Suddenly, the sky fills with pastels that turn to gold and shatter on the sea. Standing in the narrow hallway, hands against the glass, your whole body lets you know that you are in the South. From Nice, the terminus, we took a car twenty minutes inland through nondescript suburban sprawl that opens onto the pristine medieval hilltop village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Since the nineteen-twenties, the hotel has provided a haven to all manner of guests, many of them artists eager to exchange canvases with the forward-thinking patron for room and board.
Writers have come, too, and we were on a pilgrimage to retrace the steps of one we hold especially dear. I crouched and pulled out the cinderblock that stabilized it; we slipped in easily. Birds flew in and out of the second level, and Shahin hoisted himself through a rectangular opening in the side of the first, reporting back that it was trashed and stripped bare.
A short article that Valentine had dug up indicated that the land had recently been sold to a large developer and was to be subdivided into three smaller plots with brand-new villas, but work had been sporadic and then reached a standstill. Several weeks earlier, we had written a letter and begun compiling a list of potential allies to seek out.
Above the trees, the sky had achieved a perfect state of blue. At that moment, I understood why Baldwin never resettled in gloomy Paris let alone Harlem , and for the first time I also thought I understood why some other blacks had come to if not hate him then certainly look at him askew. Today, among my generation of black writers and readers, James Baldwin is almost universally adored.
Meanwhile, more serious black intellectuals than Cleaver both publicly and privately picked Baldwin apart. He writes about the economic and social conditions of Harlem, the material plight of Harlem. But far from writing in terms of a U. Baldwin himself was both pained by such rejection and resigned to his own precocity, anticipating his ultimate vindication.
