:29
come back to explaining who they are they always come back to um the personal essay you've written
1:18:34
several novels one that i happen to love a lot is tell me how long the training has been gone i'm glad you like that i'm particularly
1:18:40
that i just i just felt mad in love i gave copies to my friends i was glad when i finally came out and paperback and i could afford to do what i was
1:18:47
doing but it seems that even though we deal in the novel we deal in fiction or we deal in poetry say we always have to come
1:18:52
back to say uh you know who are we well you know i don't know well like for example in train
1:19:03
one of the things i discovered in writing it was like i'm telling you you know when i was you know when i began it
1:19:09
that no answer your ques answer your question or to deal with the question because it's an enormous question for me
1:19:15
there's a moment in in the bar in new york new york state when
1:19:21
leo was watching um jerry italian and he's watching him with an older italian
1:19:27
who just come to america and leo thinks to himself that salvatore
1:19:33
understood jerry because um he existed in effect already
1:19:39
in salvatore's imagination you know what i mean yeah an illness a jury because of the life that he himself
1:19:45
had lived but no one thinks leo looks at me that way because i don't
1:19:52
exist in anybody's imagination you know in how can i put it
1:19:59
the reason we are forced to become more and more open
1:20:05
[Music] is because in fact when you walk down the street
1:20:12
coming back now the black man black woman thing you're my wife my sister and my
1:20:19
mother i know very well the people looking at you
1:20:24
know nothing whatever about you nothing at all
1:20:31
you know if it's marilyn monroe or
1:20:36
pat nixon you know they know i think they know
1:20:42
but until this century
1:20:48
begins to apprehend the experience out of which elena horn comes
1:20:53
you know for example or another waters or you
1:20:59
or paul robeson or rita franklin because white white people or ray charles
1:21:05
they don't know what that comes out of there is no metaphor in their experience for it
1:21:10
or the metaphor in their own experience it's so deeply buried and so frightening
1:21:17
because you see the reason that people think it's important to be white is that it's important not to be black
1:21:23
they think it's important to be white because white means you are civilized and being black means you're not civilized and as yet to be
1:21:30
apprehended in any way whatever that in fact i will not be able to walk the streets or even look at you or you
1:21:36
at me or do whatever we do in our terrible days
1:21:42
day to day if we were not civilized you know but we represent a civilization
1:21:50
i don't mean i don't mean merely literally the african civilization or the indian civilization or whatever
1:21:56
i mean a sense of life which is the only thing that civilizes anybody
1:22:04
which for mercantile commercial reasons to put it a little bit too simply
1:22:09
the rise of europe attempted to destroy i said attempted to destroy because it did not in fact destroy it it dispersed it and under
1:22:17
that pressure it began to become something else when it comes to
1:22:23
is that i'm civilized in a way that englishmen are not do you know
1:22:29
because i've had a dependent on a principle which europeans have learned to distrust
1:22:34
listen does that make sense to you though sort of on one level and because i tend to be slow sometimes
1:22:41
not sort of one another what i'm trying to ask maybe is uh that's a dirty chick [ __ ] for the literally
1:22:46
what i'm john has though uh like do you think that you would ever write say um
1:22:52
a work of fiction or maybe even a work of non-fiction that did not include white people
1:22:58
there was just about some groovy black people that you knew you know in terms of characters in terms of uh who you're speaking to and why
1:23:05
because i mean you know what i mean i do i do well i can answer it
1:23:11
i'm working on something now which which are no white people
1:23:18
but i'm also working on a novel
1:23:23
which for the most please most part takes place in um
1:23:29
in europe and let's put it again to simply
1:23:36
concern the situation of an arab in france
1:23:42
now in that context i don't know
1:23:49
you know the arab is certainly a [ __ ] in france or he would be a puerto rican in new
1:23:56
york no or mexico in california
1:24:03
and what i'm trying to it's very dangerous to talk about something you haven't finished but yeah
1:24:09
i will understand what i'm trying to get at is
1:24:15
my apprehension anyway the crisis of this age no and the crisis is something you do
1:24:20
with identity and that is something you do with buried histories not merely our history has been buried
1:24:26
but as we said before when i was talking about you know my homework on brixton doing homework on the english working
1:24:32
class that has been very too you know we were talking about liberation we were talking about writing
1:24:39
what a writer is always doing whether or not he knows it is it has to go to the source because there
1:24:45
is anything else to work from you know you can't work from other people's assumptions you have to work out of what
1:24:50
you discover are your own and your own assumptions come out of something much deeper than
