Ep. 175 - Dr. Greg Garrett ”The Gospel According to James Baldwin” pt. 1

[00:00:00] Do you wish for someone who understands you like no one else? Someone who can make your wishes come true and wants to experience the most beautiful adventure of your life with you? The Shopify commerce platform revolutionizes millions of companies worldwide.

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[00:01:11] I'm your host, John Williamson. We have an all-new guest this week, but before I get to that, if you're new here, welcome. Check out our website www.thedeconstructionist.com for all things deconstructionist.

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[00:02:02] You don't see something you want, we'll get it. Just let me know. Anyway, this week we've got on Dr. Greg Garrett. He is a writer, speaker, preacher, musician, and professor. He's the critically acclaimed author of over two dozen books of fiction

[00:02:18] and nonfiction, including the book that we discuss in this interview. His latest is called The Gospel According to James Baldwin. Greg studied at Oklahoma State University, where he received his PhD in English. He then went on to continue his education with postdoctoral studies in Holocaust Studies

[00:02:35] at University of Oregon and received his master's in divinity from the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. So we talk all about one of my favorite authors, so I was very, very excited to have him on.

[00:02:51] I found out about James Baldwin by way of a documentary trailer. Just based on that trailer, I was absolutely captivated, but also immediately ashamed that I had no idea who this man was.

[00:03:02] A man who was so instrumental to so many people and such a central figure in the civil rights movement alongside names like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. So I watched the documentary and I read his books and was forever changed.

[00:03:16] And ever since then, I've recommended him to anyone who would listen. In my mind, he's the greatest writer of all time. James Baldwin was a man of many talents. He was a gifted writer, a leading voice in the civil rights movement,

[00:03:28] and a pioneer in the LGBTQ community. Decades after his passing, his words still ring true as we still fight for a world where we can love one another, regardless of the color of our skin or who we choose to love.

[00:03:42] James Baldwin was a modern-day prophet, and if you didn't know his work before, I hope you take the time to become familiar with it. One of my favorite quotes of his comes from his book, No Name on the Street.

[00:03:53] If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected, those precisely who need the law's protection most, and listens to their testimony.

[00:04:12] And with that, here's my conversation with Greg Freakin Garrett. All right, very excited. Welcome to the Deconstructionist Podcast. I've got Greg Garrett with me today. We're going to talk about one of my favorite, if not my favorite author. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

[00:04:48] It's such a great pleasure. I'm glad to be here today. Absolutely. Like I was telling you before we started recording, I got an email from your publisher and talking about your book that wasn't out yet at the time,

[00:05:00] and I got really excited because I happened upon this particular individual, James Baldwin. So your book is called The Gospel According to James Baldwin, What America's Great Prophet Can Teach Us About Life, Love, and Identity. And I thought, heck yeah, I cannot wait to talk about this.

[00:05:16] So yeah, I've been looking forward to this. Good. Let's talk a little bit about, first before we dig in, tell people a little bit about your background and ultimately what inspired you to write a book about James Baldwin.

[00:05:31] Well, I mean, one of the things about my background is that I was raised in the church. It was a conservative evangelical church. Asking questions was not encouraged. Art and beauty were not emphasized, and people were very suspicious of anybody who was too smart.

[00:05:51] It was not a good fit for me, although many of my family members are still Southern Baptist and have found a life in that faith tradition. But it was very harmful for me. And so I fled that tradition when I was 18, when I left for college.

[00:06:06] And for about 20, 25 years, I was just nothing. Like many people who leave the church of their childhood, I didn't know that there were other options. And so my life has been this sort of continuing quest for knowledge and for wisdom,

[00:06:25] but also with this very real awareness, even when I was farthest away from the church, I didn't feel that far away from God. So, you know, I was seeking that connection with the Creator, the intelligence,

[00:06:37] however you want to think about what it is at the center of the universe that we reverence. And so that search has led me in a lot of directions. I, you know, walked through a bunch of different wisdom traditions.

