SJames Baldwin’s After his death nearly 40 years ago, the great writer’s final home, in the south of France, has attracted a flock of followers to the Provencal community of Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent the last 17 years of his life.
The 300-year-old villa where he lived no longer exists: Developers converted the site into a luxury apartment complex in 2019. But that hasn’t stopped generations of fans inspired and enlightened by Baldwin’s prose from making the pilgrimage. Me included. I visited in April to mark the 100th anniversary of the writer’s death. My first stop was a table at a Baldwin bistro, Café de la Place on Place du Général de Gaulle, for a croque monsieur and a double espresso.
My entry point into Baldwin was his first, arguably greatest, work of fiction. Tell stories on the mountain. I read his work avidly as a student, a journalist, and an author. He became my muse and my ghost. Sometimes I was not sure if I was looking over his shoulder or he was looking over mine. Like countless other black writers who confronted Baldwin, I struggled with what the literary critic Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence,” the inner burden of the artist trying to overcome the relentless pull of his predecessor’s literary appeal. As Toni Morrison said in her eulogy at Baldwin’s funeral in 1987, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan: “He gave me a language to live in—a gift so perfect that it seemed my own creation. I thought about his spoken and written thoughts for so long, I believed them to be mine. I saw the world through his eyes for so long, I believed that clear, unambiguous vision was my own.”
When he moved to Vence in 1970, Jimmy B., as his friends called him, was ill with what some thought was hepatitis, physically and mentally exhausted by the pace of his creativity and frustrated by the faltering Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, I (Jimmie B.) arrived in Vence furious that America had stumbled into a so-called “racial reckoning” in 2020, mentally exhausted by the protracted war in the Middle East, exhausted by the masks I was often forced to wear, and feeling a little sick from the lingering effects of high blood pressure and a kidney transplant.
Since the Black Lives Matter movement and a slew of films and critical writings highlighting Baldwin’s legacy, he has been figuratively “everywhere.” In Vence, however, I discovered that he felt nowhere. “It’s not about choosing France, it’s about leaving America,” he said. Paris Review Magazine in 1984. “My luck was running out. I was going to jail, I was going to kill someone or be killed.”
Baldwin, I realized as I wandered the back streets, had chosen this place as his home not just to hide but to be enclosed in a place of eternity, a place of protection. Saint-Paul de Vence had been settled for 1,000 years. Its oldest buildings were behind 50-foot stone walls. He could not be harmed here.
He also came to retreat into a beauty he could not easily access at home. The valley below, in the town he knew, was dotted with lavish villas, swimming pools and Mediterranean views. Marc Chagall lived here and is buried in the local cemetery. Between the cocoon of the village and the magic of the landscape, Baldwin could only To be No one looked down on or criticized him. He was often seen with actors Simone Signoret and Yves Montand at the Café de la Place, watching people play la boule. Initially reserved, the residents took a liking to the charming storyteller from Harlem, who enjoyed chatting with anyone, regardless of social status.
His rented two-story stucco and stone house was behind high iron gates. The grounds included an outhouse, a gatehouse, and the house where Baldwin lived and wrote, mostly in solitude. The orchard on the property grew lemons, figs, grapes, pineapples, and pears. In the backyard was his so-called Welcome Table, where he would entertain 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 late, critically acclaimed African-American painter whom Baldwin had mentored in his later years. Over the fireplace was the French Legion of Honor, which he had been awarded in 1986.
