James Baldwin's legacy: seventeen years after his death, at age 63, one of America's most influential and unsettling writers still has the authoritative voice of that fabled first ancestor.

If James Baldwin could still speak to us no doubt he would have a lot to say about today's America and the world, He died on December 1, 1987, at the age of 63, in southern France. (See Black Issues Book Review, May-June 2000.) Had he lived, he would have been 80 this year.

Baldwin's too-short journey started in Harlem on August 2, 1924, when the world-famous district was entering its "Renaissance" and the so-called Negro was getting a new face. Raised on the Bible, after a short-lived experience as a boy-preaches in the storefront churches of Harlem, he converted himself to another creed--his religion of love--and following the calling of "bearing witness to the truth."

Baldwin's legacy is immenses; rooted now in everything we know or still ignore, accept or keep denying about race, sex, gender and power. We are apt to forget he had to be there to open our eyes to simple--albeit overwhelming--truths, to reveal the evidence of things not seen, not said. His is still a powerful voice, "old and black and terrible as that first ancestor," as Amiri Baraka once put it.

In all his essays, in keeping with the tradition of the book of Job and The Jeremiads, he draws from his own experience, his own suffering and that of his brothers and sisters, to teach us love. As such, Baldwin's works stand as treasured testimonies, evidence of as past to be acknowledged and cherished and reassesed because, as he said, "If you know where you were, you came, there is really no limit to where you can go," he exhorts his nephew(s) in The Fire Next Time. "You can only be destroyed by believing that you are really what the white world calls a nigger."

Indeed, Baldwin demonstrates that the American problem is not so much a "black" one as a "white" one. Here, according to him, lies the paradox of America, "We cannot be free until they ate free" since "I'm not a nigger, I'm a man, but if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it." It is, thus, all the more indispensable to disclose the psychological sources of the plight of the black people by debunking all the myths, which white America has been living on for centuries. America has to be confronted with, in Baldwin's words, the "corpse in the closet, the dead body floating in the unconscious of the nation"

Besides fiery essays, Baldwin bequeaths to us compelling, thought-provoking parables in his fiction, where the biblical "Love thy neighbor as thyself" takes on irs true value. His first novel, published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was the book he had to write so as to understand and love the only father he knew (las stepfather). Later, Baldwin chants the indispensable encounter with the revelatory power of otherness and praises the redemptive communion in sex. "To encounter oneself," he writes, "is to encounter the other: and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and, if I can respect this, both of us can live. Neither of us, truly can live without the other."

Admittedly, a hard kind of courage was required to dare to publish Giovanni's Room in the mid-'50s, a novel that is still regarded as a landmark in gay literature. Still, more guts to insist on having BluesforMister Charlie performed on Broadway, a play in which he doesn't spare us any crude detail of the sexual substratum of racism. Even more stamina and conviction to tour the South and the so-called progressive America to "pay las dues" and support the Civil Rights Movement, which he rightly renamed "a slave insurrection." And he does all this in so pure a language that Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison goes as far as to say, "No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did. You made American English honest. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy."

No doubt Jimmy's voice is still here to say, "America's trouble is that she created a myth, locked herself inside it, and now she doesn't know how to get out. The world is not the world Americans think it is"

Benoit Depardieu is assistant professor at the Universite du Havre, France. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the paternal function in James Baldwin's novels and his forthcoming book James Baldwin: l'evidence des choses qu'on ne dit pas ("The Evidence of the Things Not Said") is soon to be published in France.