James Baldwin: the Price of the Ticket
Film
The Price of the Ticket by James Baldwin
Their days is one of them. When you wonder. What your role is in this country and what your future is in it. So in my point of view, no label, no slow going to no party and no skin color, and indeed no religion is more important than the human being. And when you were starting out as a writer, you were black, impoverished, homosexual. You must have set yourself G, how disadvantaged can I get? No, no, I thought I hit the jackpot. No great. It's outrageous. You can not go any further, you know. So you had to find a way to use it.
I was born in Harlem. In 1924. And then it was a very different place than it is now. My father came to New Orleans, my mother came from Maryland. And they had waited two more seconds. I might have emboldened some. The first house I remember was on Park Avenue, which is not the American Park Avenue, or maybe it is the American public. I'm talking about gravity where the railroad tracks are. You used to play on the roof and I can't call it an alley, but near the river. It was kind of dumb, garbage dump. That was the first scene I remember. And then my father had trouble keeping us alive, living night of us. And I was the oldest, so I took care of the kids, and dealt with daddy. Might as well much better now, part of his problem was he couldn't feed his kids. But I was a kid and I didn't know that. And he was very religious, very rigid. In fact, in a word he wanted power. He won a negroes to do in effect when he imagined white people did.
That is to have their own houses to own U.S. steel, and this is what in effect killed him because there was something in him, but he could not bend. He could only be broken. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the thing that tormented me the most with a very things that connected me with all the people who were alive or had ever been alive. I went to 135th street library. These three or four times a week. And I read every single day. I mean, every single book in that library.
In some blind and instinctive way, I knew that what was happening in those books was also happening all around me. And I was trying to make a connection between the books and the life I saw and the life I lived. I knew I was black, of course. But I also knew I was smart. I didn't know how I would use my mind or even if I could. But that was the only thing I had to use. And I was going to get whatever I wanted that way. I was going to get married then that way. So I watched school where I watched the streets, because part of the answer was there. So I got more money. Sometimes. Let them.