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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 21, 1994)
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America’s foremost travel program JO IN NOW FOR ONLY $49-95 Prestige Marketing Co. COMPLETE MENTOR SUPPORT CALL CARLA AT 644-7070 OR GIABRIELA AT 274-6029 Call 503-241-9829 for Immediate delivery the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop, Who falling there to find his fellow forth,...confounds himself." <U The Comedy of E rroro A V by William Shakespeare JANUARY 8 - FEBRUARY 5 Ò Oregon gybakespearefestival In the Intermediate Theatre of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts 1 I I I SW Broadway Tickets $9 - $30 Box O ffice 274-6588 Tickets also available at Fred Meyer Fastixx 224 TIXX • * **»♦••• » 9 y r •’*•* •* % * • * % i « r , » . » • ». • K A rtist at the b attle lines "/ to TT when he realized that the world of Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot did not welcome him, or even compre Price of the Ticket (1989) is an hom hend his experience. age to a complicated and controver In 1948, Baldwin left the U.S. to live in Paris. sial man. Baldwin was a writer who When he arrived, he had $40 which he spent in two searched, who pondered, a writer days. He stayed in Paris nine years, finishing three who explored the large questions of the human books in that period: Go Tell It on the Mountain, heart and trusted no simple answer. He was a man Notes o f a Native Son and Giovanni's Room. In who said that love was more important to him than Paris he found his voice as a writer and for a time power. was “free” from the constant assault of racism. B ut The film, made two years after Baldwin’s death, in the U.S., events were brewing that would call features documentary footage from various peri Baldwin home. The movement for civil rights was ods of his life (his years in Paris, and in Turkey), gathering momentum and he knew his heart was and incl udes rare clips from television appearances there. and public spee Baldwin was ches. Commen an eloquent and tary and anec influential voice dotes are supplied on the side of jus by colleagues and tice during this lifelong friends. country’s battle With these views, over civil rights, we are helped to but he drew criti ward an under cism on two points standing of a man from members of who is neither both the non-vio easily categ o lent and the mili rized nordefined. tant arms of the James Bald movement. One win was bom in was the fact that Harlem, in 1924; he was, and al his mother Berdis ways had been, Jones was a 19- openly gay. James year-old girl who Campbell, in his cleaned the biography Talking houses of weal thy at the Gales, A Life white people. o f James Baldwin, Three years later, L I) W I N I L M suggests that in she married a formation gleaned p re a c h e r— the from FBI taps of stern, fiercely the conversations religious, much older David Bald of Martin Luther win— and with King, Jr. shows him brought eight that King disap children into the proved of Bald world. Young w in’s sexuality. An homage to writer James Baldwin James, early on a King never pub at the Clinton Street Theatre talented student licly stated such and budding wri v views. Eldridgc ter, would often Cleaver, however, by Kelly M. Bryan study or write in his book Soul with a baby in his On ice, virulently arms. At 14, and not without reluctance, he began attacked Baldwin’s gayncss, calling it a “racial preaching at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. death wish.” He found he was suited to it; his knowledge of the The other bone of contention was the degree to Bible and his articulate, inspiring way with words which he had addressed white people in his writ made him popular with the congregation. He con ing: working to expand their awareness of the tinued preaching for three years, but quit, as he African American experience, urging them to ac says, when he realized that his listeners were cept responsibility for the institutions of racism looking to him for answers—and he had none. that pervade this country and exhorting them to To leave the Church meant to break with his approach the black people in a healing dialogue. father, so he left home and took the heady chal Amiri Baraka, among other younger, more mili lenge of life in Greenwich Village—work by day, tant, leaders and writers, accused Baldwin of want drink and write by night—often getting rooms ing to be white, and referred to him as the “Joan of incognito, because “Negroes” weren’t allowed. Arc of the cocktail party.” Yet some 20 years later, Baldwin’s later work seems to spring from the Baraka praised Baldwin in a eulogy at his funeral, harsh, adversarial relationship with his father, and which opens the film, “Jimmy was God’s black his keen perceptions of the demons that haunted his revolutionary mouth—if there is a God. And revo father. In the film, Baldwin reflects on his father’s lution his righteous natural expression.” brutality, on the rage that eventually brought his It is the artist’s dilemma, when faced with a father to die, insane, in an institution, remarking, “I political imperative: how to further the struggle now realize that one of his problems was that he and yet remain true to the soul. Baldwin said in an was unable to feed his children." This understand interview in 1963, the year he published The Fire ing is indicative of the evolution of a rebellious boy Nex/Time, “[IJt’s not my life, and if I pretend it is, into an artist. Baldwin scrutinized the pain that his I’ll die. I am not a public speaker. I am an artist.” father endured—in a country that first viewed him As the world witnessed the assassinations of Med gar as property and then as a “problem” to be hidden or Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, silenced— before he even realized that this pain Baldwin became increasingly angry, which he was also his own. expressed in his writing. Critics found him bitter In another clip, Baldwin is speaking to an and polemic. audience, describing the sentiments of a black 16- The film The Price o f the Ticket portrays a man year-old boy from the South who told a white who, in the face of adversity, never stopped work reporter he had no country and no flag. Baldwin ing or loving, and never gave up. The title comes relates the pain of a child who pledges allegiance to from the introduction he wrote to a volume of his a flag only to discover that the flag has not pledged collected non-fiction works, published in 1985. It allegiance to him. One can hear in this the shock an refers, perhaps, to the package of cultural, moral intelligent African American boy must have felt and historical responsibility we each bear—the dicnThoTscn’sJames Baldwin.The « r • I f ; •' I » i » • r .f ■ ; i » i •
