The Paris Review - Fall 2016

INTERVIEWER
It’s interesting that you appear in that interview to be Baldwin’s tormentor,
when you just talked about how, as a kid in the library, reading Baldwin was
part of what convinced you that literature was something a black person
could do. What do you think now of that postwar generation of black writers
that preceded yours—Ellison, Baldwin, Wright, and others? As writers, do
you think they were limited by being locked into Western models?
Reed, ca. 1980. “For hundreds of years, they’ve told us that we’re not experiencing what we know we’re
experiencing. You can give them all the empirical data and all the scholarship in the world, but they will
still tell you you’re lying.”
REED
Some of them were assimilated. They wrote for people who could afford to
buy their books—liberals. Our generation didn’t care whether they read us
or not. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin used his nephew as a prop—his real
audience was the liberals looking over his shoulder, those whom he called
“the chorus of the innocents.” He wanted to get book sales. And then he
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