[00:06:52] I tried to find it in art, other people's art and my own art. I've tried to find it through nature in that kind of transcendentalist sort of way. You know, I'm going to connect with God through this.

[00:07:02] And then ultimately at the lowest point in my life, when I was suffering from suicidal depression, I was rescued by a historically African-American Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas. And they took me in and they patched me up and they sent me out.

[00:07:18] And so they rescued me to continue that work. But also it became very clear to me because I'm also a teacher that my job is to help other people do that work. So to find out the things that matter, the things that will save them,

[00:07:35] however you want to think about that phrase, and to continue to learn and grow. Because I mean one of the things that I talk about toward the end of the book is that Baldwin's sort of sum total of his wisdom is that we can do better.

[00:07:53] And that's, you know, so I get up in the morning. I try to do better. I try to write better. I try to love better. I try to be a little bit more courageous. And so it's partly a secular journey and it's partly a sacred journey,

[00:08:07] but long ago I realized that there's no such thing as something that separates those things. Everything in this life is sacred. And so whether or not it happens within the walls of the church or whether or not you're carrying around James Baldwin or your King James Bible,

[00:08:24] we all, as Baldwin knew, are seeking the same things and trying to figure out the same things. And so I'm no different. I'm just grateful that there are some really good guides along the way and then that community of faith that saved my life.

[00:08:42] I love that. Before we can really talk about who James Baldwin was, we really need to start at the beginning because his story is a fascinating journey that really influenced and kind of shaped who he became later in life. And so talk a little bit about his youth

[00:09:00] and the experiences that absolutely influenced who he would later become. Well, you know, Baldwin was born in the early 1920s in Harlem. He was born to a family that bloomed into a number of siblings. So he was the oldest of a number of half-siblings.

[00:09:22] The person that he called his father, that he had sort of a lifelong contention with, long after his father was dead, was actually his stepfather. He never knew his real father. He believed that probably his father had been a criminal or an addict, maybe both.

[00:09:38] But he grew up with this sort of domineering father in his life. And he also grew up with a grandmother who had been enslaved. And so the history of America was present for him in that Harlem apartment. And then all of the discrimination, the racism, the injustice,

[00:09:56] the marginalized nature that we think about in terms of how American history deals with people who are brown or black or indigenous was there for him to witness every day. So they were poor. They were marginalized. They were surrounded by violence.

[00:10:16] He was accosted by police from the time he was a kid. And the one thing that he learned early on, strangely and maybe beautifully, ironically, through a loving white teacher who saw his brilliance, was that he was really smart and really creative.

[00:10:36] And if he was going to get out, if he was going to survive, it was not going to be through any of the sort of usual mechanisms. You know, it's not going to be Malcolm X becoming a gangster, essentially. It's not going to be becoming Joe Louis.

[00:10:51] If you've ever seen a picture of Mr. Baldwin, he was slight. He was not going to step into a ring, you know, and duke it out with anybody. But he thought, if I can survive long enough to make my mark,

[00:11:05] people will pay attention to me because I can do this thing and I can do it really well. And so Baldwin went on to become, you know, I think about, you know, like baseball players, you know, we're told that like great baseball players have five tools, you know,

[00:11:20] and I don't know if you're a baseball fan or if anybody listening is a baseball fan, but just indulge me. So like, you know, we say that, okay, this person runs, hits, hits for power, you know, plays right field beautifully, has a rifle for an arm.

[00:11:35] And Baldwin wrote fiction. He wrote plays and screenplays. He wrote literary criticism, cultural criticism. He wrote essays about race and justice in America. And he was a powerful and important activist who intersected with some of the most important figures

[00:11:54] of the civil rights movement and actually knew and loved, you know, Medgar Evers, Dr. King, Malcolm X. And so there is nobody like him in American letters or American life. He was so good at all the things that he did.

