Annotate With Sara

SPOILER FREE

Toward the end of The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy, Nakia’s circumstances make her recall a moment from James Baldwin’s essay “take me to the water.”

Here’s what Nakia says:

“An image of them being pushed over the side the way James Baldwin had written about French police shoving Algerians into the Seine crossed her mind. She let it pass. People needed to eat. They had done nothing wrong.

– Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness, “The New Old Bridge” p 276

Nakia is thinking of this paragraph from “take me to the water,” an essay James Baldwin published in his book No Name in the Street.

Here’s what Baldwin wrote that Nakia is thinking of:

“Nevertheless, I began to realize that I could not find any of the Algerians I knew, not one; and since I could not find one, there was no way to ask about the others. They were in none of the dives we had frequented, they had apparently abandoned their rooms, their cafés, as I have said, were closed, and they were no longer to be seen on the Paris sidewalks, changing money, or selling their rugs, their peanuts, or themselves. We heard that they had been placed in camps around Paris, that they were being tortured there, that they were being murdered. No one wished to believe any of this, it made us exceedingly uncomfortable, and we felt that we should do something, but there was nothing we could do. We began to realize that there had to be some truth to these pale and cloudy rumors: one woman told me of seeing an Algerian hurled by the proprietor of a café in Pigalle through the café’s closed plate-glass door. If she had not witnessed a murder, she had certainly witnessed a murder attempt. And, in fact, Algerians were being murdered in the streets, and corraled into prisons, and being dropped into the Seine, like flies.”

– James Baldwin from his essay “take me to the water published on page 38 of No Name in the Street

Here’s a printable Free Download so you don’t forget this reference in the future.

I made this PDF to place in my own book, so I don’t forget the details of this reference and have the paragraph from “take me to the water” handy in my book. I want to share it with you. All you need to do is download this PDF, cut it out around black lines, then put it in your copy of The Wilderness on page 276. You’ll always have this info at your fingertips in the right spot in the book.