James Arthur Baldwin's style, prose, and critical thinking have been an ongoing obsession for me and a group of close friends. He was a Harlemite—New York-raised but a worldly black gay iconoclast who was hip to the bullshit of pre-civil-righted America. He confronted the bigotry, inequality, racial ignorance, and social despair that engulfed America with acute intelligence, a tireless egalitarian drive, a dead stare, a sardonic smile, and a series of astonishing, well-written books. He was heralded by the literary elite and loved by street-tough thinkers. Miles Davis called him “a bad motherfucka,” and he once coolly dismantled William F. Buckley Jr. on TV during a historic debate on the American Dream. All because he had style.
What is style? It's where confidence meets comfort, where anything a “motherfucka” does, wears, or says is just easy, effortless, efficient…cool. Baldwin is a true literary stylist—sharp, enigmatic, witty, and brutally honest. He writes like the best jazz-music moves: rhythmic, elegant but angular, with some spellbinding staccato. No nonsense.
There's also nothing nonsensical about this image of Baldwin in a one-button tweed blazer. It's not an easy look to pull off, but he's urbane enough for it. It's dandy as hell, but it's an assured, stately kind of flamboyance. It's East Coast swagger. It's Harlem; it's Cam'ron in a pink fur. It's romantic and cool—not camp. Baldwin is projecting a self-evident truth: “I know my way with words because I know myself and I know exactly what I look like.” It's one notch below the studied arrogance of Miles Davis yet more controlled than the freewheeling closet raiding of Jimi Hendrix.
Baldwin was smart enough to chronicle and document his home country’s struggles and growing pains in the ’60s, but like any true stylish gent, he knew to leave the party before the comedown fully kicked in. He left the United States behind in the cracked rearview mirror of 1970 (the same year Miles Davis blew the country’s back out with the twisted mysticism of Bitches Brew). Then came the comedown—a cocktail of violent events at the 1969 Altamont Free Concert almost single-handedly choked out the last remnants of the sixties hippie dream. The Black Panther Party had been weakened. Angela Davis was on the FBI’s most-wanted list, student protesters got shot at Kent State University, and the country mired itself deeper into the Vietnam War. Baldwin took the hint and got out.
By 1971, he had relocated to the South of France, but neither his style nor his writing has lost its vitality. Modern menswear has splintered off in varying, fantastic new directions, but Baldwin's scholarly look could be straight off a 2019 Gucci runway. His thinking on race, social injustice, and America's role in the modern world remains prescient and timely.
Right now we need James Baldwin and his surgical insight to tell us how it is without boring us to death. To remind us to remain calm in the face of despair, to face forces that seem way out of our control with dignity, to cry if we have to and then to keep going. More than anything else, we need his sense of style.
Looking for a place to start: Try the scarlet hymn of Giovanni’s Room for a novel about love, passion, loathing, and fear. Or “My Dungeon Shook,” a letter Baldwin wrote to his nephew, for a grief-stricken dissection of race relations in 1960s America. Or the one-two punch Nothing Personal, Baldwin’s collaboration with former classmate photographer Richard Avedon.
Ade ‘Acyde’ Odunlami is a producer and co-founder of No Vacancy Inn.
A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2019 issue with the title "James Baldwin's Righteous Style."
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