Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

As a critic of the after times, Baldwin is like a blues singer who sings about the crossroads. He stands at the railroad junction, where he can go in multiple directions. He is betwixt and between possibilities. The crossroads or the railroad junction is a way station of the blues: a place where anguish and pain are faced, where everything seems to have gone wrong, and yet a kind of resilience is found in the painful phrasing of new possibility. In the after times, hope is not yet lost, even if the call to reimagine the country has been answered with violence. So the after times also represent an opportunity for a new America—a chance to grasp a new way of being in the world—amid the darkness of the hour. But as Jimmy understood, that opportunity rests on what we do in the moment.