Letter to Jimmy by Alain Mabanckou Page A

managed to hate white people . . .” 30
    This woman, who died in 1991, remained close to you until the end of your life.
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    During your secondary school education, two other defining moments arise. They are crucial in your training as a writer. Indeed, when you begin school at the Frederick Douglass junior high school in 1935, you are first captivated by Countee Cullen. He is one of the most influential poets of the Harlem Renaissance. In this school, he teaches French and is also involved in the English department, where another teacher, Herman W. Porter, notices you. The latter is a member of the editorial board of the school’s literary journal, Douglass Pilot . He has read your essays, praises your talents, and celebrates the refined writing style of a child who is barely thirteen years old. He suggests that you work on the journal, for which you soon become one of the editors-in-chief.
    At this time you read and admire two writers. Aside from Charles Dickens, there is Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin . This woman of letters will be one of your primary focuses when you define your notion of literature in an article entitled, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in which you will formulate your first “attacks” against your mentor, Richard Wright.
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    Entering DeWitt Clinton High School represents a drastic change for you: this public school located in the Bronx enjoys an impressive reputation. To get there, you have to cross all of Harlem, and must therefore take the subway. Still, these commutes take you away for a short while from the confinement of the ghetto. In high school, you meet other adolescents who share your passion for writing. As in your last school, this one also publishes a journal: The Magpie . Very quickly you publish articles in it alongside other friends, such as Emile Capouya, Sol Stein and Richard Avedon.
    Your former teacher, Countee Cullen, is delighted, and is all the more so when you ask to interview him for the columns of this literary journal, known for having discovered several young American authors. It is Emile Capouya, the son of Spanish immigrants, who introduces you to someone who will become one of your closestfriends: the painter Beauford Delaney. He lives in Greenwich Village, the site par excellence of artistic culture and bohemian life, on Manhattan’s west side. This neighborhood is also known to be a bastion of another culture that defies convention. The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, one of the oldest gay bookshops, for example, would be created here in Greenwich Village in 1967, while at the same time the neighborhood saw the birth of the famous disco group, the Village People. Through its spirit of difference, Greenwich Village becomes the symbol of sexual freedom, particularly for gay culture, starting with the riots that broke out after police attacks on homosexuals, transsexuals, and lesbians at the gay bar, Stonewall Inn, on June 28, 1969. Many use this date to mark the beginning of the struggle for gay rights.
    And so, at your wit’s end from fighting with your father, you leave home at the age of seventeen—shortly after your break with the church—and you move to Greenwich Village.
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    Meanwhile you continue to write more and more. You are sure that your moment has arrived, that it is time to cross the Rubicon. You have to publish in order to be known as an author. Publishers unfortunately reject all your works of fiction. You are not discouraged. As you wait, you decideto read, and to commit yourself to literary criticism. Several years later you collaborate with a photographer on a book about Harlem’s storefront churches. Although you receive a Rosenwald Fellowship, this work does not find a publisher, either. It is at this time that you begin to write book reviews, “. . . mostly, as it turned out,