Baldwin

My favorite James Baldwin line was in response to the statement that he was black, impoverished, and homosexual, didn’t he feel sorry for himself? He simply responded: “No, I thought I had won the jackpot”. This reminds me of my favorite scene from a great movie, Little Miss Sunshine. In the scene Steve Carrell is talking to his nephew in the movie, Dwayne. He quotes Marcel Proust and explains his thinking. Proust said that the years he spent happy, well off, he never learned anything. But the years he spent suffering, those were the years where he became who he was.
Proust, like Baldwin, was a homosexual in a time when it was not accepted by society, but Baldwin’s suffering did not end there. Although he grew up poor, black, and gay, he beat all the odds and was able to construct a life for himself. I believe that his suffering turned him into who he is. You can feel his emotion with every spoken word. He became a great orator, using his background and experience to inform his words and messages. You can tell that he truly did read every single book in his local library, spending days inside to avoid the harsh realities of his somewhat unfortunate upbringing.