A Report from James Baldwin's Archive

"You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal."

On November 1st, I visited an archive for the first time since 2019 (before Covid was a household word). For this inaugural trip, I chose the NYPL’s Schomburg Center in Harlem because it houses the vast majority of James Baldwin’s papers. Thanks to Raoul Peck’s excellent documentary, I am Not your Negro, James Baldwin has become more widely known as an …