[00:12:10] And it is sometimes puzzling to me that, you know, as you had to be introduced to him and as the reporter that I talked to earlier in this week about this book had to be introduced to him,

[00:12:21] it sometimes strikes me as strange that everybody doesn't know who he is, but they don't. And that was one of the primary reasons that I wanted to write this book. Every time I teach Baldwin, my students blossom, whether they share any part of his identity or not.

[00:12:38] They understand their humanity better after they have read or experienced him. And so I wanted to take that out on the road, as it were, you know, outside the classroom where I teach at Baylor.

[00:12:51] And to allow other people to have this experience of having their hearts and minds enlarged by James Baldwin. So that was the primary thing. Nobody takes on a book project without an incredible degree of passion.

[00:13:05] And I say nobody. I mean, I'm sure there are people who write for money. But, you know, if I'm going to spend years, and this project was probably six years from conception to publication, that's a whole lot of life, you know.

[00:13:19] And for me, since I go away to write, it's also a whole bunch of weeks and even months away from the people I love most. And so I had to know that I could say something about Baldwin that would be useful,

[00:13:33] that this would be a book that hadn't been written by somebody else or couldn't be written by somebody else. And so that for me was the big thing. Baldwin has changed my life. He's changed my students.

[00:13:45] And I thought, you know, anybody who reads this book and then maybe goes on to read Baldwin is going to have that same experience.

[00:13:54] I completely agree. And I think, you know, reading your book, I can tell just by reading it, just the love and reverence that you have for Baldwin. So it comes through in the book. Absolutely. So I think it's interesting.

[00:14:09] I definitely want to talk about because he brings us up. He talks about his relationship during the civil rights movement, movement in the 60s with Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X. And he always struck me as a guy who didn't necessarily want to join either movement.

[00:14:27] He kind of found himself forging his own path because I recall a conversation he had with Malcolm X in particular in the book. What was what was your sense? You know, and you talk later also,

[00:14:39] I think this kind of connects with where you mentioned the fact that he always seemed like a guy looking for his identity. I think that that's fair. I think part of what he was trying to do and he wrote about this a lot using the word witness.

[00:14:53] And I love that kind of characterization of him, because I think what it often meant was that, you know, he was present and paying attention. And, you know, as every writer's mind is, it's like I'm recording this. I'm recording these conversations.

[00:15:11] I don't know exactly how these are going to be structured. I don't know how this is all going to fit together. But I'm going to be present at this moment, this moment in history.

[00:15:19] And I'm going to I'm going to bear witness in my speech and in my writing later on. I think that philosophically, he had, I think, a lot in common with Dr. King, particularly when we talk about the primacy of love.

[00:15:36] And some of the later activists and black power figures looked down on James Baldwin because they they felt that he was weak and ineffectual. They thought that his failure to to consider that violence could be a way forward was was a lack of judgment on his part.

[00:16:00] But he knew at least as far back as the fire next time. And I think before that, because I'm thinking about maybe some of the essays from Notes of a Native Son, where he's talking about love and forgiveness and truth telling as the only potential way forward.

[00:16:19] I think he understood when he was writing about the church of his youth and about the white church and the failure of Christianity to follow Jesus. And sort of in a strange and sort of mirror way, the failure of the nation of Islam,

[00:16:37] the fire next time is that they were essentially doing everything that had been done to them. You know, their their blind hatred and desire to do violence and to to wipe out the people who had oppressed them was no better.

[00:16:53] And certainly in the name of God had to be condemned because that's not who Baldwin thought that God was. There is this wonderful line, which is I think many people's favorite line in the fire next time.

[00:17:09] I told a gay Episcopal priest in Paris that I was reading Baldwin and she said to me, if the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can be only to make us larger, freer and more loving.

[00:17:23] If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him. And I'm like, yes, that's the book. That's the heart of the book right there. So the other thing that I want to mention about Baldwin is, you know, I said something about his physical stature.

[00:17:37] And, you know, Dr. King was not a large person. He was a little portly. He loved his chicken. And I've been to the old Ebenezer Baptist Church and stood at the pulpit where he used to stand. And I was like, oh, I'm a giant compared to Dr. King.