1:24:57
than you it takes a long time before you realize that there is a connection in fact between
1:25:02
tammy along the train's been gone and uh swing low speed chariot you know or what ray charles does with
1:25:07
dreary little and you know anthem is on every dream of hearing until he got his hands on them
1:25:13
and put our experience into them you know
1:25:18
all of a sudden right down then yes wow wow
1:25:23
well that's that's what i mean by energy that's that and that it seems to me that's that's the assignment of an artist
1:25:30
because the people who produced him i am not responsible to anybody but
1:25:36
the people who produced me you know whether or not they knew they produced me whether or not they wanted
1:25:42
to produce me you know i cannot drive a truck
1:25:47
and i can't sing a song but the people who produce me pretending me to do
1:25:52
something which they knew before i knew that i might be able to do
1:25:58
you know what i mean yeah but there's uh and i keep coming back to this kind of a thing but there's
1:26:04
a whole movement or something that says that we have to write only about black people and
1:26:09
you have to you know what i mean that there's a little thing that says we're going to look the very first thing that a writer has to face
1:26:16
is that he cannot be told what to write you know nobody asked me to be a writer in a way you know they didn't know in
1:26:22
any case no in any case i chose it since i'm a man i'd assume i chose it
1:26:28
perhaps you know in fact no i could go perhaps in fact
1:26:33
i didn't choose but in any case you know
1:26:39
the one thing you have to do is try to tell the truth
1:26:44
and what everyone overlooks is that in order to do it
1:26:50
when the book comes out it may it may hurt you but in order to do it it had to hurt me
1:26:56
first you know i can only tell you
1:27:02
about yourself as much as i can face about myself
1:27:07
you know everything's happened to everybody who's tried to live you know you go through your life for a long time you think that
1:27:15
no one has ever suffered the way i've suffered you know my god my god and then you realize
1:27:23
you read something you hear something and you realize that your suffering does not isolate you
1:27:30
then your suffering is your bridge that many people have suffered before you
1:27:35
many people are suffering around you and always will and all you can do is bring
1:27:42
hopefully a little light into that suffering
1:27:48
enough light so the person who is suffering can begin to comprehend his suffering
1:27:55
and begin to live with it and begin to change it
1:28:00
to change the situation we don't change anything all we can do is invest people with the
1:28:06
morale to change it for themselves i agree with that i'm pursuing this because it's something
1:28:12
that keeps coming up that personally i'm interested in what you have to say but the same argument i agree with you as a matter of fact but the same
1:28:19
argument you say um they say why should a writer be free to write what he wants when say a teacher
1:28:25
is not free to teach what he wants or a teacher who is not free to teach
1:28:31
is not a teacher you know yeah that's true you know
1:28:37
if i assume their responsibility then i had got to be free to teach the way i see it
1:28:44
angela davis is precisely in trouble not for all those nonsensical reasons given by those impeccable
1:28:51
honorable men like the governor of california and head of the fbi
1:28:56
not for any of those reasons but because she was trying to teach
1:29:02
and to teach in the situation which black people in america find themselves really to teach is a revolutionary act
1:29:10
that's you solved it for me because it's something you keep hearing and they always say well why should the artist be
1:29:16
free to do what he wants to do what nobody else is john is not free to do what he wants to do honestly to do what he has to do when in fact everyone else
1:29:22
should pursue along those lines yeah yeah that's that's wild i hadn't thought
1:29:27
about it that way this is god's truth i've been having revelations a lot lately as a personal
1:29:32
thing so what do you think you know about the development say of the whole black literature trend from say richard
1:29:38
wright till uh until i say me all right it's good this is a good cutoff
1:29:44
um no it's a good beginning period it's a good beginning period thank you
1:29:51
all right i'll try to reach it right to you a chance to ham since chester goes beyond richard
1:29:57
and since i have a new dorchester oh chester yes
1:30:03
gesture is exciting to me because when you go from say yeah well jessica's got guts oh my god the only crusade you
1:30:09
talked about lonely crusade which i didn't like when i was when i was 22. i loved when i read it i found a first
1:30:14
edition i won't even tell you what i paid for it and uh simply adored it and i could see why everybody hated it
1:30:20
let me make a confession whenever came out i was working for the new leader oh yeah i see why you yeah wait a minute
1:30:29
and uh i said working with you i was doing no book reviews for ten dollars a shot
1:30:35
and going through my own changes you know
1:30:41
and also this is very important really i was in a kind of political crisis
1:30:47
because i had been a kind of communist you know when i was 19.
