Baldwin put it this way to Fern Marja Eckman: “You’re at the mercy of something, which has nothing to do with you, nothing to do with your career, nothing to do with your ambitions, nothing to do with your loneliness, nothing to do with your despair. It had to do simply with the division of labor in the world—and this was your job. This is what you were here to do. Y’know, to translate somehow, if you could, by whatever means you could find, the way I see it—in any case, you know, I found myself in the deep South, looking at the eyes of a black boy or girl of 10. Y’know? To make it real. To
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