SJ man helps tell James Baldwin's story

This is the story of the Negro in America. It is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.

James Baldwin, “I Am Not Your Negro"

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James Baldwin, one of the most important voices in American literature, died in 1987.

Yet a book Baldwin intended to write about race in America, as told through his friendships with and the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., was not completed for nearly 30 years.

In a written proposal for the book, which Baldwin planned to title “Remember This House,’’ the author wrote that he wanted “these three lives to bang against each other, and reveal each other.’’

In the end, Baldwin completed only 30 pages of notes toward what he hoped would be his master work before his passing. Several years ago, an envelope holding those notes made its way into the grateful hands of Raoul Peck, a Haitian-born filmmaker hoping to make a movie about the African-American author.

The result is “I Am Not Your Negro,’’ a new film up for Best Documentary Sunday night at the 89th Academy Awards, as well as a new best-selling paperback with that title that realizes Baldwin’s dream.

Through his company Velvet Films, Raoul Peck directed the documentary, which he produced with his brother, Hébert Peck, and Rémi Grellety.

Hébert Peck makes his home in Voorhees, a place his family landed after fleeing first Haiti, and then Democratic Republic of Congo. The Pecks left Haiti as young boys, fleeing the dictatorship of François Duvalier, whose reign ultimately led to the deaths of 30,000 to 60,000 Haitians. They resettled in Congo, where their father could find work after the retreat of the Belgians. But the family would be forced to flee again when Patrice Lumumba, that country’s first prime minister, was executed.

Hébert’s brother Raoul splits his time between Florida, Haiti and France (where he leads La Fémis, the French state film school).

Across those vast distances and the challenges of time zones, the brothers worked together painstakingly, using Baldwin’s own words – drawn from books, letters, essays, televised interviews and those precious notes – to tell a story of America still relevant today.

Reviewing the film for the New York Times, A.O. Scott called the result “a posthumous collaboration’’ (with the director crediting Baldwin as the film’s writer).

In the era of Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter, “You would be hard-pressed to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater clarity and force, insisting on uncomfortable truths and drawing stark lessons from the shadows of history,’’ writes Scott.

Indeed, whether Baldwin is answering an inquiring Dick Cavett in a grainy talk show reel, or his cadence and words are rendered lovingly by narrator Samuel L. Jackson, it is as if he were speaking directly into the soul of 2017 America.

Hébert Peck is assistant director of the Rutgers University Television Network (RU-tv) in New Brunswick, where he’s worked on and off since the 1990s.

He made time to talk about the film a week before the Oscars, having just returned from the Berlin International Film Festival, where “I Am Not Your Negro’’ had its European debut.

Peck has survived both his parents and his wife. He has two children — Natalie Peck, 21, who is completing her master’s degree in social work at Rutgers, and Hébert III, a young adult with Down syndrome who aspires to be a performer.

“Our parents basically retired in Voorhees. My mom wanted to be near family that’s in the area, so that’s how we ended up here,’’ he said.

Immersing himself in James Baldwin’s words and legacy, a project 10 years in the making, was a natural step in a career spent focusing on social issues.

Peck’s prior credits include work on a documentary about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which poor African-American men in Alabama deliberately were left untreated to study the long-term effects of the virus. He also worked with his brother on an earlier project, 2013’s “Fatal Assistance,’’ about the international community’s mismanagement of relief after the earthquake in Haiti.

Working through Raoul Peck’s Velvet Films, the filmmakers knew they wanted to maintain complete control of the Baldwin project, Peck said.

“(Raoul) had just finished a piece on the Rwanda genocide, and at that time, he said I’d like to just tackle Baldwin,’’ his brother recalled. “Baldwin had always been an important person in his life as a writer and as a person who had very clear commentary on race issues in America. At the time, we weren’t sure it was going to happen, because the Baldwin estate had traditionally been very silent on such projects.’’

Not this time, however. Baldwin’s sister, Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, answered Raoul Peck’s letter within three days, inviting him to her home in Washington, D.C. “When Gloria met Raoul, she became the guardian angel of the project,’’ Hébert Peck confided.

She had seen Raoul Peck’s earlier films, most notably “Lumumba,’’ and her confidence in him brought something extraordinary – the rights to Baldwin’s entire body of work – not just books, published and unpublished, but notes and letters, “you name it,’’ Peck said.

