Magpie: A Literary-Art Publication featuring a selection of writing by James Baldwin, Dewitt Clinton High School, 1942

Dante Micheaux: “Go away and let me rest in peace
Thou restless, ruthless, ever-searching Mind.
Why is it that you come, and never cease
To tear apart each refuge that I find?”

Meshell Ndegeocello: These lines, read by award-winning poet Dante Micheaux, are from a sonnet James Baldwin published in the winter of 1942 in his high school magazine, Magpie: a literary-art publication, of which he was the editor.

Micheaux: It’s a great example of his metacognition. So you can see in the poem what we will eventually come to see in all of Baldwin’s work. He spends a lot of time thinking about thinking, and I think that makes him distinct from other writers, even great writers that were his senior. So we get a lot of Black male writers in this time period writing characters who have rich interior thought processes, but they’re never overtly thinking about their thoughts and how their thoughts are shaped and how their thoughts are affecting their emotional state.

Ndegeocello: Even as a teenager, Baldwin displayed a level of self-awareness and literary sensibility beyond his years, referring to himself as a “blasé grown-up” elsewhere in the magazine. His work in Magpie contains allusions to the Bible and Charles Dickens, and his poems have a rhyming musicality.

Micheaux: There’s a poem called “The Dream.” It’s about the dream of thinking that someone that the speaker is very intimate with or close to has gone away and upon waking, discovers that that person has not gone away and is just beside them. But I think it’s really important from a queer history perspective because the poem has all of the hallmarks of what we might describe as like proto-queer poetry. It’s a sort of enigmatic kind of “you.” You know, they never say, they never gender the “you,” and the descriptors are lacking.

Ndegeocello: We can see in Magpie how Baldwin’s signature style has already started to form and how he has begun to explore some of the topics that will later feature prominently in his writing. This issue also includes an interview that he conducted with writer Countee Cullen in which Baldwin shows interest in the literary world and what it means to be Black within it. 

Micheaux: I think that it’s important to see the work and the thinking of a very, very young Black intellectual. It’s invaluable particularly to students, particularly Black students, who are coming into the Schomburg and seeing this and thinking, this person wrote this when they were my age. How were they able to write this when they were my age? What had to come before in order for them to get to this?