[00:17:55] But, you know, James Baldwin weighed maybe one hundred and twenty five pounds, you know, like dripping wet. He put himself in a number of situations, particularly on his trips to the South,

[00:18:04] to be a witness to what was going on there, where he felt that he was in constant danger, you know, danger for his life. And this was a danger that the three men that he loved, not sexually, but, you know, the heroes, the people he admired,

[00:18:19] you know, Medgar Evers, Dr. King, Malcolm X, all were killed well before, you know, they could finish the things that they had set out to do.

[00:18:30] But I love that although Baldwin could have been happy as a writer, you know, sitting in his garret or in the Swiss Alps, he talks about in my other favorite Baldwin book, which is No Name in the Streets,

[00:18:46] which is kind of his memoir of the civil rights era. He talks about seeing pictures of the brave black kids integrating schools in the South, and in particular, this young lady in Charlotte, North Carolina.

[00:19:00] And he just said, I can't ask them to endure these dangers and sit here on the sidelines. And he said, you know, I knew then I was going to have to come back to America

[00:19:12] and I was going to have to put my body in that space and endure what they were enduring. So I'm not sure I could do that. I want to think that I could. But, you know, there are so many things that I admire about him.

[00:19:26] But, you know, besides just that consummate artistry, that eye, that ear, that mind, it was he had a great heart. And so when you were talking before, it's like clear in the book, and I hope it is clear how much I admire Baldwin.

[00:19:44] I think of him as one of the formative people in my formation, you know, Dr. King, Robert F. Kennedy, the better Robert F. Kennedy, the senior one, if you will. And then the later senior Robert F. Kennedy, not the one from the 1950s. That one's right out.

[00:20:04] But, you know, there are a handful of people. And one of my favorite, one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, says we get to choose our teachers. And that's that is one of the greatest blessings of this life.

[00:20:20] And so I hope that people will choose this man, you know, as one of their teachers to show them what it is we're capable of. Do you wish for someone who understands you like no one else?

[00:20:32] Someone who can make your wishes come true and wants to experience the most beautiful adventure of your life with you? The Shopify commerce platform revolutionizes millions of companies worldwide. With Shopify, you can create your own online shop, without programming or design knowledge.

[00:20:50] Thanks to the efficient set-up and intuitive social media and online marketplace integration, you can advertise and sell via Instagram, eBay and Co. Reaching new target groups has never been so easy. Shopify offers all the tools to set up your online business on a single, secure platform.

[00:21:09] Test for free and present your business to the world. Visit shopify.de//try. Simply enter shopify.de//try and get started. Made for Germany. Powered by Shopify. Oh, absolutely. And what's interesting in a point that we haven't really talked about yet is, you know,

[00:21:31] when we talked about earlier a little bit about all the things that sort of influenced him growing up, you know, sort of the very religious stepfather and, you know,

[00:21:42] one thing we didn't mention you talk about in the book is his young Jewish friend and sort of exposure to that. And then the other piece too, obviously growing up, you know, African-American during the height of the civil rights movement

[00:21:57] while living with a grandmother who is living history of slavery. But then also being a gay man in a time where it would be decades before that fight would even begin in earnest. Talk about a heavy burden.

[00:22:12] Yeah. And so it's not surprising that he didn't feel that he could live honestly or safely in New York or really anywhere in the United States.

[00:22:24] So one of the primary parts of his identity after that sort of childhood, young adult formative part was that he followed his mentor Richard Wright to Paris. Like he went to Paris with like $40, you know, $40 in his pocket. And he was poor.

[00:22:44] And at one point he was actually thrown in a French prison. And it would be funny if it weren't so terrifying when if his friends stole a bed sheet from a hotel and the gendarmes came after him and Baldwin had put that sheet on his own bed.

[00:23:02] And so he got taken in as a part of this, you know, sort of Rico scandal. And it is only, as I say in the book, the merest chance that Baldwin ever got out of a French prison. You know, he could be there today.

