Putting James Baldwin's name into frontal lobes

CHAPEL HILL -- Randall Kenan is still dabbing sweat from his walk across campus when the clerk looks up for our order.

I slide the new book the UNC English professor has edited onto the counter. The young clerk scans the big orange letters - "James Baldwin" - above a jazz-cool image of the writer.

Nothing.

"He was an African-American writer of the '60s and '70s," I say.

Nothing.

"He wrote about civil rights, social justice."

Nothing

"He edited the book," I say, gesturing to Kenan standing beside me.

"Oh, that's cool."

Later, as he waits for his chai, Kenan resists a sigh.

He's gotten used to young people not knowing Baldwin, a writer whose uncompromising social critiques made him a household name when fortysomething Kenan was younger than our college barista. It was a time when a pop-eyed preacher's son, whose gift for holding a mirror to America's inequities and admonishing it to do better, put him on magazine covers and on stage at civil rights rallies. A time when more people read books.

Newly published "The Cross of Redemption, Uncollected Writings by James Bald win," brings together essays, letters, book reviews and a short story not previously available in one collection. Kenan, who has written a Baldwin biography and three years ago his own homage to the writer, "The Fire This Time," was asked by Baldwin's estate to edit the book.

The following excerpts are from an interview with Kenan last week.

Q: How did you come to Baldwin, to his writing?

When I was a kid he was the African-American writer. The only African-American writer who was more famous was Alex Haley, maybe Maya Angelou. ... People in the neighborhood knew who he was. Our minister quoted him from the pulpit; he was that relevant, even in the late '70s. I mean you'd go to the barbershop, you'd open Jet magazine and there'd be something about Baldwin. You were aware of him on that level.

Q: [The book contains part of a 1961 speech in which Baldwin says Robert Kennedy has told him one day, maybe in 30 years, Baldwin could be president.] I'm not going to ask you what Baldwin would think of Obama. But in the speech, he flips it. He says why would he want to be president and what kind of country would he be presiding over? What would he make of the country today?

I think he would be giving Obama hard time, like a lot of black leaders are. Angela Davis has dedicated herself to the plight of black men in prison. Marian Wright Edelman has devoted herself to poor black children. There are still many things he would be fired up about. ... The war would have been one thing. So yesterday [when Obama announced the end of U.S. combat in Iraq] would have been good news. A day late and a dollar short, probably.

Q: Can a writer have the influence that he had then? Writers in general were held in higher esteem, or were listened to, at least. Organizers wanted him. He was invited to rallies. He was an excellent speaker. ... "The Fire Next Time" was published in its entirety in The New Yorker. He was on the cover of Time magazine. He was on the radio and TV all the time. People wanted to hear what he had to say. He was one of the voices, like Martin Luther King, like Harry Belafonte, like Vernon Jordan, who had people's ear.

Q: Why was his race the lens? Why wasn't his sexuality more of an influence on his writing and the subject of his writing?

He was very leery of being co-opted. When you think about the gay-rights movement, that didn't really get off the ground until after Stonewall [demonstrations in New York by gays and lesbian resisting what they saw as police harassment]. That was 1969. He was out as a civil rights leader well before that.

The second novel, "Giovanni's Room," was about two white [homosexual] men in Europe. He wasn't running away from it. He was tackling it on another level. Even before the politics of it coalesced, he was doing his own thing. He probably wouldn't have used the word gay, but he identified himself as a man-loving man.

Q: What was Baldwin saying about race that we need to hear today?

He talks a lot about how to be white in this country you needed the black person. That whiteness doesn't exist without black people. It comes up again and again in his essays.

Q: That for some people to be on the top others have to be on the bottom?

Basically. Other people benefit financially, that it's a lie in the American soul. And that in order to move beyond that you have to confront that.