Such unlimited access was astounding, but the director still needed a way to tell Baldwin’s story.

It would not come until four years later, when Baldwin’s sister handed him that envelope containing the author’s proposal to his literary agent and notes on what Baldwin had hoped would be his most important work.

“I Am Not Your Negro’’ would form itself around those words.

“It was an incredible text. Baldwin wanted to write the definitive book about America, and wanted to talk about his three friends who were murdered. He wanted to talk about the making of the image of the American Negro through Hollywood films.’’

“Baldwin was going through a lot,’’ Peck continued. “The death of those three men had almost incapacitated (him). It was important of him to write as a witness. (Raoul) didn’t want anyone to interpret Baldwin. He wanted Baldwin to speak to us directly.’’

If “I Am Not Your Negro’’ is a story about race, it is also a story about Hollywood.

Baldwin, who was gay and whose work inspired an FBI file during the McCarthy era, had spent much of his adult life living in Paris, but he returned to this country to serve as witness to the racial violence and Civil Rights movement as it unfolded at lunch counters and the backs of buses, on city streets and segregated schoolyards, on our television screens.

One face brought him home – the front page newspaper images of Dorothy Counts, a 15-year-old black girl walking in front of an angry white mob of protesters in 1963 as she entered alone her newly desegregated Charlotte, North Carolina, school.

For Baldwin, nowhere was America’s soul laid bare more so than at the movies.

“Heroes,’’ wrote Baldwin, “as far as I could see, were white; and not merely because of the movies, but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection.’’

So Baldwin’s costars in this documentary are the larger-than-life John Wayne and Gary Cooper, Doris Day and Joan Crawford. When Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier make an appearance, they are kept in the safe fictional roles Hollywood has constructed for them at that time.

For the Peck brothers, weeding through all of that archival material and securing the rights to everything from the nightly news clips to classic films took tremendous time and patience, as well as expert archivists, a passionate editor and strategic lawyers. And there was new footage to shoot, primarily in the South, and multiple sources of funding to keep the project moving forward.

“It’s Raoul and Remi and myself, and we’re working on three continents at the same time. If we had phone conferences … I usually was up by 4:30, trying to resolve things before I left for work, and they were six hours ahead.

“It was a long haul but because Raoul had complete control, that gave him a lot of freedom to do the film at his own pace,’’ Peck observed.  “It was possible to do a cut or two cuts and let it be and come back with fresh eyes a month later. … And that freedom was really important to have. And it was really important to have the backing of the estate. At no point did Gloria say, ‘Raoul, where’s the film?’‘’

As scenes were shot, there were feedback sessions, and eventually screenings in D.C. and New York.

WATCH PODCAST: Hébert Peck discusses James Baldwin film

“All of that has to happen. It’s the work we do, it requires a tremendous amount of coordination in a tight group of people. And also, making sure Gloria got to see it. That’s a big test there. And when we showed it to her, she was very moved and basically, gave it her blessing.’’

Reaction to the film has been almost universally positive. It debuted at the Toronto Film Festival, where it would receive a People’s Choice Award, the first of many accolades.

“It was an incredible audience reaction,’’ said Peck of the film’s examination of America’s fear and denial of race. “And from that point on, it’s done quite well with audiences, black and white and old and young. It’s a testament to who Baldwin was. And of course, to Raoul as a filmmaker.’’

“I Am Not Your Negro’’ is being distributed by Magnolia Films, and in its first few weeks of its run, has already become its highest grossing documentary.

“They are a very smart group that really understood what we wanted to do with the film,’’ says Peck. “They are working with us to make sure the film gets to be seen not only in the traditional theaters but in other places where we want it to get seen, like schools and church basements and community centers.’’

Once it has left first-run theaters, the filmmakers plan speaking engagements and other outreach, including for high school students and other groups, “so we can create some conversation around the issues Baldwin raised. We want Baldwin to be in the curriculum … this writer who is an American treasure.’’

Sometimes, at screenings, the Pecks are confronted by some viewers who say they didn’t know Baldwin existed.

“Baldwin has been out of the curriculum for a long time. For us, it’s important that people read Baldwin. We hope that the film will create that, and also that we will be working on having that happen.’’