[00:23:24] And so there are so many adventures he had. But the good thing about Paris is that while racism still exists in Paris, I mean, it's largely xenophobia, xenophobia, excuse me, phobia.

[00:23:39] And Baldwin said, you know, it felt that the color of my passport superseded the color of my skin.

[00:23:47] But as he looked at Algerians, as he looked at Cameroonians, you know, other people from French colonial Africa and saw the way that they were treated, it was not any different. And today you can go to Paris and you will find Harlem.

[00:24:02] There are suburbs in Paris that are, I mean, no different qualitatively. And the experience of growing up there, I'm sure Baldwin would have recognized as almost identical to his own.

[00:24:16] But the thing that Paris did for him was it gave him the freedom to live and to love the way that he chose. And it gave him the freedom to write. It was cheaper in those days to live in Paris. And he was getting some grants.

[00:24:31] He had, you know, he had made some connections at some of the big national kind of intellectual magazines, published his first novel. And people paid attention to it, paid attention to him.

[00:24:43] And he was on his way to becoming one of the most important literary figures of the last century. Yeah, that's a great transition to the next question I had on here. So the impact of his novel. So the first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain.

[00:25:00] And then he published his second novel during the 1950s, Giovanni's Room. And both books sort of got pigeonholed as this is the voice of the civil rights movement. This is the voice of LGBTQ.

[00:25:14] And yet and this theme comes up then and it continues to come up as he criticizes his peers work as well when it comes to any book that he sees as sort of a protest book. Where he gets kind of annoyed.

[00:25:28] And there's this quote at the beginning of your book that where you quote him, where he's he's very critical of who had been his his hero. Yeah. Right.

[00:25:39] And then then Uncle Tom's Cabin, obviously a famous work where he says, however well intentioned the protest novel might be, the truest job of the novelist is to represent human life in all its beauty, complication and difficulty, not simply to convey a message.

[00:25:56] And I thought, wow, you could you could literally apply that to any art. And the fact that he felt like it weighed too heavily on the thing in which it was protesting versus the nuance and complexity of the human condition.

[00:26:13] And I resonate with that from a lot of directions because I am a novelist and because I teach creative writing. And when Baylor was much more explicitly a Christian school than it is now, we used to get you know, a majority of our students were devout.

[00:26:34] And often they wanted to come in and save souls with their stories. And you know what I tell them is that, you know, as Baldwin says, anytime your advocacy is more important than the human beings that are advocating, then that's bad art.

[00:26:52] You know, it turns them into stick figures carrying a protest sign. And, you know, unless somebody already agrees with your protest sign, then you're not going to reach them.

[00:27:03] You know, but what Baldwin does so beautifully in his best creative writing and I think my favorite probably is Another Country, which is the sort of epic novel he wrote in the early 1960s.

[00:27:18] But you can see it in Giovanni's Room, you can see it in Go Tell It on the Mountain.

[00:27:24] Even though those books were necessarily claimed by marginalized people who had not felt represented in American literature proper, what he was very clear about is that the books were more than that. You know, so for anybody who ever grew up in a conservative religious setting.

[00:27:46] And I did in the Christian world, but I think a Muslim could identify with these characters. I think a conservative, you know, somebody raised in a conservative Jewish tradition could recognize themselves.

[00:27:58] And the other thing that he said about Giovanni's Room is he says, you know, people make the mistake of thinking it's a gay novel. And he says, you know, the problem with David, the main character, is not that he loves a man.

[00:28:15] It's that he doesn't love him enough. And so everybody who has ever loved and lost, everybody who has ever failed at love, I mean, I'm including myself and probably most of the people listening here. You know, it's important that people be represented.

[00:28:34] Barry Jenkins, the great black film director says, you know, if you don't see yourself represented in art, it's as if you don't exist. And so that's an essential thing that Baldwin does. And I'll just park this and come back to my thing.

[00:28:50] I was teaching the Fire Next Time to Baylor students back in the spring. It was a group of non-majors who were taking like the sophomore American lit class. And I had a young black man who sat in the back.

