The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Reissued Edition

By James Baldwin

Over twenty-two months in 1979 and 1981 nearly two dozen children were unspeakably murdered in Atlanta despite national attention and outcry; they were all Black. James Baldwin investigated these murders, the Black administration in Atlanta, and Wayne Williams, the Black man tried for the crimes. Because there was only evidence to convict Williams for the murders of two men, the children's cases were closed, offering no justice to the families or the country. Baldwin's incisive analysis implicates the failures of integration as the guilt party, arguing, "There could be no more devastating proof of this assault than the slaughter of the children."

As Stacey Abrams writes in her foreword, "The humanity of black children, of black men and women, of black lives, has ever been a conundrum for America. Forty years on, Baldwin's writing reminds us that we have never resolved the core query: Do black lives matter? Unequivocally, the moral answer is yes, but James Baldwin refuses such rhetorical comfort." In this, his last book, by excavating American race relations Baldwin exposes the hard-to-face ingrained issues and demands that we all reckon with them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781250886729

James Baldwin

James Baldwin (1924 1987) was an African American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels. His 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son helped establish his reputation as a voice for human equality. Baldwin was an influential public figure and orator, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States.

Book preview

PREFACE

Walter Lowe, of Playboy, wrote me—to my home in France—suggesting that I go to Atlanta to do a story concerning the missing and (as it evolved) murdered children. I had been following the story—what there was, that is, in the foreign press, to follow. It is not so easy to follow a story occurring in one’s own country from the vantage point of another one.

From afar, one may imagine that one perceives the pattern. And one may. But, as one is not challenged—or, more precisely, menaced—by the details, the pattern may be nothing more than something one imagines oneself to be able to remember.

And, after all, what I remembered—or imagined myself to remember—of my life in America (before I left home!) was terror. And what I am trying to suggest by what one imagines oneself to be able to remember is that terror cannot be remembered. One blots it out. The organism—the human being—blots it out. One invents, or creates, a personality or a persona. Beneath this accumulation (rock of ages!) sleeps or hopes to sleep, that terror which the memory repudiates.

Yet, it never sleeps—that terror, which is not the terror of death (which cannot be imagined) but the terror of being destroyed.

Sometimes I think, one child in Atlanta said to me, that I’ll be coming home from (baseball or football) practice and somebody’s car will come behind me and I’ll be thrown into the trunk of the car and it will be dark and he’ll drive the car away and I’ll never be found again.

Never be found again: that terror is far more vivid than the fear of death. When the child said that to me I tried to imagine the tom-tom silence of the trunk of the car, the darkness, the silence, the speed, the corkscrew road. I tried, that is, to imagine this as something happening to the child. My memory refused to accommodate that child as myself.

But that child was myself.

I do not remember, will never remember, how I howled and screamed the first time my mother was carried away from me. My mother was the only human being in the world. The only human being: everyone else existed by her permission.

Yet, what the memory repudiates controls the human being. What one does not remember dictates who one loves or fails to love. What one does not remember dictates, actually, whether one plays poker, pool, or chess. What one does not remember contains the key to one’s tantrums or one’s poise. What one does not remember is the serpent in the garden of one’s dreams. What one does not remember is the key to one’s performance in the toilet or in bed. What one does not remember contains the only hope, danger, trap, inexorability, of love—only love can help you recognize what you do not remember.

And memory makes its only real appearance in this life as this life is ending—appearing, at last, as a kind of guide into a condition which is as far beyond memory as it is beyond imagination.

What has this to do with the murdered, missing children of Atlanta?

It has something to do with the fact that no one wishes to be plunged, head down, into the torrent of what he does not remember and does not wish to remember. It has something to do with the fact that we all came here as candidates for the slaughter of the innocents. It has something to do with the fact that all survivors, however they accommodate or fail to remember it, bear the inexorable guilt of the survivor. It has something to do, in my own case, with having once been a Black child in a White

Reviews for The Evidence of Things Not Seen

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Baldwin's exploration of a deeply faulted criminal trial and the surrounding issues is a scathing and widely-scoped picture, one which examines a very real portion of American history, civil rights, and racism. Baldwin's essay, sometimes sarcastic and at many points infuriated, examines a guilty verdict which is, at best, questionable, and the essential forgetting of more than twenty murders. Examining evidence, action, and report, as well as wider-reaching issues of poverty, psychology, economics, and race relations, Baldwin delivers what amounts to a dissection of supposed justice and legality.

Tightly delivered, there is no way to parcel out pieces of this essay into different sections or expect some version of easy organization to come across. Weaving each issue with the others, and weaving the single story of multiple murders and an ensuing trial in with larger issues of race and psychology, Baldwin's work is nearly overpowering in its intricate (and yet, frightfully straight-forward) delivery of information and analysis.

Very simply, this book should be read by any American who cares where the country has come from or has any interest in civil or human rights, let alone history. The book is frightening and exploratory, but it is also entirely impossible to ignore or forget.

Highly recommended.