Baldwin’s publisher, Vintage Press, released early this year a paperback version of the film, complete with many of its archival images. It was an immediate New York Times bestseller, reaching No. 8 earlier this month.

The timeliness of the film is acutely felt by the filmmakers, as a divided nation wonders how it will heal after a bitter election season and in the backdrop of protests of President Donald Trump’s policies on immigration, refugees, Muslims and a southern border wall.

“When you see the film, it’s incredible. It’s like he wrote it this morning,’’ Peck said.

The film is not an easy one to watch, and not only because of three murdered Civil Rights leaders.

The violence spans more than half a century, the desegregation battles of the 1960s South juxtaposed with protesters and cops clashing violently in the wake of police shootings as recently as last year.

“It comes as a great shock,’’ says Baldwin, while debating William F. Buckley in 1965, “to discover a country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.’’

Baldwin looks America dead in the eye, and what he sees there is about so much more than skin color:

“I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears to be able to achieve any visible, organic connection between his public stance and his private life,’’ writes Baldwin. “This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct, and on black-white relations. If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they never would have become so dependent on what they call 'the Negro problem.'"

Baldwin rejects the label of pessimist, just as he rejects being characterized as a victim.

The film’s title is its over-arching premise.

“I Am Not Your Negro’’ could be read by movie audiences as almost a call and response to then-candidate Trump’s reference, during a campaign rally, “to my African-American over there.’’

But in actuality, it comes from Baldwin’s stark warning at the end of the film, a film in which he seems prophetic.

“The future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger who they have maligned for so long,’’ Baldwin wrote in “The Negro and American Promise’’ in 1963.

“What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a ‘nigger’ in the first place, because I’m not a ‘nigger,’ I’m a man. But if you think I’m a nigger, that means you need him. The question you’ve got to ask yourself … If I’m not the nigger here, and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.’’

It’s a question that snakes its way from the founding of a nation by genocide straight through the slave trade and Southern plantations and cheap Union labor all the way through mass incarcerations and city slums, a question the filmmakers want to dwell on as they tour with the film.

“Those questions are so important,’’ Peck said. “What’s important in Raoul’s work is, he wants room for the audience to think. We all go in with our own baggage, right, but we are experiencing this film with its own baggage. And it forces us to really look at the baggage, and to reflect.’’

And a lack of time to reflect is part of the problem, as Peck said, “to have that space where you can think. We are bombarded with all of our mobile devices. It’s almost where some of us are scared not to have noise. You have less and less time for yourself and to reflect on, ‘Who am I? And who are we?’

“No matter who you are, when you watch this movie, you go in and you come out differently. And you cannot say you didn’t know. And that is already a lot. I have a responsibility in this. I can’t just sit on the side,’’ Peck continued. “I’m part of this, so what am I going to do?’’

If the message is hard to hear, it’s not without hope, although as both filmmakers and black men, the Peck brothers are not going to hand solutions to audience members asking “What can we do?’’ The only answer, Peck insisted, is “that’s not my job.’’ Each of us has to figure that out for ourselves what role we can play to move beyond our racist legacy, and then go do it.

“Baldwin was a humanist. Though he spoke truth to power, he did it from a position of love. And that’s why whatever he says, you don’t feel like he’s assaulting you. He’s not angry at anyone. And that’s why it’s easier to listen.’’

The world may just depend upon it.

“It’s like the Titanic,’’ Peck concludes. “If we go down, everyone goes down.’’

Tammy Paolino: (856) 486-2477; tpaolino@gannett.com

If you go

"I Am Not Your Negro'' is now in theaters including Ritz 5 in Philadelphia, Regal Burlington Stadium 20 and AMC Loews Cherry Hill 24.

OSCAR NOMINEES: Documentary (Feature)

"I Am Not Your Negro" – Raoul Peck, Rémi Grellety and Hébert Peck

"Fire at Sea" – Gianfranco Rosi and Donatella Palermo

"Life, Animated" – Roger Ross Williams and Julie Goldman

"O.J.: Made in America" – Ezra Edelman and Caroline Waterlow

"13th" – Ava DuVernay, Spencer Averick and Howard Barish

OSCARS ON TV

Red carpet: 7 p.m. 

Ceremony: 8:30 p.m.

Channel: ABC