1:30:54
you know whatever it means whatever it means 19. and i learned a great deal
1:31:01
about the american communist party
1:31:06
it's a very i could read as an outsider
1:31:12
indescribable organization it's crazy well i just like it no but since the book
1:31:19
in a sense for me had no the aura of the things i was battling
1:31:24
the political elements i was battling the book frightened me
1:31:31
you know because i know she is in those years i don't want to get sidetracked from the communist party but those communist
1:31:37
party was in a sense in a sense the only
1:31:42
haven for a young american black writer it was also a terrible trap
1:31:48
you know which most people lost their lives because the american communists were also after all americans
1:31:53
you know and you worked for them like you were everybody else except since they were communists you know you're not supposed to say you worked for them
1:32:00
no no and all of that complicated my reaction to both chester and richard
1:32:07
in a sense which i can't exactly it took me a long time to understand you know
1:32:13
but it's a question of generations again no the question is because they're both yes
1:32:19
yes it's question generations i had to get to be a man myself
1:32:24
in quite another context and since i was since in effect after the second world war
1:32:30
world war the um the american communist party was a very different organization in a sense
1:32:36
and it had and the black situation became different too there was no haven at all for black
1:32:41
riders so i split i had to split otherwise you know i would be dead
1:32:47
and you know figure it out on the stones of paris you know what i mean now
1:32:54
richard left a tremendous testimony you know
1:33:00
about a time that will never be seen again in which your son
1:33:06
will read about the way he reads about greece you know yeah you know it's uh
1:33:12
it came out of a set of assumptions you know which a boy 21 that's what i
1:33:17
was then had to fight if he was going to live at all
1:33:23
you know you know because what you couldn't accept was that pain
1:33:28
you couldn't accept that past as being your present and still more your future
1:33:33
you know you had to find some way of dealing with it
1:33:39
of dealing with it and to deal with it you had to find another vocabulary you had to you had to risk
1:33:46
your life do you know you had to risk it all
1:33:51
you had to go for broke you know which both chester and richard now i can see
1:33:58
now i can see what i order richard when i ordered chester
1:34:06
what i ordered langston when i ordered w b dubois when i ordered freddy douglas
1:34:11
but i could not see that when i was 20. you know i don't think anybody can see that at
1:34:17
20. you know but you see
1:34:23
they were in on one level simply more exalted victims i still remember a
1:34:29
boy named angela herndon wrote a book called letting me live and i have no idea what happened to him
1:34:34
no it's probably he's probably given him no like everybody else and that's your future
1:34:40
yeah you know and it takes a long time before you accept what has been given to you from your past you know
1:34:46
what we call black literature is really summed up for me by the whole career let's say bessie smith ray charles
1:34:51
aretha franklin because how it's been handed down since we couldn't read or write as far as they
1:34:57
knew you know and it was at one time i'd draw another thousand years ago
1:35:02
a crime to be able to read if you were black you know it was punishable by law
1:35:08
you know we had to smuggle information somehow and we did it through our music we did it in the church
1:35:14
you know you were talking before about you know the the um church you went to visit you
1:35:19
know i thought about the apollo theater last time i saw aretha
1:35:24
and what did you do with the policy to turn it into a gospel church service you know
1:35:30
everybody no and then that's and that's true religion yeah you know and and and anything a writer a
1:35:38
black writer is trying to do has come out of that i don't mean has it be limited to that but it comes out of that because the
1:35:44
standards which come from greece and rome for example you know
1:35:50
even the salvage come from what we call the christian judeo the jewish christian ethic
1:35:57
are very dubious when you try to apply them to your own life
1:36:05
