The writings of James Baldwin and Kathleen Collins clearly demonstrate the scope, but also the limits of the conquests carried out by the civil rights movement in the United States between 1954 and 1968. While Stock Editions reissued Murders at Atlanta, an essay by Baldwin published in 1985 under the title The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Éditions du Portrait brings together various texts by Collins dating from the 1970s under the title Diary of a black woman.
Between 1979 and 1981, a series of murders were committed in Atlanta. Among the victims, all black, 28 children. In her preface, the African-American author Jacqueline Woodson sums up the issues of the case which inspired the book by James Baldwin: “The children were poor, I said it. Black, I said it. And their lives obviously redundant. “
Three years after Wayne Williams was convicted of two adult homicides (no one has been tried to date for murdering children) and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, the author of Murders in atlanta explores with undeniable rigor and certain stylistic agility the ins and outs of this affair, a complex and revealing story to which, moreover, the second season of the series Mindhunteron Netflix is devoted.
Moving away from the Atlanta murders here and there, Baldwin offers a powerful overview, a penetrating analysis of the place reserved for blacks in American society: “In the eyes of the whole world, not to mention those of America , the Americans had behaved honorably and had improved the situation of their brothers of color. In reality, with an unspeakable virulence spirit, they had done the complete opposite of what they claimed. But the world had no way of knowing and the Americans had no reason to admit it. “
The author explains in particular the crucial distinction between desegregation and integration: “As far as we go back, it is clear that the claim of blacks has never been integration. […] What blacks claimed was desegregation, which is a legal, public and social issue: the requirement to be treated as human beings and not as pack animals or dogs. “
Then he concluded: “Desegregation simply meant that blacks, and especially black children, should be recognized and treated as human beings by the institutions of the country where they were born. These are certainly words whose topicality is as glaring as it is painful.
Overflowing appetite
It was in 2015, when the restoration of Losing Ground, a film directed by Kathleen Collins in 1982, first fiction feature film directed by an African-American, that the name of the scriptwriter and filmmaker begins to circulate strongly. While the film, now available on The Criterion Channel, finally gets the recognition it deserves, Collins’ daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, undertakes to publish the texts of her mother who remained in a drawer.
Engaged in the civil rights movement, a teacher at New York University, Kathleen Collins died of breast cancer in 1988 at the age of 46. Although she wrote throughout her adult life, it was not until 2016 that she appeared on the literary scene, when Harper Collins published Whatever Happened to Interracial Love ?, a collection of news acclaimed from all sides. In 2019, Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary confirms the talent of the author who died prematurely.
Borrowing from the two works published in English, Diary of a black woman offers a happy combination of news and letters (to his sister, his daughter, friends…), and even a few pages of an unfinished novel. But the most enlightening, the heart of the book to which everything else is tied, is undoubtedly the extracts from the diary commented by the author.
Collins approaches with admirable lucidity the complex relationships between men and women, whites and blacks, the dominant and the dominated, easily relating analysis and testimony, personal and universal, love and political, digging the same furrows when it is in the territory of fiction as in that of introspection. “I looked deep inside, until I was able to take the pulse of love in its slightest beat – living love of sex, love emptied of sex, love that claws and screams of jealousy, neglected love until turning into existence so lonely that there was practically no way out. Instead of taking care of the race, I started looking for love … and what I found was a woman of color with an overflowing appetite. “
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