The Paris Review - Fall 2016

But I do have problems with some feminists, like some who used to write
for the Village Voice. They were terrible. I mean, they called James Baldwin a
woman hater. I was the first to publish excerpts from Ntozake Shange’s masterpiece,
for colored girls . . . Now, if you polled feminists who found that the
least expensive way to bond with minority feminists was to bond with their
handpicked surrogates in expressing hostility toward black men, I’d probably
be voted as one of the worst misogynists in the country. Ms. magazine
described me as a misogynist. But if you polled Native American women,
black women, Asian American women, and Hispanic women—poets and
intellectuals—you’d probably get a different result.
INTERVIEWER
What was the trajectory of your relationship with Baldwin?
REED
By the time Baldwin was forty years old, he’d written two masterpieces.
Giovanni’s Room is a masterpiece. Go Tell It on the Mountain, his best novel,
he wrote when he was hungry, starving. Another Country comes close but
gets messed up after it loses its most interesting character, Rufus. But by
his forties, when I encountered him in person, he was on the decline. The
Black Power people had rejected him. Henry Louis Gates Jr. said Baldwin
never recovered from Eldridge Cleaver’s attack. Back in the 1970s, writers
and artists used to go to this jazz bar in New York called Mikell’s—Baldwin’s
brother was a bartender. I remember being there one night and Baldwin
was there and no one was even paying attention to him. It was like his time
had passed. When he was really down and his former patrons had abandoned
him, he got a job at Bowling Green State University—they had called me
up and asked me did I think he was qualified to teach. James Baldwin! I
said, You shouldn’t even be asking me that. But then in his last interview
before his death, with Quincy Troupe, Baldwin claimed I called him a
homosexual slur. Nobody from the Village Voice called me to fact-check or
say whether I denied it, and now that same interview is in a new volume
from Melville House. I wrote to them about it, but as of this date, I haven’t
received a reply.
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