Epistle to Another Countryman

by Jordon Briggs

Dear James Baldwin, 

There is  a picture of you sitting at your typewriter in a white shirt, your fingers massaging the rim of a wine glass. You’re looking off somewhere, your eyes saying, “Oh, you’re going to help me? If you bother trying, you had better realize I’m not something or someone to take lightly, but okay, come on.” James, did you ever have it figured out? You’d probably say no. You knew about being black, poor, and gay in America. You knew about being a New Yorker and a Parisian. Oh, and Christianity. But what trumped you? Scared you because you couldn’t figure it out? I've got this thing in me, that if I give up, I'm not telling the truth. It's all about the truth with me. But what truth? They say, in church, that truth is the light but what about the path to the truth? Truth or a Lie. Good or Evil. Heaven or Hell. And the way to those, if talked about, seem to be of consequence to a few acts. Acts you have to keep repenting for or acts you must never forget to do. What about that long path, if taken, to the light? Wouldn’t it have to include the dark somehow? In the photo you look to be in between the two. There’s this memory that’s been peering in my head and it takes place in darkness. When it shows up, the memory seems distant, but relevant in a way as if it just happened. As if I’m re-living it. James, what would you say about truth? I think you knew something about being in the dark. You knew something about the unknown. I think you knew in that picture of you at the typewriter. In a pause. In a moment in between writing and longing. Maybe right then and there you were in that place of the unknown. A place of non-rootedness. 


The memory. A room, moon lit and cold, in Monterey. He and I tucked away in my sleeping bag. Did he ever sleep in his own bed when I visited? Tonight would not be the first time. It happened the last time I was here. When I came to Monterey with my parents, we stayed with my step-dad’s folks. They taught me how to shoot pool. An only child on vacation with double the grown ups. They thought to call up my step-dad’s sister and ask for Reggie to come over. He did. We played in the backyard filled with dying grass and shrubbery or the park up the street. At night we slept in a room with separate beds, but always up talking. Attentive to one another. When we were together we were inseparable. Time did not exist. Time might have existed in Sacramento, no siblings, alone. My mom begging me to go outside and make friends. For what? I always thought for what, I have everything I need here. My friends are at school, the friends who already know me. In Monterey, with Reggie, I didn’t know what time meant. Nothing mattered. I wanted to share everything with him, be with him all the time. The park up the street had a playground rooted in sand. At the end of the park was a small cliff or broken off piece of street that stretched over the playground, maybe five feet up. Beauty and the Beast had been out on VHS and it was one of our favorite movies. That and The Wiz. Never had I been interested in the Wizard of OZ until I saw The Wiz. It made sense. I related to the Tin Man the most. The whole family loved his trademark saying “A teeny, a teeny”. He needed just a little bit to function and I felt that. Not sure what I felt, but, yes, I know what you mean, Tin Man. I guess back then seeing black folks struggling to get somewhere, to get what they needed, and only having each other meant something to me. Togetherness in a world where we played by everyone’s rules but our own. Everybody’s got their own issues but when we get together, and “ease on down” the yellow brick road  nothing can stop us. Maybe that’s what Reggie was, James—my companion in this unknown land. I mean I was familiar with Sacramento, and even Los Angeles when I visited. Two different places embedded in me somehow. Now I had been thrust into some new place, into some new group of people and forced to find my place in it. 
On the outskirts of the playground we played on that small cliff. Reggie and I taking turns playing the roles of Belle (more so talking to ourselves), the Beast and Gaston. When it came to the part when the Beast and Gaston were to hang over the edge of the castle, Gaston had to fall. We did this over and over again, but we changed the rules. Gaston falls at the expense of the Beast but Reggie and I chose to either let the other fall or help them up. When it got to the point where our hands embraced, a pause occurred. Our skin pressed onto one another’s. Bones becoming familiar with foreign bones. Bones awakening in relation to other bones. The overcast created a perfect scene for our life or death re-enactment. His hand was soft but firm. Perfect. He had a strong grip. Life or death. Choose. But holding onto his hand erased having to choose, having to do anything for a few minutes. We would laugh holding onto each other. He’d let me go most the time and I did the same. It was exhilarating to fall. We did this for hours, no other scene mattered. We could have done this until I left Monterey. With Reggie, I was creating a mark for myself in that place. 


Blackness. The unknown. The place where you cannot see but the place you are always welcome. You are welcome to fumble, to be expansive, to let your skin go, to suspend yourself. Be light. The place you find or won’t find anything. Blackness. Deep impenetrable blackness. A set, a foundation all its own. No end until you create one. You can maneuver here in silence. Do what you want with whatever you find but know they you may always come here. You need to. If you don’t, then finding something is what in the light? Not finding at all. Bring that which is in the darkness to the light. The light came from darkness. “Let there be light”, God said. Before light, we were in the darkness trying to see what we wanted to be, trying to see what worked and didn’t. Maybe we were sailing a ship, coasting, running free on top of black water in the mist. In the cool and blinding mist. No guide or map. James, if you had a guide or map while you were in the dark what would it have been? Writing? The Civil Rights movement? Istanbul? Mahalia Jackson? What guided you in the dark? Did you ever get out? “Let there be light”, already, huh, James? Not yet. Not while we are sailing. Not while the darkness has us. Darkness in the name of nothing. In the name of itself.


