Chasing James Baldwin’s Shadow in the South of France

Since James Baldwin’s death nearly 40 years ago, the literary lion’s final home, in the South of France, has drawn a procession of acolytes to the Provençal community of Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent the last 17 years of his life.

The 300-year-old villa in which he resided no longer exists: By 2019 developers had converted the site into a luxury apartment complex. But that hasn’t deterred generations of admirers, inflamed and enlightened by Baldwin’s prose, from making a pilgrimage. Including me. Seizing the occasion of the writer’s centennial year, I paid a visit in April. My first stop was a table at a Baldwin hangout, the Café de la Place on Place du Général de Gaulle, for a croque monsieur and a double espresso.

My entry point into Baldwin had been his first, arguably greatest work of fiction, Go Tell It on the Mountain. I devoured his oeuvre as a student and journalist and author. He became my muse and my specter. At times I wasn’t sure if I was looking over his shoulder or he over mine. Like countless other Black writers confronting Baldwin, I grappled with what literary critic Harold Bloom termed the “anxiety of influence,” the artist’s internal burden of trying to overcome the relentless tug of a predecessor’s literary gravity. As Toni Morrison put it in her eulogy at Baldwin’s funeral in 1987, at Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine: “You gave me a language to dwell in—a gift so perfect it seems my own invention. I have been thinking your spoken and written thoughts for so long, I believed they were mine. I have been seeing the world through your eyes for so long, I believed that clear, clear view was my own.”

When he moved to Vence in 1970, Jimmy B., as his friends called him, was ill from what was thought by some to be hepatitis, physically and emotionally exhausted by his pace of creative output and downcast from a sputtering Civil Rights Movement. In parallel, yours truly (Jimmie B.) arrived in Vence rageful over America’s backsliding from a so-called “racial reckoning” in 2020, demoralized by the protracted war in the Middle East, exhausted by the masks I’m often compelled to wear, and feeling somewhat ill from the lingering consequences of high blood pressure and kidney transplantation.

Since the emergence of Black Lives Matter and a raft of films and critical texts burnishing Baldwin’s legacy, he’s figuratively “everywhere.” Yet in Vence, I was to discover, he felt nowhere. “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France, it was a matter of getting out of America,” he told The Paris Review in 1984. “My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed.”

Baldwin, I came to realize as I roamed the back streets, had made his home here not just to flee but to be enveloped in a place of permanence, of protection. Saint-Paul de Vence has been settled for 1,000 years. Its oldest quarters lie behind 50-foot stone walls. He could not be harmed here.

In the backyard was his so-called WELCOME TABLE, where he would receive Nina Simone and William Styron, Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis, JOSEPHINE BAKER AND MAYA ANGELOU.

He had also come to retreat amid a beauty he couldn’t access as easily at home. The valley below, in the town he knew, was dotted with glitzy villas, swimming pools, and Mediterranean views. Marc Chagall lived here and is buried in the local cemetery. Amid the cocoon of the village and the magic of the landscape, Baldwin could simply be without anyone looking down on him or singling him out. He was often seen in the company of actors Simone Signoret and Yves Montand at Café de la Place, watching people play la boule. Initially reticent, the residents took to the charming raconteur from Harlem who delighted in engaging in conversation with anyone, regardless of social status.

His rented two-story cottage of stucco and stone stood behind high iron gates. On the property was an outhouse, a gatehouse, and the home where Baldwin lived and wrote, mostly in solitude. The orchard on the grounds could sustain lemons, figs, grapes, pineapples, and pears. In the backyard was his so-called Welcome Table, where he would receive 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 belatedly appreciated Black American painter whom Baldwin cared for in his later years. On the mantel was the French Legion of Honor he was awarded in 1986.

Yet on my wanderings, I came to learn that the village, as far as I know, has no official acknowledgment of Baldwin’s homestead, nor of the man himself. Visitors in search of some Baldwin shadow, of that tug of gravity, must navigate narrow cobblestone streets lined with galleries, boutiques, card shops, and open-air cafés.

“Excusez-moi madame, pouvez-vous me dire comment trouver l’endroit où vivait James Baldwin?” I haltingly asked the solemn-looking woman in l’office de tourisme. “Je vois ‘Baldwin museum’ sur Google Maps?”

“Are you American?” she replied, smiling. I didn’t know if I should feel relieved or offended. She brushed back her gray-streaked locks and leaned over the counter, suddenly congenial and curious. “Oh, yes!” she beamed. “Go Tell It on the Mountain. I have read this book many times.” In a flurry of only slightly accented English, she told me she had lived for decades in Chicago. When I asked what she missed most about her life in the States, she said, “I like the American way of getting things done. And the meat.”

“Was there a Baldwin museum?” I inquired, showing her directions on my iPhone app. “His house is long gone,” she replied. “There’s nothing there now.”

I made my way toward the door, and she looked up to wave. “Good luck finding what you’re looking for,” she said and turned back to help another flustered visitor. Indeed, after a futile search, I found no plaques bearing Baldwin’s name. France, of course, fiercely preserves the memory of its native sons and daughters. It has also kept space to memorialize the Doors’ Jim Morrison and adopted artists from Oscar Wilde to Gertrude Stein to Richard Wright. They are all buried in-country. Baldwin’s presence here, however, exists only in books or in the stories the locals tell about him or in the spirit of those who come to find it. The American exile who had embraced the République française had become, in the end, the outcast once more—a figure quietly revered yet, with the passing years, more feared and forgotten.

The week of my arrival, there had been articles in the French press about the country’s percolating resistance to Aya Nakamura, a French singer of Malian descent, who was under consideration to sing during the opening ceremony at the Summer Olympics. Despite being the most popular French-language singer in the world at the time, her authenticity as a representative of France was a matter of fierce debate, especially on the far right. (Last week, she graced the proceedings, as did Lady Gaga and Celine Dion.) Back home, commentators were ruminating on O.J. Simpson’s death earlier that week and how his 1995 acquittal, on murder charges, had divided American society. It was a week in which Baldwin would have had a lot to say.

Or maybe the point was that those of us who’ve followed in his footsteps should say what needs to be said or explored in our own voices, through our own lenses. Letting that sink in, I came to understand, as I sat in yet another café, that I had found what I was looking for in Saint-Paul de Vence. An older, wiser Jimmie B.