When James Baldwin Went South

Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley’s documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine follows James Baldwin on a journey across America as he recounts his experiences of the civil rights movement. He travels to Birmingham, where white supremacists exploded or planted roughly 50 bombs during the 1950s and ’60s, and to Selma, where Martin Luther King Jr. led the march to Montgomery in 1965, painting a vivid picture of life in the South as it violently resisted desegregation. Then Baldwin journeys back up North to Newark, where riots raged for days after a Black man was assaulted by the police. At each stop, Baldwin is left to reflect on how much things have changed and how much they have stayed the same.

More than 40 years after its original release, the documentary benefits from a special effect that hasn’t lost an ounce of power or authenticity in the intervening decades: Baldwin himself. He’s a mesmerizing speaker, especially when he can be seen as well as heard. His hands dance in front of him as he talks, embodying that mix of easy elegance and ruthless precision that characterized his writing, his great orblike eyes suggesting that nothing could escape them.

“Daddy’s distant eyes” is how Baldwin describes them in I Heard It Through the Grapevine. His father’s were exactly the same, as were those of a mixedrace ancestor whose grave he visits during his journey South. “Like seeing your father in whiteface,” says Baldwin, after finding a picture of the man born to his grandmother and the white man who owned her.

I Heard It Through the Grapevine makes the political personal at every turn. Throughout his journey, Baldwin is joined by the preachers, teachers, and fellow writers who were on the frontlines of the civil rights struggle during the ’60s, and there’s an intimacy to all of their conversations. There are no formal interviews, just friendly discussions over cigarettes and wine, taking place in comfortable living rooms and cramped apartments.

Throughout Fontaine and Hartley’s documentary, it often feels like the camera had simply been left running in the corner of the room. At one point, just as one woman is bemoaning the way that young Black men are demonized in the media, her own young sons pop their heads in through a nearby door to cheekily ask what time dinner will be ready.

The film also doesn’t require any voiceover narration, section headings, or other conventional documentary devices to help organize its narrative. It flows easily from one story to the next, zooming in to scrutinize specific historical events—like the killing of James Chaney in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964, or the absurdly belated trial that followed the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church—and then back out again to talk about the state of America at large.

Energizing the whole thing is a soundtrack that draws from footage of blues guitars in New York cafes and gospel choirs in the deep South to create an atmosphere that’s joyous and defiant, soulful and sorrowed—not unlike the timbre of Baldwin’s own work. As a result, the film feels like more than just an artifact of an important historical period or a snapshot of an influential literary figure. It’s a living document, providing a groundlevel look at the struggle against white supremacy from those who lived through some of its darkest hours.

Archival footage is also used, including excerpts from speeches made by Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. But perhaps the shrewdest use is when it comes to the footage of the other side: of the crowds of grinning white people who harassed Black protestors, and the white policemen and politicians who candidly condoned their actions. Simply by allowing these people to speak for themselves, the film paints a more damming picture of racists than even Baldwin could.

Early in the film, Baldwin talks of his dismay at the tendency to name streets and buildings after Martin Luther King Jr. Comparing it to the Lincoln Memorial, he sees it as a hypocritical attempt to turn a revolutionary figure into something safer, lionizing the man while losing the message. “It is one of the ways that the Western world has learned, or thinks it has learned, to outwit history,” he explains. “To outwit time. To make our lives and our deaths irrelevant. To make their passion irrelevant. To make it unusable, for you and your children.”

Like so much of Baldwin’s incredible work, it’s a line that feels tragically timeless. But by so vividly capturing the world that Baldwin lived, wrote, and fought his way through, I Heard It Through the Grapevine provides a more fitting kind of memorial.