Native Sons A Friendship That Created One of the Greatest Works of the Twentieth Century Notes of a Native Son

Chapter 1 Notes of a Native American The Story of a Friendship in Black and White Sol Stein One thing you always have to keep in mind is how little you can take for granted. When one talks about the sixties, for example, one tends to assume that everyone knows what you're talking about, but, in fact, many of them were hardly born yet when the sixties were going on. That means you have to rethink everything as if it happened in ancient Rome or Greece. -James Baldwin in Contact, a publication of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, January-February 1984 I am remembering five thousand people crowded into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for James Baldwin's funeral, and I imagine my lifelong friend Jimmy and me watching that event, an elbow poking the other's rib for attention as in the old days when our lives intersected. I knew James Baldwin first in our early teenage years, when I was thirteen and he was fifteen. It all began in the tower of DeWitt Clinton High School in the north Bronx at a time when students anywhere in the five boroughs of New York City didn't need to be bused anywhere but could elect to go to a high school of their choice. Baldwin, known then and since as Jimmy, went the distance by subway, bus, and foot from Harlem in Manhattan to DeWitt Clinton at the far northern edge of New York City, an exceptional school where his last formal education took place. In this day of failed busing, it is hard to imagine that in 1939 a poor boy could travel many miles to a different borough to seize an education he could not get locally. When DeWitt Clinton first opened the doors at its present site in May of 1929, it claimed to be the largest secondary school for boys in the world. The three-story building and its athletic field and stadium occupied about twenty-six acres and had a single-session capacity of over five thousand students. A recently remodeled room just off its library displays a picture gallery of onetime Clinton students that includes such luminaries as Paddy Chayevsky, Countee Cullen, Burt Lancaster, Ralph Lauren, Jan Peerce, Richard Rodgers, A. M. Rosenthal, Daniel Schorr, Neil Simon, and Lionel Trilling. Clinton was a garden in which black and white teenagers could become fast friends, an environment that a few years later made possible Notes of a Native Son, which in 1999 was selected by a distinguished panel as one of "the 100 best nonfiction books of the century." Our home away from home was in what we called the Magpie Tower, the place where DeWitt Clinton's award-winning literary magazine, The Magpie, was edited by students as young as thirteen and fourteen. Our core group, besides Baldwin and me, included Richard Avedon and Emile Capouya, working under the tutelage of a faculty member, Wilmer Stone. Avedon was then a poet and shy. When we were called upon to sell the issue of January 1941, Avedon and I would stand in front of each classroom, Avedon silent, his hands clasped in front of him, while I recited a poem of his from memory. America had not yet formally entered World War II, but London was burning. Avedon's poem that lingers still in my memory is about the loss of a childhood friend in the firebombing of London. What we all wrote then is today mostly embarrassing, but the learning process was astonishing. On Friday afternoons, after classes officially let out, the Magpie gang would assemble in the tower above the three floors of the school building to hear our faculty advisor read our stories aloud to us in the most boring monotone imaginable. We were eager to see our stories in print and were learning to take criticism in a most painful way that was also instructive, for we learned then what all writers must eventually learn, that the reader has to be moved by the words alone, without help from the histrionic talents of the author. Stone's private critiques of our work could be witherinStein, Sol is the author of 'Native Sons A Friendship That Created One of the Greatest Works of the Twentieth Century Notes of a Native Son', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345469359 and ISBN 0345469356.