Brooke Obie & Evan Starling-Davis Announce La Maison Baldwin Resignation: Statement
A public service announcement and letter to our community.
Dear reader,
We are Evan Starling-Davis and Brooke Obie, two members of La Maison Baldwin’s 2019 writers-in-residence cohort, as well as inaugural members of La Maison Baldwin’s board of directors. After much thought and consideration, we resigned from the governing board of La Maison Baldwin in May 2021 (Brooke) and June 2021 (Evan). Below is our statement:
When we arrived in St. Paul de Vence, France for our residencies in 2019, we were eager, excited, and grateful for the opportunity to focus on our respective writing projects and practices. We were going to be “working in the spirit of James Baldwin.” That was the original intention. That’s why we applied. Why we hopped on a plane. Why we taxied into the very conservative south of France. Seldom are there programs like La Maison Baldwin that provide time, space, and funding for Black Americans to reflect on our work, and our lived experiences, outside of our immediate communities. As inaugural writers-in-residence, we expected some bumps in the road, though what we were not prepared for was Cain to divulge to us, during our time there, that the organization was founded and operated [by Cain] against the direct wishes of James Baldwin’s family.
“Your experience as a white person does not give you proximity for what you’re trying to represent,” Baldwin’s niece told the New York Times in 2017 of Cain’s insertion of herself into Baldwin’s story and legacy with the creation of this program. The NYT reported that the family also threatened to take legal action against Cain for using James Baldwin’s name without permission. We would soon come to understand that Cain’s entitlement to a legacy and a space outside of her domain (the self-delusions of “an unexamined life” that Baldwin wrote about) is a character trait that permeates the organization, with any good fruit obscuring its rotten roots.
It would later come to our attention that our understanding of the mission, vision, and finances of La Maison Baldwin are not, and have never been, in alignment with the reality of how La Maison Baldwin is operating. This is directly due to the continued leadership, harm, and brazen disinterest in repairing the harm, of the organization’s founder, Shannon Cain. At the time when we joined the board, however, we felt these initial actions to be Cain’s clumsy mistakes with good intentions for Black writers. As beneficiaries of the program, we felt compelled to help heal the harm done to the Baldwin family. When we joined the executive director hiring committee and the inaugural board of directors in 2020, at Cain’s request, our understanding was that one of the main goals of our board was to heal the harm done to the Baldwin family.
With the hiring of a Black executive director and Cain taking a step back from the organization, we believed ourselves to be on the right track to righting the harm done to the family as well as honoring the vision of Baldwin to host Black writers in his final hometown, St. Paul de Vence, while providing writers space and time to write and create. Yet the encroachment upon Black space and stories that Cain displayed with the family in the initial founding and operation of La Maison Baldwin was not a fluke but a feature of later interactions with affiliated Black community members of the La Maison Baldwin network.
“While supporting [La Maison Baldwin] I located key financial and ideological inconsistencies from the founding of the organization that was incongruous with the narrative offered to me upon my hire,” the former executive director said in their resignation statement. “These inconsistencies related to the last three years of finances, developmental leads, status of projects, and community affiliation including with the Baldwin Family. When it was finally time to craft my exit letter the only thing I felt was bamboozled quite frankly.”
They continued, “In addition to the factual inconsistencies, Shannon made clear in [her] action that she is an unsafe steward of this important work and incapable of advocating for or supporting Black space. She repeated[ly] crossed clear and established boundaries with me and other community members. However, the final catalyst was when my experience progressed into racialized aggressions in the workspace.”
Upon arrival in France, we were naive to believe that this opportunity presenting itself was in the best interest of our creative and professional spirits. As we reflect as both former board members and alum of the residency, it’s apparent that the actions of the organization are anything but working in the spirit of Baldwin. Cain breached boundaries with the executive director and other Black members of the board including us and was unwilling to do the anti-racist work requested of her to repair these harms. These breaches, along with new revelations about La Maison Baldwin’s finances and Cain’s plans to write a book capitalizing on how she infiltrated Baldwin’s legacy that could further distress the family and tarnish the reputation of the organization, led to the executive director tendering their resignation to the board immediately on May 26, 2021, positioning Cain back into leadership of the organization.
For these reasons, we resigned from La Maison Baldwin’s board of directors. We ask that our likeness and writings not be used to promote the organization further.
Our concerns now are for the cohort of writers-in-residence coming behind us. If they choose to still participate and travel to St. Paul de Vence when COVID restrictions lift, it’s our hope that they will receive space to write and create without compromise or interference from Cain or the politics of the organization. We hope that the city will also be made safe for Black writers, as we have heard of a series of racist incidents occurring near La Maison Baldwin’s residence.
As for the Black members of the board who have chosen to remain, we hope they never experience (or never experience again, for some) what we and the family have experienced with Cain: a complete disregard for Black people and our well-being when it conflicts with her ambitions.
It’s critically important for us to relay the information to the incoming cohort of fellows and the broader La Maison Baldwin network, so everyone has the knowledge they need to make their own informed decisions and remain safe. For clarity, safety is more than physically feeling safe in St. Paul De Vence or the South of France, but also emotionally and mentally safe from the potential harm that could arise from leadership and other investors of this organization.
We owe it to our peers to let them know.
We owe it to James Baldwin.
Writing this letter has been gut wrenching because we truly believed in the potential of this work: an international network and organization striving to carve out a sanctuary space for Black writers to work within the spirit of Baldwin. We only hope one day that this sanctuary can truly be realized outside of the confines and violence of whiteness and its harms, intentional and otherwise. What we have witnessed is nothing but the continued commodification of Baldwin’s legacy and we cannot in good conscience be silent about it.
With love,
Brooke and Evan.
“One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.” –James Baldwin