James Baldwin offers the signatory time and place from his 1985 book-length essay The Evidence of Things Not Seen from four locations across two countries. In doing so he signals the extent to which he traveled to be able to write an essay for Playboy magazine and rewrite the essay into a book. Baldwin required a mix of presence and distance, of immediacy with “the event” and places to process.Footnote ¹ At the behest of Playboy’s editor Walter Lowe, Baldwin traveled back to the United States from his home abroad in St. Paul de Vence, in the south of France. His research required him to be in America: he made multiple trips and spent time in Atlanta, then New York and Amherst, where he taught at the University of Massachusetts for several years. He invites us into the journey of the book, which extends far beyond Atlanta and the US South.

The subject of Evidence is commonly known as the Atlanta child murders: in 1979, Black children began disappearing and were found murdered around the city. So many aspects of the case have been scrutinized by journalists and the public, including the timeline of events; the police response at the city, state, and federal levels; the conviction of Wayne Williams, the accused murderer; the forensic fiber evidence; and the conditions that made this possible in the first place. As a result, in 2009, then mayor of Atlanta Keisha Lane Bottoms reopened the case.Footnote ² Despite a trial and conviction, aspects of the case remain unresolved and emblematic of a deep and widespread terror that Baldwin traces beyond the fixed location of Atlanta.

The stillness and completeness of a piece of writing seem incompatible with an unwieldy case that evades resolution. The Evidence of Things Not Seen requires movement and prepares readers for the journey across time and geographic space. One must travel to European settlement, to South Africa, to the Casbah, to Harlem. The cross-Atlantic journey Baldwin makes requires more than mileage. Baldwin must traverse time, back to the origins of Georgia as a “convict colony” (xx),Footnote ³ and invites us to witness his future and our present moment in the context of what happened in Atlanta. The same urban forest where the bodies of Aaron Wyche and Aaron Jackson were found in 1980 is now the site of the Stop Cop City movement, a zone of contestation against development for a police training facility. The site has since become militarized with anti-activist private security forces in a manner that would not have surprised Baldwin. He was an activist both on the ground and in the writer’s studio, but it is us, circulating Baldwin’s words, who solidify his legacy as activist–writer.

I trace Baldwin’s writing as movement, both in the term “mobilization” and in the spiralic temporality of Evidence’s expansion and style. The term “mobilization” signifies political organizing, the act of making action and of literally moving people into the same room or rally for a common cause. Baldwin brought movement to the page and created a style of mobilized writing, which drew countless people into the fight for social justice. Evidence challenges us to see the act of witnessing as community-based action, one that necessitates collaboration in its fragmentary and iterative forms. “My memory stammers,” Baldwin claims, “but my soul is a witness,” acknowledging the limitations of a single mind’s capacity to complete the story (xix). Soul-work transcends the individual body and brings in a spiritual corpus of many. Beyond his extensive collaboration with Lowe, Baldwin undertakes a nonmaterial exchange with activists and writers in Atlanta, such as Toni Cade Bambara. The titular reference to St. Paul, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” (ix) calls on us to recognize the unseeable as a literary device and bear witness to things unseen but known.

Evidence has been regarded as an anomaly within Baldwin’s canon because of its unruly style. As a book-length essay, it refuses genre or category and has been read as a “textual model of refusing to collaborate with either state narratives or conventions of form.”Footnote ⁴ As Courtney Thorsson notes, “Baldwin promises an essay and then delivers a jeremiad about racial terror.”Footnote ⁵ Baldwin aligned his writing style with his capacity to write about terror, where “the event” must take precedence over “virtuosity.”Footnote ⁶ Rather than a rhetorically neat commentary on what was happening in Atlanta, Baldwin writes into the paradoxes that determined the investigation and trial of Wayne Williams, and how they spiral outward to govern American life. Baldwin first visited Atlanta when the investigation was in full swing, as authorities searched for a pattern that could identify a singular serial killer. Rather than endorse or condemn the idea of a pattern, Baldwin riffs on the meaning of pattern in terms of the civil rights movement and southern justice. He notes, “it is absolutely meaningless to say that there have been no murders that ‘fit the pattern.’ What pattern? In Georgia?” (88). Baldwin makes the case against a central investigative tool, profiling, claiming that “once one begins looking for a ‘pattern,’ this ‘pattern’ will prove anything you want” (14). Williams was tried for the murder of two adults, so therefore tried and convicted outside the pattern of victims, who were all children, yet Williams was still implicated. Baldwin identifies a paradoxical pattern that is also an anti-pattern, extralegal forms of enacting “justice” where “guilt or innocence is a matter of convenience” (94). Within this enigma, Baldwin asserts, “Legality, according to an Atlanta lawyer I know, is whatever you say is legal” (98). Baldwin rewrites “pattern” to signify the rut in people’s minds that equates violence as quotidian and that too readily accepts the evidence conjured by authorities as scientific.

To prove his point, Baldwin turns to a story of the search in Mississippi during summer 1964 for the bodies of the three murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. While dragging the river, volunteers uncovered a plethora of unidentified bodies from, none of whom were the three victims. One of the volunteers, Dave Dennis, steps back with a profound realization: “It suddenly struck us – what difference did it make that it wasn’t them? What are these bodies doing in the river?” (89). The phrase “suddenly struck us” implies a rupture in a pattern of thought. If Baldwin’s own rhetorical style was consistent enough for critics to note the change in Evidence, then rupturing his own pattern serves to discomfit those looking for a tidy translation of American violence.

