“Letter from a Region in My Mind” offers proclamations and predictions, delivered as jabs and right hooks while the author shadowboxes with God. The essay begins with a crisis of faith, recounting how, during the summer he turned fourteen, Baldwin collapsed in front of his church’s altar. “One moment I was on my feet, singing and clapping,” he writes. “The next moment, with no transition, no sensation of falling, I was on my back, with the lights beating down into my face and all the vertical saints above me. I did not know what I was doing down so low, or how I had got there.” Baldwin’s disorientation reflected a new clarity about what it meant to be Black, which he rendered cosmic in scope. “The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets . . . but other people,” he writes, “has evolved no terms for your existence.”
Baldwin’s letter takes readers through his rejection of the “white God” of Christianity and to a dinner with Elijah Muhammad, who hoped that he would join the Nation of Islam. It also dissects the mentality of white Americans: not only overt racists but the sort likely to be well-meaning readers of The New Yorker. The essay caused a sensation and has proved wildly influential ever since.
One place Baldwin’s letter didn’t have much visible impact, ironically, was at The New Yorker. His first piece in the magazine was also his last, and, as the country lurched its way through the civil-rights movement, its roster of contributors remained almost entirely white. (Later in the sixties, Charlayne Hunter and Jervis Anderson would be hired as the first Black staff writers.) This was The New Yorker’s loss, not Baldwin’s. Although the magazine had commissioned him to write additional essays—including sending him through the American South in the eighties, for a piece he never wrote—Baldwin published the rest of his work elsewhere. The gap in the archive remains palpable, and leads one to wonder how the magazine might have evolved differently if editors in earlier decades had accepted more than a handful of poems and short stories by Langston Hughes, or more verse by later figures such as Audre Lorde and Michael S. Harper. (Like Baldwin, each appeared in the magazine only once.)