12/31/2023 0 Comments Kairos retreat letters to neiceWell, you were born here you came, something like fifteen years ago, and though your father and mother and grandmother, looking about the streets through which they were carrying you, staring at the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavy-hearted, yet they were not, for here you were, big James, named for me. Your countrymen don't know that she exists either, though she has been working for them all their lives. I suggest that the innocent check with her. Your grandmother was also there and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. Your countrymen were not there and haven't made it yet. I know the conditions under which you were born for I was there. How bitter you are," but I am writing this letter to you to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist. I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, "No, this is not true. Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. They have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime. One can be-indeed, one must strive to become-tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of war remember, I said most of mankind, but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it and I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. Let him curse and I remember his falling down the cellar steps and howling and I remember with pain his tears which my hand or your grandmother's hand so easily wiped away, but no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. You gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. I don't know if you have known anybody from that far back, if you have loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man. I have known both of you all your lives and have carried your daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed him and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. Over 50 years later his words are, sadly, more relevant than ever. James Baldwin's thoughts on his nephew's future-in a country with a terrible history of racism- first appeared in The Progressive magazine in 1962.
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