[00:29:03] He didn't talk during class, although I knew he was reading. I had read his journals. I knew there was a lot going on up here. He was too shy. And, you know, he didn't feel that he had anything to contribute.

[00:29:15] I mean, he was wrong, but that's how he felt. But he pulled me aside one day in the stairs because he didn't want to say this in class, but he wanted me to hear it. He said, I have never before felt seen. And I mean, just imagine that.

[00:29:32] You and I, when we look at a movie screen, when we read many books, I mean, when we look at art, we're represented. And we always have been.

[00:29:42] And one of the reasons that I think it's so important that Baldwin represented so widely is that he does offer people that chance to be seen, to be seen and known, which is one of the things that's really essential to Baldwin, I think philosophically and maybe even theologically.

[00:29:59] But coming back to the idea of what Baldwin does is he thought that protest novels were bad because they diminished the humanity of the characters that they represented and whether that was for good.

[00:30:16] Like Uncle Tom is saintly to such a degree that we don't know his inner life. He's not represented with an inner life. And, you know, Bigger Thomas, who is the main character in Richard Wright's novel, is sort of the opposite.

[00:30:34] He's made so monstrous by the hatred and prejudice that he's absorbed. And for Baldwin, I mean, this is this is, I think, true of him as a writer, but it's also his understanding of his witness. People are so much more complicated. Than their best or worst acts.

[00:30:56] So, you know, we were talking about Dr. King earlier, Dr. King, who who gave himself to the struggle knowing he was going to die. You know, he was not going to live a long life.

[00:31:07] And so we we sometimes make Dr. King into a postage stamp, you know, and we forget about the very real human being who he was, the sins that he you know that he committed, the pride he carried around. The disappointment that people sometimes felt with him.

[00:31:29] And Baldwin's great contribution as a critic and as a writer, because he lived out his best criticism in his work, was that human beings are infinitely complicated.

[00:31:42] And to do anything less than represent that is not to represent the, you know, the created humanity of of every one of us. And so that was a huge lesson that he gives us in his work.

[00:31:59] But it's one of the things that I like to tell my students, you know, your heroes are going to do bad things. And your bad guys, girls, are going to do things out of a very real set of harms inflicted on them.

[00:32:18] So he I mean, he's a guide star for us in a lot of ways.

[00:32:23] But if you want to do art, and if you want to do it honestly, and, you know, conscientiously with a real regard for the human complexity that God has created in us, it's hard for me to imagine how you can do better than pay attention to Baldwin.

[00:32:56] She could go made a living giving dying folks a shoulder and a hand until he told his leaders that he had some feelings for another man. And they said, you must go and take your broken heart and walk it to the door. We know you're hurting.

[00:33:38] And you've been giving. But now your damage goes and you gotta give some more. John, we love you. But we can't love you. You must go. Jen could sing a song and channel the divine spend a decade sharing it and kept herself in line

[00:34:33] until her eyes began to see the light inside the door. And the floor of all she thought began to fall apart. And they said, you must go. We didn't know your quest would lead you down this road. We know you're searching and you've been giving.

[00:35:11] But now you've wandered off and you gotta walk. Jen, we love you. But we can't have you. You must go. Jane was born with skin dark as gold. Born with skin darker than her peers. Spent a cycle telling them the reasons for her fears.

[00:36:07] No one seemed to know or care about the past. Then they showed her where she stood with every vote they cast. And they said, Jane, thanks for your time. But there's no room for you when there's power on the line. We know you're, but we're not listening.

[00:36:47] And we'd help you out, but we don't have that kind of time. You must go. So John and Jen and Jane were on the streets without. And he said, child, don't you go. I want your broken heart and your beautiful soul.

[00:37:46] I've felt your hurting, I've seen your giving. And I'll stay right here till you have the power to stand. They may not want you, but I know they need you. So let us go. So come out, rejected and broke. Let us go into the promised land.

[00:38:43] Rejected and broke.

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