There’s a clip of Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin that keeps popping up on TikTok. The year was 1971. It was a little more than three years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Richard M. Nixon was president and nowhere close to resigning. “Theme From Shaft” was No. 1 on the Billboard chartscadoola casino, “Imagine” by John Lennon was No. 6 and “Got to Be There” by Michael Jackson was No. 7. Nikki Giovanni was 28 years old, Baldwin was 47, and the two writers met in London to film a conversation for a public television series, “Soul!”
In the clip, Baldwin begins by saying, “If I love you, I can’t lie to you.” Nikki blinks playfully and says, boldly, “Of course you can lie to me.” Then she adds something surprising. “What the hell do I care about the truth?” she says. “I care if you’re there. Like Billie Holiday said, ‘Hush now, don’t explain.’”
Baldwin eyes her carefully, dashing in his cravat. He’s clearly amused. He seems to acknowledge without hesitation that she is intellectually his match; she has read the books, studied the history and the psychology of the moment. She has done the work. Like him, she plays the English language like a melody. Her words are rhythmic, carefully chosen, precise and elegant. She never raises her voice; her smile — easy, generous — lets him know she is pleased to be there with him. But she never lets him fall upon his righteous banter, that Baptist preacher meets Renaissance man of the world that he has so uniquely perfected.
Finally, she lets him know that she would appreciate some of the kindness that women of her generation were taught to turn on for men, not out of duplicity, but out of tenderness, affection and care. Plaintively, she turns to him and says: “Because I love you, I get the least of you, I get the very minimum. Fake it with me, is that too much for the Black woman to ask of the Black man?”
In one five-minute exchange, Giovanni has brought to the fore questions of race, the constrictions of midcentury gender roles and gently, but powerfully, asked, Who might we be outside of the hard histories we’ve been handed?
It was that combination of questions — a constant interrogation of heritage, inheritance and “dreaming as planning,” to use the Gloria Steinem phrase — that gave Nikki Giovanni’s work the kind of firepower that burned so brightly for more than 60 years, right up to her death on Monday at the age of 81. Change is a through line in her work. In “Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day,” she wrote:
We are consumed by people who singthe same old song STAY:as sweet as you arein my cornerOr perhaps just a little bit longerBut whatever you do don’t change babyBaby don’tchange.Something needs to change.
Her work, like her worldview, was never static. She changed and in the process, encouraged her readers to embrace the evolution of ideas and of self.
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