SJames Baldwin’s After his death nearly 40 years ago, the great writer’s final home, in the south of France, has attracted a flock of followers to the Provencal community of Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent the last 17 years of his life.
The 300-year-old mansion where he lived no longer exists: By 2019, developers had converted the site into a luxury apartment complex. But that didn’t stop generations of fansinspired and enlightened by Baldwin’s prose, from the pilgrimage. Including me. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the writer’s death, I visited in April. My first stop was a table at a Baldwin bistro, Café de la Place on the Place du Général de Gaulle, for a croque monsieur and a double espresso.
My entry point into Baldwin was his first, arguably greatest, work of fiction. Tell it on the mountain. I have read his work as a student, a journalist, and a writer. He has been my muse and my spectre. Sometimes I am not sure whether I am looking over his shoulder or he is looking over mine. Like countless other black writers who have confronted Baldwin, I have struggled with what the literary critic Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence,” the inner burden of the artist trying to overcome the relentless pull of his predecessor’s literary heft. As Toni Morrison put it in her eulogy at Baldwin’s funeral in 1987, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan: “You gave me a language to live in—a gift so perfect that it seemed my own invention. I have thought about your spoken and written thoughts for so long, I believe they are mine. I have seen the world through your eyes for so long, I believe that clear, distinct perspective is my own.”
When he moved to Vence in 1970, Jimmy B., as his friends called him, was ill with what some thought was hepatitis, physically and mentally exhausted by the pace of his creativity and frustrated by the faltering Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, I (Jimmie B.) arrived in Vence furious that America had stumbled into a so-called “racial reckoning” in 2020, mentally exhausted by the protracted war in the Middle East, exhausted by the masks I was often forced to wear, and feeling a little sick from the lingering effects of high blood pressure and a kidney transplant.
Since the Black Lives Matter movement emerged and movie raft and critical texts burnishing Baldwin’s legacy, he was figuratively “everywhere.” In Vence, however, I would discover that he felt nowhere. “It was not a matter of choosing France, but of leaving America,” he said. Paris Review Magazine in 1984. “My luck was running out. I was going to jail, I was going to kill someone or be killed.”
Baldwin, I realized as I wandered the back streets, had chosen this place as his home not just to hide but to be enclosed in a place of eternity, a place of protection. Saint-Paul de Vence had been settled for 1,000 years. Its oldest buildings were behind 50-foot stone walls. He could not be harmed here.
He also came to retreat into a beauty he could not easily access at home. The valley below, in the town he knew, was dotted with lavish villas, swimming pools and Mediterranean views. Marc Chagall lived here and is buried in the local cemetery. Between the cocoon of the village and the magic of the landscape, Baldwin could only To be No one looks down on or criticizes him. He is often seen in the group of actors. Simone Signoret and Yves Montand at the Café de la Place, watch people play la boule. Initially reserved, residents took a liking to the charming storyteller from Harlem, who enjoyed chatting with anyone, regardless of social status.
His rented two-story stucco and stone house was behind high iron gates. The grounds included an outhouse, a gatehouse, and the house where Baldwin lived and wrote, mostly in solitude. The orchard on the property grew lemons, figs, grapes, pineapples, and pears. In the backyard was his so-called Welcome Table, where he would entertain Nina Simone and William Styron, Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis, Josephine Baker and Maya Angelou. The house itself was filled with art, including works by Beauford Delaney, the late, critically acclaimed African-American painter whom Baldwin had mentored in his later years. Over the fireplace was the French Legion of Honor, which he had been awarded in 1986.