i use the word advisor yes you know so you have to use what in fact you have as
1:36:11
distinguished what you've been told you have
1:36:17
there's a question someplace i'm trying to form it and again i guess i'm stuck with chester
1:36:22
because among other things he's one of my favorite writers and i've read everything to date including his autobiography that he's written so he's
1:36:28
easier for me but if you move from say if he hollers let him go right into um
1:36:34
third generation caster the first on that group of okay then he had to stop he left the states also he left the
1:36:40
states much later than all of you all in terms of age not much well later in terms of inter he was much older yeah
1:36:46
then he began pink toes and went into the coffin at graveyard jones which everybody assumed was safe
1:36:52
you dig it then he did then he did well most people you know what i mean that they could publish him because they said oh it's
1:36:58
just a detective story then he did of course the master detective story blind man with a pistol and he said who's the
1:37:04
murderer emergency it's not a detective story at all it's an allegory it's fantastic exactly but again uh i'm
1:37:10
talking about chester in chester's uh pursuit of truth because richard wright died before he's
1:37:15
quit pursuing truth or was murdered before he quit you know what i mean but chester could say okay i will pursue truth in this way
1:37:21
which looks a little better that you can make a movie out of it if you want to it'll still be true and then takes it
1:37:26
right to blind man sweetheart it's the same thing that we were doing on the plantation when they started to sing steal away to jesus and i was telling
1:37:32
you it's time to split yeah you know yeah it's like you know but why are we right
1:37:40
get hung up and uh if i can use that kind of a word why do we as black writers
1:37:46
seem to be so hung up in the truth if i can i'm asking this as a younger person because the responsibility is
1:37:52
is excavate only where i can find again the experience of the people who
1:37:57
produce them because active writing is the intention of it
1:38:03
the root of it is liberation look this is why no tyrant in history was able to read
1:38:12
but every single one of them burned the books that's true
1:38:19
you know yeah that is why no one yet believes really
1:38:25
there is such a thing as a black writer a black writer is still a freak
1:38:30
you know maybe even a dancing dog we don't yet exist in the imagination of
1:38:37
this century and we cannot afford to play games there's too much at stake
1:38:43
but there has to be a way to do what we do and survive which is uh to me what seems to be missing sweetheart
1:38:50
sweetheart our ancestors taught us how to do that we have survived until now
1:38:56
use chests and it's a very good example you know and people may think blind is a detective story
1:39:03
he didn't write it for the people who think it's a detective story yeah
1:39:08
that's a great book though you know that is fine look
1:39:15
there was a law let me say a very brutal thing a very brutal thing but
1:39:21
it has to be said i think it was a law in america not a thousand
1:39:26
years ago which stated
1:39:33
that a black man has no rights this was a law yes
1:39:39
which a white man is bound to respect now
1:39:44
you come to this i can say now
1:39:53
the people who frame that law have no standards which i am bound to respect
1:40:03
that's the way the wheel goes around no white critic can judge my work
1:40:12
i'd be a fool if i depended on that judgment
1:40:18
you know what i'm trying to say exactly but i'm not sure that anyone
1:40:25
at this stage um i personally hate critics
1:40:30
maybe they're i'm not sure that anyone actually i love critics but they're very rare a real critic is very rare
1:40:36
a real critic to criticize a real book would have to write a book of recruitment which case is a waste of
1:40:42
time because you could read the book that they're criticized right whether it be good or bad whether it's to explain
1:40:47
you know what i mean mostly though the young critics are i think just trying to hurt people
1:40:52
and uh the young black critics try to hurt people i think essentially and and the
1:40:58
white critics don't understand in many cases they would like to praise it but uh i
1:41:05
um critical judgments today i understand that they understand ray charles
1:41:11
