"Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin

1.3.22

Let us stop and acknowledge how incredible James Baldwin’s writing is. I spent

a lot of my life not knowing who he was, though I was always an avid reader. Once, before I went to undergrad (I started my undergrad when I was 32), I was writing an admission essay for Bard College (I didn’t get in) and I asked a woman I had nannied for (she is a poet and one of the first people to introduce me to literature when I was a 21 year-old live-in nanny) to read it, and the feedback she gave was that it reminded her of James Baldwin. I thought of the Baldwins. You know, the actors. And then I found James Baldwin and read everything, and continued to read everything, and continue to read everything. One cannot read enough James Baldwin, in my opinion. One cannot read anything of his too many times.

This is a lovely piece from The New Yorker on Baldwin (the picture above is from that piece). In essence, he is required reading for anyone who is interested in American history. We have short memories…