I was aware that James Baldwin had spent the last seventeen years of his life living in the French town of SaintPaul-de-Vence. As I understood it, he rented a stone house with orange trees and palms and views of the sea and the mountains. It was his refuge from hostility to his skin colour and homosexuality in 1970s America. He wrote in this rented stone house, ashtray on his desk, the fireplace behind his chair. Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald: all made the journey to visit him. He talked long into the warm, Mediterranean night with friends, seated around a table in the garden. His former Swiss lover lived in the gatehouse with his family and nursed Baldwin when he became sick from stomach cancer. Apparently, Baldwin took steps to buy this house when he was dying, but somehow it did not work out. After his death, his rented real estate did not become the James Baldwin Museum. I, for one, would have made the pilgrimage just to see the glass ashtray on his desk. I would have liked to glimpse where he wrote and thought and welcomed friends. The house was not just a domestic space, it was a political space. He’d had to leave his country and make a kinder world in a house he had rented elsewhere. It was not the first time he had to escape racism in America to survive and to write. He had arrived in Paris from New York in the winter of 1948 with forty dollars in his pocket. At that time, he lived in a crummy hotel in the Rue de Verneuil. A rented house on the Côte d’Azur with orange and palm trees in the courtyard, surrounded by friends, was an encouraging image. I had kept it in my head for decades, like an old photograph in my family album.
Deborah Levy, Real Estate