it never happened no when that day comes then okay that's a new ball game you play you
1:41:16
know you see i would rather a 14 year old kid said i didn't like that essay i didn't
1:41:22
like that point i could relate to that because i know that he read it and that he understood it i found myself together
1:41:29
by the judgments of a few people whom trust it yeah it's the way it has to know when you not
1:41:35
give me any beep
1:41:41
yeah it's a funny situation to be in these days because uh everybody's trying to
1:41:46
delineate what you're doing and and to me what's important is that things are being done look baby i know
1:41:53
that my mother worked for them for a long time a long time a long
1:41:59
and i know she came to the house every morning left every night
1:42:04
and they did not know anything about her at all i can do it
1:42:11
where this guy's who my mother is they may be able to tell me who i am until they do that they can't tell you
1:42:17
the one thing they don't know who their mate is they can't tell me anything about me
1:42:24
and still less about you you know we were talking earlier about the uh
1:42:30
the junky situation mm-hmm which i'm gonna get you said that it related to like that whole sexual
1:42:36
thing i'm kind of curious well
1:42:47
i have to discuss nothing i was thinking about something that junkie once said to me he was a very good friend of mine
1:42:55
the musician he said you're a junkie too
1:43:00
i thought to myself am i you know send me in the way you said it maybe because i came to the same streets
1:43:07
i knew why he was junkie and i knew what had happened to me
1:43:13
is it your junkie because you talked to yourself i think about that
1:43:22
and i thought about it and i what he meant was you have to listen to your own sound
1:43:29
you got to find a way to listen to your own sound you live in a kind of echo chamber and it's true
1:43:35
you know and it also demands a terrible turning away
1:43:42
from many things you know
1:43:49
it is on one level on one level
1:43:55
i must say some of the junkies i have known
1:44:00
i've been among the most valuable people i've ever met in my life
1:44:06
because they know and some they know something and i've been trying to be mystical about it but they know that
1:44:12
they know their situation george cain wrote a book called blues child baby which is tremendous tremendous book
1:44:21
and the first honest book i've ever read about the condition of a junkie
1:44:26
but it's really in it really is exaggerated or rather you know
1:44:32
made clear the situation of being a black man in america you could even go further than that and
1:44:37
say the situation of being a white man this being a man this civilization
1:44:43
wasn't that frustrated the hell out of me it's a tremendous book i hear this one yeah read it again
1:44:50
read it again it's a very frightening book but
1:44:57
you have to in order to live finally make so many difficult and dangerous
1:45:02
choices that the one thing you really are trying to save is what you lose what you're trying
1:45:09
to save is one thing your ability to touch another human being will be touched by that person
1:45:14
you know that's what you're really trying to say and when you realize you can't say that
1:45:20
either you hit the needle you know
1:45:26
and it is one more way after all the junk comes from somewhere
1:45:31
i don't care how many cowboys i thought of the wolves and how many um you know drives against drugs i lived in the
1:45:38
ghetto and i watched it you know i think that's the biggest hype in the world
1:45:43
you buy drugs in the ghetto like like you buy like you buy whiskey in the deep south from the sheriff right
1:45:49
you know it's part of a criminal conspiracy to destroy black people the proof of this is nobody gave nobody
1:45:56
cared as long as our kids were dying it's only when they got you know the
1:46:02
plague spread outward up to scarsdale westchester and white kids started dying then we have a drug problem
1:46:08
they have a drugstore i think that's a big i think it's a big height and i'm not on anything so i don't know
1:46:15
what from the inside i'm going to try to but all it's done is to divide the people who are not on drugs because the
1:46:20
junkies should go on uh yeah the jungle but you have a love affair but everybody's gonna break them i think the
1:46:25
only thing when i fight about it i think i you know i think really seriously some of my brother said to me
