The Paris Review - Fall 2016

tried to get the cash register by making his characters white, like in Another
Country. He had to go for the marketplace. What was he supposed to do,
wash dishes? Be a shoeshine boy? He had talent, and a liberal constituency
picked him up. He became a proxy. What was he supposed to do? Same
thing with Frederick Douglass. Was he supposed to shovel coal for a living?
When I came to New York, I came with a very sophisticated guy with a lot of
savvy—I met him in Buffalo. He organized the hospital workers, man, and
they’d be in the headlines, you know, the guy was a genius. He could bring
the hospital industry to its knees. And he was the only white man living in
the segregated black projects. When I came to New York, he got me a job at
Mount Sinai. He told me, you’re not going to achieve any status as a writer
unless somebody takes you uptown. I was so naive at the time I thought
someone was literally going to come down to the East Village, put me on the
subway, and take me to some destination uptown. I didn’t know it was just a
figure of speech. But he knew what he was talking about. They took Baldwin
uptown. Even then, the thing about him is that he was tough but he was a
genius. You know, Baldwin came down to the Village from Harlem when he
was a kid to hang out with the painter Beauford Delaney. And Baldwin’s got
a painter’s eye. Those details he draws into the characterizations—he’s really
meticulous. It’s like hyperrealism.
INTERVIEWER
Going back to your early work, you were nominated for those two National
Book Awards in the same year, which is a remarkable achievement for a
young writer, but even more so given that the books you were nominated
for, Conjure and Mumbo Jumbo, were such radical works in terms of their
nonlinearity, their surreal and satirical content, and their confrontational
spirit. Were you surprised by that sort of reception?
REED
Well, I couldn’t write a realistic Norman Rockwell book surrounded by Cecil
Taylor and Sun Ra and all these painters down in the East Village. It was
impossible. I wanted to run with the big dogs. Joe Overstreet is the one
who turned me on to the sophistication of African religion. He had this
one painting full of these geometric shapes, and I asked him, What’s this?
and he said, These are vèvè. They’re these geometric patterns drawn on the
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