James Baldwin was only 10, he recalled, when his life became purposeful in the company of a twenty-four-year old white teacher, Orilla Miller, who took him to a movie in which Bette Davis’s pop eyes reminded him of his own. In that recognition of sameness in difference Nicholas Boggs navigates through the passionate and painful loving relationships that went into the creation of the man and the writer.Teacher and student read Charles Dickens, and Miller realized “here was an exceptional and brilliant boy.” Baldwin said he “loved her, of course, and absolutely with a child’s love.” Because of her, he admitted, “I never really managed to hate white people—though God knows I have often wished to murder more than one or two.”Through an archival record, Baldwin’s own autobiographical reflections, and the testimony of those who knew him, Nicholas Boggs discloses more than ever before how Baldwin’s love life was inseparable from his thinking and writing.But what to do when the archive is nearly silent about personal matters, and when your subject, Paule Marshall, refused to open up even to close friends, to share herself in ways that became so important for Baldwin? Mary Helen Washington begins by explaining how she met Marshall, how she went about interviewing Marshall’s friends and investigating the background of a daughter of Barbadian immigrants that all went into Marshall’s first book “Brown Girl, Brownstones”(1959) set in Brooklyn. In common with Baldwin, Marshall explored queer sexuality with a boldness that put her on a parallel track with writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou.While the scope of Dana A. Williams’s biography of Toni Morrison is narrower than Mr. Bogg’s and Ms. Washington’s, she shows how Morrison’s groundbreaking work as an editor helped to create the cultural milieu in which Baldwin and Marshall thrived. Morrison, who died in 2019 at the age of 88, took a leading role in promoting the work of Angela Davis and Toni Cade Bambara, for example, while negotiating the institutional complexity of a prominent publisher, Random House. Like Mr. Boggs and Ms. Washington, Ms. Williams has also drawn on many interviews, including with Morrison herself.To read Susana M. Morris’s biography of Octavia E. Butler is to zoom out via science fiction into an epic consideration of what might be called America’s imperial project, defined by Thomas Jefferson as the extension of human liberty across a continent and as a gift to the world. That Jeffersonian vision, included slavery and the expansion of capitalism, and becomes a cautionary fable in Butler that also deals with the themes of civil rights, black power, women’s liberation, and queer rights.Butler is fascinating because she chose a genre dominated by white men and turned the genre against them by exploring the kind of inherent fascism that provided no place for a writer who refused to be bound by the hetero/homosexual binaries. Her work, no less celebrated than Baldwin’s, Marshall’s and Morrison’s, is nonetheless less well known, and so it is helpful that Ms. Morris begins with an “Octavia E. Butler Chronology.”Like Baldwin, Ms. Morris records that Butler got started early, in 1959: “A chance viewing of a B-movie science fiction film ignites a creative spark in twelve-year-old Octavia. She begins crafting her first science fiction stories.” A year later, as in Baldwin’s case, a “supportive teacher recognizes Octavia’s talent and encourages her to submit her work to science fiction magazines.”As with Ms. Washington, Ms. Morris draws on archives and interviews, but begins, like Ms. Washington, by situating herself next to her subject—in this case as a 15-year-old who saw the “picture of a Black woman. Her eyes were closed, and she had a tiny globe suspended between her upturned hands.” This was the cover of “Parable of the Sower,” about a “Black girl, a teenager, who lived in the near future apocalypse of 2024, whose ideas might just change the world.”What all these biographies demonstrate is that one teacher, one book, one writer can transform a world that may otherwise seem unchangeable.‘Baldwin: A Love Story’By Nicholas BoggsFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 720 pages‘Paule Marshall: A Writer’s Life’By Mary Helen WashingtonYale University Press, 312 pages‘Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship’By Dana A. WilliamsAmistad, 368 pages‘Positive Obsession: The Life and Times Octavia E. Butler: A Biography of the Visionary Science Fiction Writer and Black Power’By Susana M. MorrisAmistad, 272 pages
