Jimmy’s Blues : Selected Poems

I’ve been reading James Baldwin’s essays on the theater and came to his collection Jimmy’s Blues, republished in 2014 with six poems from his limited-edition collection Gypsy and an illuminating introduction by Nikky Finney as Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems (Beacon Press). I found Baldwin’s awareness of theater echoed in the fourth section of “Staggerlee Wonders,” when he speaks of the self-aggrandization of American heritage that treats its history as “the Star, / whose name, above our title, / carries the Show, making History the patsy, / responsible for every flubbed line, / every missed cue.” This first poem sets the tone for the rest of the collection as a series of laments—Baldwin’s titular blues—on the nature of the country he loves and its rejection of the Black Americans it created.

Baldwin’s most poignant expression of this tension between a homeland and a people scorned imagines it as romantic heartbreak. In “A Lover’s Question,” he pleads for understanding before reciprocation: “you do not know / how desperately I hoped / that you would grow / not so much to love me / as to know / that what you do to me / you do to you.” It’s especially tragic alongside poems illustrating the American mutilation of body and land (“Staggerlee Wonders”) and the recurring nightmare of political persecution (“Gypsy”), warning of a self-destructive tendency in a way that only a lover would care to do. 

Tucked between these are gentle poems of hope and reassurance, most with dedications to fellow artists (Lena Horne, Simone Signoret) or other more obscured figures in Baldwin’s life (Skip, Y.S.) suggesting that in spite of an America “hurling stones” is an America made up of friends, lovers, and creative beacons.