I didn’t like that he and my grandfather were four years apart in age, but that Baldwin, as he was taught to me, had escaped to France and avoided his birth-righted fate whereas millions of black men his age had not. It seemed easy enough to fly in from France to protest, whereas it seemed straight hellish to live in it with no ticket out. It seemed to me that Baldwin had written himself into the world—and I wasn’t sure what that meant in terms of his allegiances to our interiors as an everyday, unglamorous slog.
