ABSTRACT
When people are subjected to analytic cuts, they bleed. Sometimes they pour out the blood of their anger. James Baldwin had this experience more than once, and for more than one reason. Here is one of those, in 1965, as told by his friend and biographer David Leeming: 1
A well-known sociologist sat down on a chair directly across from the sofa on which Baldwin was sitting, with his brother David on one side of him and me on the other, and asked him how many “siblings” he had. After a long period of hesitation Baldwin asserted that he had no siblings. The voice was a whisper, but the signals of explosion were clear in the enlargement of his eyes. Not recognizing the signs, the sociologist assumed a vocabulary gap on Baldwin’s part and explained that he had referred to the number of children in the Baldwin family. Baldwin, in the softest of voices, explained that he knew what “sibling” meant. He did have brothers and sisters, but no siblings. Refusing to accept Baldwin’s rhetorical distinction, which he seemed to consider an attack on the vocabulary of his discipline, the sociologist became insistent. “Yes, but they are siblings,” he said. “No,” Baldwin now shouted, attracting the attention of the whole room, siblings were a category; you could not smell, touch, or love siblings. When the sociologist persisted, Baldwin raised both hands high in the air, and with his by now enormously enlarged eyes holding the sociologist’s attention he brought the hands down with tremendous force on my right arm and David’s left arm and literally screamed, still without taking his eyes off the sociologist. “These are my brothers; not my siblings, motherfucker.”
