The Fire This Time

Ghansah writes of her decision to visit James Baldwin’s former home in the south of France. Although hesitant to pay for this trip, she has received income from writing and is now more relaxed about her previously stressful financial situation. For Ghansah, writing fights against her idea of “black death” (20), which involves financial hardship, trauma, and being forgotten. 

When she receives a large check, she decides to travel to Baldwin’s home, as he became her patron saint during a pivotal magazine internship. Her former internship was at a famous magazine with which she was not previously familiar. She anxiously traveled to the city on her first day, and editors oriented her and other interns at the magazine office. A fellow intern referenced the looting after Hurricane Katrina, reminding Ghansah of her black identity and the hurricane, which had occurred that week. She also discovered that she and the fellow intern seemed the only black people on staff at the magazine. 

One editor told Ghansah, to her surprise, that she was the magazine’s first black intern and that they had never staffed a black editor. Another editor confirmed this, leaving Ghansah feeling “like an oddity” (25). She experienced this racial difference with equal parts fortitude and fury. She feared she was hired for her race and that her qualifications for the role never mattered. 

Her paranoia about this festered when an editor requested that she spend a week sorting files in the magazine storeroom. In the storeroom, she relished sorting through great literary works and invoices from well-known writers like James Baldwin. She found his $350 invoice from 1965, which symbolizes his escape from dark, lonely rooms like the storeroom and his ascension to iconic status. 

Back in the present on the train to Baldwin’s home, Ghansah compares him with her grandfather: similar in basic biography, but different in their life goals. During one of her last meetings with her grandfather before his passing, she saw him struggling with poverty in his Los Angeles apartment. 

When she arrives, Ghansah admires the exterior of Baldwin’s home. Baldwin said he might not move to France again a second time if he had the chance, but, rather, to Africa. He left America to be free, alone, and to write. 

Inside Baldwin’s house, Ghansah finds similar detritus as she found inside her grandfather’s home after his death. There are empty beer cans inside Baldwin’s abandoned home, as well as evidence of the home’s forthcoming demolition. Although he lived there for 25 years, he left behind little, and his house would not serve as a memorial for him as other writers’ homes have. Ghansah concludes “that Baldwin died a black death” (30). 

After visiting Baldwin’s house, Ghansah researches his years in the house and reaches out to his acquaintances. She hopes to prevent the house’s destruction and preserve things like the rainbow kitchen in Baldwin’s guest house. 

When the writer’s brother carried him to his deathbed, Baldwin quoted song lyrics from the Hollies. Ghansah quotes Baldwin’s writing, in which he discusses the inevitability of death and how it can encourage us to seize the gift of life. The act of writing this essay gives Ghansah the occasion to examine the truth of death and life. She questions her desire to hold onto Baldwin’s past, since he “seemed to have prepared himself well for his black death, his mortality, and even better, his immortality” (31-32). He achieved this through his writing, which maintains relevance in the twenty-first century.