Around the Welcome Table
Early in Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, Eddie S. Glaude Jr recounts paying a visit to James Baldwin’s house in Saint Paul de Vence, outside of Nice, France, only to find it in a state of ruin. Indeed, the sprawling ten-acre property (“with its ‘welcome table’ that he finally called home for seventeen years”) was being razed to make way for condominiums. Looking over the worksite, Glaude Jr. finds it a fitting, and ironic, end to Baldwin’s “prophetic witness” that “even his sanctuary failed to escape…the capital and luxury running roughshod over everything.”
In his recent Why Writing Matters, novelist Nicholas Delbanco describes meeting Baldwin in Nice and sitting down at his table for drinks and a meal. “We were rarely less than six at a table, and more often ten.” He describes the quality of kindness in Baldwin’s manner, in particular “the affection he expected and expressed.” Delbanco was early in his career and so surprised, and excited, to be included in Baldwin’s famously bohemian circle. He writes: “That he took my work seriously, that he read and respected my work, or appeared to, that he wanted us with him as often as possible—all this was flattering.” “We talked as most writers do,” Delbanco adds, “in a kind of shorthand and sign language.”
When I was starting graduate school in Ann Arbor, Delbanco was the University of Michigan’s MFA program director and my mentor. In fact, I had known him since I was a teen, having met him and his family up at Bread Loaf a decade before. It wasn’t long before he invited me and Ali—newly together, about to become engaged—to his “welcome table.” The first time he invited us, we were made to feel that we’d be the sole guests for a special meal. Arriving appropriately dressed, excited, a bottle of wine as thank you gift, we were surprised to find a sitting room full of guests, wine glasses in hand, and a large table decked out for the fabulous meal to come. We were “fooled” at least one more time by Nick and Elena’s seemingly personal invite, more than a little late in realizing that for Nick, as for Baldwin, a table wasn’t truly welcome until brimming with a “full retinue of intimates.” To be invited at all was to be taken seriously, and to be included in the grand master’s party was to be accepted into that age-old bohemian club of writers and artists.