When I meet my Lord one day

“There is no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.” The men and women in these eight short stories understand this truth on a fundamental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways they try to stay afloat. It could be the heroin a down-and-out jazz pianist takes to face the horror of having put his life into an inanimate instrument. It could be the fragile piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his inability to live in matrimony. Or it could be the screen of bigotry erected by a boorish congressman to dull the terrible childhood memory of watching a jubilant mob murder a black man with his parents.