1:46:31
years ago he got robbed by junky right okay and he was very hot you know he was very
1:46:37
angry but then he realized that
1:46:43
the jungle didn't have any choice but to rob him did you know that the whole point was
1:46:50
to set you at a division you know i decided after that you know that the junkie
1:46:56
is a victim like me a brother like me you know i ain't no better than he is i
1:47:03
really am not any better than he is we're in the same trap we're in the same trap for the same
1:47:08
reasons do you know it's the same way you know that uh
1:47:13
the great powers can use a tribal war in some unknown
1:47:18
country you know set them against each other then blame both parties
1:47:24
and put the money in switzerland and they still own the country you know but both countries are to blame
1:47:32
because they have to stop and think about it of course of course i mean i've already just finished with that
1:47:38
which is what you do one of the examples i mean yeah there was no point in it but maybe
1:47:44
it takes people a very long time to learn it very little if you consider your own life like instead of my life
1:47:50
you know when i think how little i've learned in actual a fairly long time
1:47:56
and what it has caused me to learn whatever i've learned and then to face whatever it is i've learned
1:48:02
and then the act on it it takes a long time
1:48:08
you know i don't think do you see what i mean though sure but i think that i'm all that uh like different exception or something like
1:48:14
that but i think there's certain things well first of all i don't need anybody to feel better than
1:48:20
you see and i think that like that junkie hype that whole war height that whole homosexual hype
1:48:27
you know what i mean that whole do i know he's not black hype i don't need it because it doesn't make
1:48:32
me any better people invent categories in order to feel safe
1:48:38
white people invite invented black people to give them to give white people an identity
1:48:48
so they can sleep with them that's true without becoming a factor themselves
1:48:53
somehow somehow somehow you know it's it's a hype though
1:48:58
if you're a writer you're forced to look behind the word into the meaning of the word
1:49:05
you know reaction's produced by the word yes yes you're responsible for what that word
1:49:11
means i agree you know you have to find a way to use that word to liberate the energy
1:49:17
in that word so it has a positive effect on that on the lives of people
1:49:23
there is such a thing as a living word
1:49:28
that's right that's not a mystical statement no it's true it's true i'm saying
1:49:34
i'm just always amazed at the number of hypes though that people go for you know like if you don't eat meat now
1:49:40
you're somehow better than somebody who has a pork chop look baby what does it matter baby i told you baby i told you i
1:49:46
told you before you know some things you seem nearly huge
1:49:52
it's been a problem yeah i just can't get over how people continue the bs
1:49:58
when we see that it has nothing because they're afraid to let it go but they're perpetuating their own destruction
1:50:06
you tell that to some white south african farmer
1:50:11
i can't tell that to some black guy you know what i mean that you're buying the level the destruction of your
1:50:17
children he doesn't have to hear i i mean see we're talking about counter purposes
1:50:23
sometimes the white south african does not have to hear me you know what i mean if it's children
1:50:29
it's tough if i walk down the street and tell some kid listen so what if you don't eat meat
1:50:35
and you're eating portage sugar you're a [ __ ] you understand he gets mad at me
1:50:41
yeah but you have to understand why he gets mad at you because first of all first of all he ain't mad at you
1:50:46
he's mad he's mad because what you told him is the truth you're mad he's mad because you're you
1:50:53
peep this whole card he's mad he's mad because he is trying to establish an illusion which you're
1:51:00
breaking he's not the same way those terrible preachers in the church i grew up in were mad you know i began to ask them
1:51:06
questions about what does this really mean you know when i began to watch their
1:51:12
lives they were talking about pimps and hustlers really you know wrapped in a cloak
1:51:18
you know in the blood of jesus and all that jazz you know and you ask them you ask them a real
