A Good Fucking Start: For James Baldwin and the Contradictions He Was Forced to Live
“I want what you want.
I want to be left alone…”
This is probably the most powerful thing James Baldwin ever said
Because it speaks to an “everyday”
Where “nothing much happens”;
And, “everything is possible”.
It’s 2025, and there still hasn’t been a day like that in America for Black people.
People tell me that there has been progress and hope
But, it’s the hope that kills us.
Hope is not a strategy.
We are still crossing the Edmond Pettis Bridge;
Not safely reaching the other side.
And, that bridge is still named after a Klansman.
I want a day when Jackie Robinson isn’t deleted.
Or, the Tuskegee Airmen and Elenor Roosevelt aren’t a blow to the status quo.
Celebrate Ira Hayes — hands clutching a flag while under fire at Iwo Jima.
And, Native American Code Talkers who performed the healing ritual: “Where the Two Met Their Father”
So, that they could return home safely from World War 2
Celebrate Japanese heroes who were the real Mr. Miyagis.
While little Mr. Sulus languished in American concentration camps.
While some of their dogged brothers on the other side refused to surrender and fought WW2 until 1974
Shout out to Ononda, hero of Japan;
Who proves to us how difficult it is,
To just surrender;
And, let it go.
Celebrate the masculinity of Black soldiers who liberated concentration death camps.
And, recognize their efforts to bring that virility home from Europe
how it fueled the birth of the Civil Rights movement.
How it helped lead to the creation of a Jewish homeland
Black Dominoes falling against Middle Eastern dice
On a World Backgammon Board
Ebony reverberations!
I want Neo-apartheid: the sequel
And New Jim Crows
To be recognized at home and abroad
I reckon the 50,000 —and rising—dead in Palestine bring us back again to a cyclic return of blatant segregations.
States formed exclusively on ideology must first drive out the Undesirable
Other.
And, criminals must be deported without due process.
I’m looking at you MAGAmerica with your gerrymandered voting districts
And voter suppression laws.
I want that to be well known and taught in history classes — the violence that led to non-violence.
And, I don’t want my history to be deleted from text books published in Texas.
I want people to remember that Patton requested the Black tankers.
That men who flew the Flying Fortress requested the Red Tails to escort them on their suicidal missions to fight Nazis.
Nazis that seem to be rising again here in America;
Along with hooded and masked assistant tyrants who terrorize Americans
Only to be mass pardoned.
I want to walk into a store and not have people come up to me and ask me to help them find a sweater.
‘Cause I don’t work at the fuckin’ store; I’m shopping too.
And, I want cabs to stop for me.
I don’t want the Enola Gay stricken from American History because of the word “gay”.
And, I want James Baldwin
Langston Hughes
Billy Porter
Billy Holiday
Jackie “Moms” Mabley
And so many others to be recognized for what they contributed to American culture.
Who and what they choose to kiss behind closed doors is their own goddamn business.
Take your hands off women’s wombs
Especially when
Menstruation
Female orgasm
Fertile mucus
Embryo implantation
And, menopause
Are still mysteries to you.
That’s what Baldwin meant when he said “I want to be left alone,
Just like you”.
I want to see subaltern lives in textbooks;
Because we are the history of the everyday.
And, I don’t need Taylor Sheridan to explain me or my Native Brothers and sisters to me.
We were Sheriff Bass Reeves
And, Buffalo soldiers
And, cowboys
And, calvary men
Before he was a gleam in his daddy’s eye.
Way back before John Dutton was a MAGA masturbation fantasy.
And, I don’t want to be a sidenote in a Francis Ford Coppola movie either.
And if you have stayed with me this far and seen the contradictions inherent in this poem;
Well.
Life is deeply ambiguous.
And “#COMPLICATED”!
This is NOT a DEI poem;
It’s an American and World History poem.
Is that all I want?
No.
But it’s a good fucking start.
(By Heidi Lindemann and Michael Perry)
(Image Credit 1: Marc St. Gil, “Jesus Christ Hope of the World” / Smithsonian National Museum of American History)
(Image Credit 2: Edward Ruscha, “HOPE” / Tate Gallery)