Letter to Jimmy by Alain Mabanckou

I am still staring at your photo.
    I blow on it lightly to remove the dust, but I do so with the hope that I will awaken the memories enclosed within it. I see a little black boy, a fragile boy, who is crossing the street to his public school while the world is facing the economic crisis of 1929. Wall Street is not far from where this photo was taken. History will always follow in your footsteps.
    One person in this institution has an impact on you: Gertrude E. Ayer, the first woman of color to become a public school director in New York City. She reaches out to you, watches out for you, guides you. Gertrude appears in Go Tell It on the Mountain, encouraging the youngJohn Grimes in his studies. However, another woman, a white woman, seems to have helped you, and toward her you display an ingratitude that is surprising, to say the least, as Benoît Depardieu seems to reproach: “Strangely, Orilla Miller, a young, white school-teacher, the other key figure in his elementary school years, remains eternally absent from his fiction. He makes reference to her in several of his essays, but she never appears in any of his novels or short stories in any form whatsoever . . . She undertakes the literary, theatrical, and cinematic education of the young James Baldwin, and even went so far as meeting the Baldwin family. [. . .] Orilla Miller played a particularly important role in shaping the way James understood whites and their world.” 27
    It is Orilla Miller who puts on your first play. It is she who endures the wrath of your father when she wants to take you to the theater. But her persistence would win out over David Baldwin’s reluctance. She does not stop after the first victory. You visit museums with her, watch films together, share with her a passion for Charles Dickens. Orilla Miller almost becomes a member of your family, and you become a part of hers, where you discuss politics with her husband, Evan Winfield, which broadens your understanding of American society even further. You later admit that you realized, “Whites did not act as they did because they were white, but for other reasons.” 28 These social meetings, which, according to Leeming, probablyoccur unbeknownst to David Baldwin, correct your view of the white world. From this point forward, your view of that world will be based on considering each person individually, and not on a systematic condemnation of an entire group of people. You refuse the simplistic syllogism: a white man kills a black man, and since Paul is white, Paul also kills black men.
    Are all white people bad? Black Muslims are inclined to say yes.
    Can whites and blacks intermarry? No, would again be the answer from Black Muslims.
    And when, many years later, as an adult, you are invited to the home of the head of the Nation of Islam at the time, Elijah Muhammad, he will warn you of the “holocaust” awaiting the white world. This discourse of the black American Muslims brings up bitter memories for you. You cannot erase the looming figure of David Baldwin from your thoughts. You will feel more solidarity than ever with the “other side,” destined for Gehenna according to Elijah Muhammad: “I felt I was back in my father’s house—as indeed, in a way, I was—and I told Elijah I did not care if white and black people married, and that I had many white friends. I would have no choice, if it came to it, but to perish with them . . .” 29
    From time to time Orilla Miller comes to your house with her sister, Henrietta Miller. She discovers your poverty, the daily burdens and exhaustion of EmmaBerdis Jones, who works like a dog in the kitchen, or in the corner doing the washing with her bare hands. Orilla is moved, and brings clothing for the children. Your admiration is complete: “I loved her, [. . .] with a child’s love . . . It is certainly partly because of her, who arrived in my terrifying life so soon, that I never really