Baldwin writes about a moment in time that Grace Kyungwon Hong would identify as the “biopolitical and necropolitical operations of neoliberal power.”Footnote ⁷ Hong contends with the way neoliberal power “both brutalizes and affirms” through “the selective protection and proliferation of minoritized life as the very mechanism for the brutal exacerbation of minoritized death.”Footnote ⁸ Buying into a life compliant with “reproductive respectability,” one can feel protected from premature death. At a time when Atlanta was actively branding itself as an economic powerhouse beyond the racism of the past, Baldwin draws attention to how the progress made – a Black mayor, Black police chief, and Black judge – could not exempt the community from premature death among its most vulnerable population. For Baldwin, the need to save the neoliberal project of post-civil rights Atlanta, represented by the moniker the city too busy to hate, brings Wayne Williams to trial: “The case against Williams struck me as so dubious that I wondered how and why it had been brought to court … Why has to do with the fact that the commercial viability of the city too busy (making money) to hate was in danger” (10, original emphasis). Controversially, Baldwin implicates those making a neoliberal gesture of disavowal – “I’m from Atlanta. I’m not from Georgia” – and shows how “the false question of integration” could not guarantee safety for Black folks in the United States (2).

Baldwin expands from the US to the global reshuffling of colonial power: “No colonizing power voluntarily surrendered this arrangement, and ‘independence’ (like ‘integration’) merely set in motion a complex legal and political machinery designed to camouflage and maintain the status quo” (25). Baldwin witnessed the shift towards a neoliberal politics and saw behind the masquerade of progress, as well as what people were willing to do to keep the order that served self-interest.Footnote ⁹ Baldwin moves from his global commentary to the scale of the neighborhood. Baldwin ends Evidence with a digressive story about Buddy, an older kid he remembers from his childhood. Turning to Buddy might seem an unusual choice, but in this intimate example, we see the creation of judgment at the scale of the interpersonal. Buddy was ostracized by his religious community because he was seen as a wayward, sinful soul; Buddy eventually died of tuberculosis. Baldwin claims that “the community produced the transgressor in order to renew itself” (109). The community might see Buddy’s death as inevitable and brought on by his own choices, but Baldwin sees Buddy as a sacrifice to “maintain the status quo.”

Baldwin writes to defamiliarize the terror that has become normalized. Baldwin prepares his reader to approach the trial of Wayne Williams with raised eyebrows, not because of his presumed innocence of guilt, but because of the mechanics at work that reinforce the pattern of suspending justice in the name of maintaining a status quo. Before his trial, Williams has “already been condemned” because he was placed on “open surveillance,” which Baldwin describes as “a lethal legal principle so to mark a man before he is accused of any crime” (69). Baldwin suggests that Williams served as a convenient scapegoat to end the outcry against Atlanta, and critiques this as “untidy” and a dangerous legal precedent. Baldwin contextualizes what happens to Williams within Buddy’s story and the history of racial violence to move his reader to understand what might seem conspiratorial as wholly possible, what he described in an interview as “a system of nuances that, perhaps, only a Black writer can see in Black life.”Footnote ¹⁰ He exposes how society arbitrates justice by manipulating what we see: “They are not suspending judgment, they are creating judgement: ours” (2, original emphasis).

Baldwin wants his reader to see what they cannot and brings his line of thinking into spaces beyond easy comprehension. Evidence shares this process with Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child, a sprawling text that shares spiralic temporality and literary unruliness with Evidence.Footnote ¹¹ In Those Bones, Bambara leans into esoteric knowledges as a pathway to understanding, representing this through the character Mattie Shaw, who uses psychic abilities of free association to see something new in the investigation. Baldwin does not share to the same extent Bambara’s sense of the collective unconscious, or what Baldwin admonishes as “a kind of grotesque Disneyland” (10) of prophets and soothsayers that surrounded the investigation in Atlanta. Yet he understands that this case requires us to enter the realm of the “not seen.” He dares us to go “digging in the bayou” (89) to encounter the silences in the archive and the non-places that exist. Reading Baldwin through Bambara invites us to consider how integral the unseeable was to the case and the processing of racial terror.

Baldwin brings the metaphysical into the geographic, introducing us to the woods as an unseen space, like the bayou or the river, that holds the other side of history. As Jonathan Eburne writes, “For Baldwin, the ‘truth’ to which Evidence seeks to bear witness is approachable only negatively – albeit a negation conceived as absolute rather than dialectically recuperable.”Footnote ¹² The negation acts less as a qualifier of feeling than as a literal negative space, gesturing to places the municipal government would rather ignore: “in the weeds, by the roadside, in abandoned sites, in the river” (5). In the 1959 essay “Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South,” Baldwin first encounters the non-places on the outskirts of Atlanta and describes them with a surreal prescience. Decades before Evidence, Baldwin writes, “It was on the outskirts of Atlanta that I first felt how the Southern landscape – the trees, the silence, the liquid heat and the fact that one always seems to be traveling great distances – seems designed for violence, seems almost, to demand it.”Footnote ¹³ These liminal places rewrites the third space through the physics of the black hole, the negative space that undoes tangible matter. Or liminality becomes the bardo, an intermediary state of the afterlife, in which liberation depends on the act of hearing. As Baldwin listens to the urban woods on the outskirts of Atlanta, he sees into the future, which could be clairvoyance or a deep awareness of the patterns that repeat themselves over time. Using the unseen as a literary device, Baldwin represents this system of nuances through the metaphor of the woods, except the metaphor becomes real. Evidence reads as his most unruly writing because he invites us to witness what is beyond comprehension, discomfiting the reader. As an activist-as-writer, Baldwin moves readers to have faith that there is more to this case than he can say in words.