A short essay Baldwin had been drafting during his time in Hollywood, "The Price May Be Too High," which appeared in The New York Times on February 2, 1969, did not not directly mention the Malcolm X debacle, but it was its implicit subject. "The question is not whether black and white artists can work together -- artists need each other, despite all those middlebrow rumors to the contrary," he opines; rather, the question "is whether or not black and white citizens can work together." After reminding readers that "black artists remember how much white artists have stolen from them, and this certainly creates a certain tension," he explains that if and when Black artists reject white artists, what they are rejecting is "the American system which makes pawns of white men," presumably like Perl, "and victims of black men, and which really, at bottom, considers all artistic effort to be either irrelevant or threatening." Expressing an opinion that the experience in Hollywood, not to mention the recent murder of King, was forcing him to face more fully than ever before, he writes: "I will state flatly that the bulk of this country's white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long; the effect on their personalities, their lives, their grasp of reality, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself."

"Black Power means the recognition that neither the American government nor the American people have any desire, or any ability, to liberate Negroes or -- which comes to exactly the sar same thing -- themselves. Well, the job must be attempted, we must save ourselves if we can; and if we can save ourselves, we can also save save our country; it is now absolutely and literally true that the American Negro is America's only hope."

Against the backdrop of the interracial tensions and possibilities of the civil rights era, Baldwin seems to have found with Brando, at least in shese passing moments, something of an emotional and perhaps physically intimate anridote to the limitations of American notions of race and mas- culinity, and what he later called, in his 1976 book-length essay, The Devil Finds Work, "that seismographic shudder which the word, homosexual, until today, produces in the American mind, or soul." As he went on: "I doubt Americans will ever be able to face the fact that the word homosexual is not a noun. The root of this word, as Americans use it -- or, as this word uses Americans -- simply involves a terror of any human touch, since any human touch can change you."

He was still mulling over the trip to Africa, and nervous about the upcoming publication of Another Country: "I simply dread facing the tigerish Negro press if I return to America without having visited the land which they so abruptly are proud to claim as home." Racial orthodoxies, on whichever side of the color line, continued to vex him, and he voiced his concern about his growing role as a spokesman: "This trip has had the effect of opening something in me which I must pursue, and I do not think I can do that and be a Negro leader, too. And, in any case, my whole attitude toward the fact of color un- dergoes several melancholy changes: I don't know where they will lead me, but I must buy the time to find out."

On October 8 Baldwin wrote to Mills again, still enthused but also dis- turbed by what he had witnessed as he "stood on a hill in Jerusalem today, looking over the border: the Arab-Israeli border. There really is something frightening about it. There is something insane about it, something which breaks the heart." He had now been in Israel for about two weeks, stayed in a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip and at an art colony in Haifa, and "wandered through bazaars; and indeed all of this is Jewish-if you like. But it is re- ally the Middle East." Baldwin was just beginning to wrap his head around the deeply troubling history of the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict: "one can't but suspect that a vast amount of political cynicism, on the part of the English and the Americans, went into the creation of this state," he opined, "and I personally cannot help being saddened by the creation, at this late date, of yet another nation-it seems to me that we need fewer nations, not more: the blood that has been spilled for various flags makes me ill."