1:51:24
question they hate you of course they hate you but it just it's not exactly it's so
1:51:29
simple but it's got nothing to do with you of course it's self-destructive yes i know that but but we're back at how we're going to get
1:51:35
over that and into uh look baby i've written off my generation you know completely i don't talk to them
1:51:43
let's go back to the kid you talk to those people you can hear
1:51:48
you and you say what you can save and you you're you are not going to live forever
1:51:54
either you know thank you yeah what you have to do is make it possible for others to live
1:52:03
you know that's the only reason to be here you know who needs rested really
1:52:09
that's true you know it's so weird though
1:52:16
it's counterproductive thank you that's very bad english
1:52:22
that's very good would you say that like to sort of sum things up here that uh would you say
1:52:27
like you tend to be optimistic you know on those kind of levels when i pick your
1:52:33
kid up in my arms yes i look at you yes you know not me
1:52:38
yes i'm very pessimistic oh no you're not as specific as you think you are i'm not pessimistic you've got too much
1:52:44
energy to be as pessimistic as you think you are i'm pretty pessimistic no i think you're pretty realistic i think
1:52:50
you're very cool no i think you're pretty clear but pessimists
1:52:55
are silent pessimists are people who have no hope
1:53:00
for themselves for others pessimists are also people who think
1:53:06
that the human race is beneath their notice they're better than other human beings
1:53:12
back to them so we're back people really feel the need to feel better than somebody
1:53:18
don't they uh because they can't that's a mystery which i can't but they
1:53:23
do feel it i don't know why they feel it but they do is that being in competition with
1:53:29
somebody you know just something i never understood i've been in my own life you know in competition
1:53:35
with me which is enough enough yeah so what happened
1:53:42
yeah just pushing me busy just it's very good for the figure
1:53:47
it makes you happy you know well it means in any case you can walk into a room and talk to
1:53:53
somebody looking in the eye you know if i say i love you i can say it
1:54:00
no but i can't you know get on my face i can mean it
1:54:05
you know right i've only got one life and i'm going to live my life
1:54:10
you know in the sight of god and all his children
1:54:17
that's all i can see you know which is it's maybe parochial narrow-minded bullheaded
1:54:23
but it just takes up so much energy just to keep yourself happy you know what i mean it isn't even a
1:54:28
question of keeping yourself happy you know it's a question of keeping yourself
1:54:33
in relation to in some kind of clear relationship more or less
1:54:39
to the for to the to the force which feeds you you know some days you're happy sometimes you some days you ain't
1:54:46
but as long as we can manage to to deal with it
1:54:53
on the simplest no level right just bear in mind that this person
1:55:00
facing you is a person like you you know
1:55:06
they're going to go home and do whatever they do just like you they're as alone as you are
1:55:11
you know because that becomes a responsibility doesn't it well
1:55:16
it's called love you know we agree yeah love is a tremendous responsibility
1:55:23
it's the only one to take there isn't any other i agree
1:55:32
that was incredibly beautiful we've come to the end of this
1:55:37
what i think is a very important exchange of ideas and experiences and really love between nikki giovanni
1:55:45
and jimmy baldwin and we here at seoul thank them so very much for letting us have the opportunity to do this special
1:55:52
program a conversation between nikki giovanni and james baldwin this is ellis
1:55:58
haystep saying goodnight from seoul see you next week
1:56:05
that's awful we're supposed to be arguing we blew this gig
1:56:13
goofed again i think love is an answer but you have to be logical about it yeah well it's in
1:56:19
other words you know of course you know but logical you you say logical rational i say clear you know becomes the same
1:56:24
thing no you can't be romantic about it no you can't be romantic about it that's all no
1:56:33
i think you think we are yeah you asked you asked the loaded question the one did you i asked it you did it your death you
1:56:39
did that question