An Excerpt from James Baldwin’s Another Country: Bookmarked, by Kim McLarin

I once sat on a panel with a Very Important Poet, a former US laureate. The event was a fundraiser; our job was to sit pretty before an audience and be interviewed by several high school students, aspiring writers all.

After the usual round of questions—When did you know you wanted to
be a writer? Where do you get your ideas?—one student, a young Black woman, asked us each to recommend a poet she should be sure to read. Or maybe she asked the Very Important Poet for some poets she should be sure to read. He went down his list; I don’t remember who he said, only that they were all fine poets, and also white and male.

When he finished, I asked the young woman if I could add to that. She nodded.
“Audre Lorde,” I began. “She’s—”
The VIP cut me off, abruptly furious.
“Don’t do that!”
A little stunned, I tried to regain my footing. “Do what?”
“That!” he sputtered. “What you’re doing now!”
That, it turned out, was recommending a Black female poet to an aspiring Black female poet. Shame on me for suggesting Lorde, because of her intertwining identities, might speak to that young woman in a way the others would not.

The VIP went on to babble about some kind of shared, American identity and also his pet poetry project in which he had recorded thousands of Americans reading their favorite poem and among these was an old Black man in Chicago (or wherever) who loved Longfellow and another old Black
man in Detroit (or wherever) whose heart burned brightly for William Butler Yeats.

I am my mother’s daughter, constitutionally incapable of backing down from a fight. The VIP and I went at it, hammer and tongs, audience squirming. After all, I had not suggested the young sister not read Yeats or Longfellow, only that she also consider a poet I was pretty certain she would not learn about in school (who was also an American, by the way, but never mind). Nor had I suggested that Lorde was only of use to poets who happened to be female and Black. Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Frances Harper—these poets and others appear on every syllabus I create, though the vast majority of students who enter my classroom every fall and spring are white. But there is a difference in the reception, a critical one; what’s bread to you is water to me.

When I teach Lorde (or David Walker or Harriet Jacobs or Zora Neal Hurston or Lorraine Hansberry or August Wilson or James Baldwin) to white students, they say, “Thank you for this, it’s really interesting.” When I teach these works to Black students, some of them—not all, but many—say, “Thank you for this. It saved my life.”
And I say: “Yes. I know exactly what you mean.”