It was there in the moonlit room—and I can’t remember if I slept alone or if he was always there with me. He must have been because I was the visiting cousin. Gaston and the Beast, savior or killer—in that room where it started. 

His sleeping bag
A small cave etched out
In this dark place. 
Both boys
There, huddled together
In the pit of darkness.
Enclosed together
Where the touch began in mystery
Touch turned into pressing of bones
Into grip. 
A space created between the familiar
And unfamiliar.
There in the dark
Time slipped away as it always did with them
As it did it the day. 
Both boys.
It happened before but this time
It was different.
Ferocious.
He was sure the kiss was coming because
The last time it came.
Their bodies fluttering 
In the sleeping bag. 
The older cousin brought his mouth
To the younger one. 
At the moment of touch       of taste
Time returned. Found its way back.
The younger one remembered time existed.
Like Adam and Eve after the apple
He was naked. 
Time became real in that kiss. 
It was when darkness became
Emptiness. 

James, it had happened before but different this time. Reggie’s mouth, his lips, his tongue, all-wrong. His mouth, as warm as the heater in the room. His lips, soft but powerful. Demanding. His tongue, like a small monster in my mouth, hard and forceful. The texture of it, thick, drenched in saliva, and searing. When I stopped him I told him his mouth tasted like jelly. Back then jelly meant funk. A bad odor. Nastiness. When your feet stunk we said your feet smelled like jelly. An utterly disgusting way to be. We stopped. He returned to his bed. I laid on the floor with my mouth sullied, dripping with the taste of him. His touch, left over my body like wounds. The moon peered through the blinds of the window and I laid there, as if I had been left in the wake of my own murder—a scene out of a noir film. I wanted to be where the moon was and not in that pit. My mouth oozed with his saliva. His tongue markings. I spit into the floor and just laid there.  Just laid there in the dark. Reggie, up on the bed in all over- print pajamas sprawled out, snoring like a big oaf does after getting off on some bar maiden. All of a sudden I felt my foreignness return.  


What is the truth about existing?  I need an answer for everything, challenging the unknown. What’s the conclusion to “being?” James, how did you exist in Harlem? In Paris? Should we give “being” rules? Shape “being?” Put existence in a cardboard box and give it a name? Document it? Tell the truth about it? What did they do to you, James? To people you were black,  gay,  an activist, a writer or a preacher—or all those things in couples or triplets. A black writer, a black-gay writer, Civil Rights activist, author. They always placed names on your existence. They said, that boy Jimmy Baldwin, is that right there. 
Maybe we’re afraid of the possibilities of existing. How “existing” doesn’t make sense now and how it won’t make sense after you go through something, just existing. Possibilities. A possibility, that his fingers may soothe the body, your body—male body—better than her fingers. A possibility, that being with him brings less pressure (in private) than with her. It’s a possibility that he sees you  more clearly than she does.  He understands your desires and fears better than she does. Better with him than with her. Always this better or worse. Never difference. His skin is different than hers, her skin different than his. Skin. Isn’t it always about skin? When and if you can get past the color, or think you’ve gotten past it, doesn’t skin become a subject of touch? The touch that awakens your spirit, calms your blood. The touch that lives with you and yet becomes forgotten-- like family. Coded touch. Language transmission. You come to live in this middle ground between being unaware and conscious. The heart and the mind in a fox trot all through your body. But which should be the lead?
I thought I was “existing” with Reggie. In that room I was unaware of everything that had a name. That had a function. The blinds were blinds. The TV was the TV and it was on and that’s all it was. The room, covered with clothes, toys, and video games was just that. Reggie was Reggie. How Reggie expected me to sleep on the ground, I don’t know. But it didn’t matter, I was unaware. “Green,” the old black folks called it. Ain’t got no sense of nothing just green as ever and as anyone could be. With Reggie, it made no sense to be aware until he kissed me. He betrayed my experience—me experiencing. Woke me up out the darkness, out of the present with a kiss, like Judas did Jesus. What if Reggie was just existing? Laughing with me, playing around with me, touching. How can I place a name on him? He could have been unaware like I was. Searching in the dark for something he didn’t know was there or wasn’t there. Searching, through touch. This boy searching through another boy. Searching through me. James, how can we start to name what is only existing? Naming an experience limits possibilities. You limit its hold on you, on the person who experienced it with you; you limit the truth. You limit God. 


The life of a writer, a lonely life, a helpless life. Who can help a writer? At all times, at odds with life while trying to find what to live for. In search of beauty. James, that look you have on your face says it all. It says this is the place, this corner where I’m at my desk by the window with my typewriter, is my dungeon as well as my sanctuary. I want not to be here, where pain must come forth. Here is where I must make sense of the world around me—with language. If I don’t do this, if I don’t try to understand what is going on, I’ll be doomed. Maybe go crazy. So, I write. My way to come from the darkness, that freeing, seductive darkness, I write. I save myself by writing. I come to understanding. Not figuring it out, but something to hold onto. From dungeon to sanctuary. Your look says, I need to be here, moving in the dark, moving in between the dark and the light. If you want to join me, you had better be aware. And if I am to join you outside of my sanctuary, I’m going to have to trust you. That is no easy task. It seems that should be the only task. Trust. That’s all there is, James. Here is where I end. I, ending. 

Yours, true and warm, Jordon.