What remains of Baldwin’s home reads as an excavated ruin

Evidence

It looked like an excavation of an ancient ruin. The ground had been carefully cleared, and only the writing room of the historic house, once a beautiful villa with a lush garden and palm and orange trees, remained, exposed for the sun to beat down on its side. Contrasted with the new construction jutting out of the mountain, what was left of Baldwin’s home looked old, scarred, and resigned to its fate. I imagined the owners of the new apartments, or at least some of them who cared to mention it, boasting that they lived at the home of a famous African American writer, only then to point out the panoramic view. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 35

Categorization

• FICTION: The image of new apartment owners boasting they live at the great writer’s home while pointing at the view fuels a story about a Black writer’s legacy being gentrified into a selling point.
• BMF: The razed sanctuary that becomes a luxury commodity with the writer’s name kept only as a marketing hook recalls the memory-erasure dynamics of ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’ and the commodified death-of-art threads in ‘White Noise’.