Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems

by James Baldwin

He felt that Black men in America, as the most obvious targets of white oppression, had to love each other, to warn each other, and to communicate with each other if they were to escape being defined only in reaction to that oppression. They had to seek and find in their own tradition the human qualities that white men, through their unrelenting brutality, had lost.

Who, indeed. I may be able to tell you who I am, but I am also discovering who I am not. I want to be an honest man. And I want to be a good writer. I don’t know if one ever gets to be what one wants to be. You just have to play it by ear, and pray for rain.

It is dreadful to be so violently dispersed. To dare hope for nothing, and yet dare to hope. To know that hoping and not hoping are both criminal endeavours, and, yet, to play one’s cards.

Love, love has no gifts to give except the revelation that the soul can live: on a coming day, you will hear, from afar, I, your lover, pray. You will hear, then, the prayer that you cannot hear now, and, when you hear that sobbing, boy, rejoice, and know that love is the purpose of the human voice!