For lovers of Black literature, James Baldwin was one of the greatest. And while he was born in Harlem and influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, he produced some of his best work from the south of France, where he lived for nearly 20 years until his death in 1987. In search of an escape from the racism and homophobia he experienced in the United States, it was there that he finished his 1953 novel “Go Tell it on the Mountain” and his 1955 collection of essays “Notes of a Native Son.” It was where he hosted parties with a guest list that read like a who’s who of Black creatives, including Ella Fitzgerald, Maya Angelou and Nina Simone. And it was where he went to heal after the tragic assassinations of his close friends and civil rights icons, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Baldwin left New York for France with 40 dollars in his pocket. And as he told The Paris Review in 1984, as a Black man, it was a move he needed to make to save his life.
“It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France — it was a matter of getting out of America,” he said in the interview. “My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail. I was going to kill somebody, or be killed.”
And while a trip to the villa in Saint-Paul de Vence where Baldwin spent the last years of his life would be the ultimate artist pilgrimage, many fans are surprised to learn the home that provided him with so much creative inspiration is now a luxury apartment complex.
Baldwin found the villa in the town near Nice and Cannes with the help of French actress Simone Signoret. His family claims that the home’s owner wanted him to have the house after her death and that he was in the process of buying it from her. But because he died without the money to buy the home free and clear, it ended up in the possession of the owner’s cousin and former housekeeper, who sold it to a Dutch property developer who then sold it to the real estate investment company that would turn it into three apartment buildings with a pool.
The fact that future generations of Black writers won’t get to experience Baldwin’s creative oasis for themselves is enough to anger friends and fans alike.
“James Baldwin is a legendary writer. So how come this house was destroyed? Taken away, and destroyed?” Belgian singer David Linx, who lived with Baldwin in France for a few years, told Financial Times. “I try not to get impassioned, but every time I do, because there is something that is not resolved. This should not have happened. This place should have been a sanctuary.”