The Price of the Ticket

Photography credit Carl Van Vechten

Back in 1985, on the morning of November 23 (a cold, wet, gray autumn Saturday) I woke up happy. At that time in my life, nothing could have been more unusual.

But I knew that before that day’s sun had set, I was going to meet James Baldwin, whose body of work (the novels and short stories, his plays and all those exquisite essays) had inspired my own burning desire to write.

Baldwin was on an interview-and-autograph tour which would be his last, crisscrossing America after the simultaneous publication of The Evidence of Things Not Seen (a book-length essay on the Atlanta child murders that were then still common knowledge) and The Price of the Ticket. On that Saturday afternoon, Mr. B. (as I privately referred to him) was scheduled to appear at a bookshop on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago. For the preceding month, each customer who made a purchase at Guild Books had received a Xeroxed postcard-sized printout of an invitation to the event. Baldwin’s appearance had also been touted in a news story printed that week in the Tribune.

I thought of how strange it must be—how truly bizarre—for a great writer who has spent thousands of hours alone in a room, grasping for words, struggling to sculpt just the right image on paper, to be confronted suddenly with hundreds of smiling, book-buying admirers; dozens of them invariably requesting special inscriptions for someone special; others craving a momentary brush with celebrity; still others bearing poems, plays or stories they’re praying to share, plus the others who want to say a few words. I belonged in the latter category. Or I told myself I did. And what I wanted to tell Mr. B., more than anything else, was something like this: Thank you—for your books, for all of your work, and for being such a formidable mentor. I knew he’d heard some variation of that a thousand times before, but I was determined to say it.

Baldwin’s appearance was set for three p.m., and when I arrived at Guild Books just after two o’clock, a crowd of some three hundred was already crammed inside. A line of people stretched out the door and snaked around the corner and down the block. It may have been the most successfully integrated aggregation ever to peacefully assemble in Chicago (food festivals and ChicagoFest notwithstanding). Blacks and whites, Hispanics and Asians, Sikhs with turbans and Jews with yarmulkes were all in line, drawn together by the power of the words.

Passersby inquired about the reason for such a gathering. When told that hundreds were ignoring the autumn chill in order to meet James Baldwin, some of them smiled. Others drew a blank: They wanted to know why he was famous.

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