Book Review 2: James Baldwin — Notes of a Native Son
He loved his country so much that he vowed to always be honest with her
Why this book?
I debated between a review of Notes of a Native Son and Going to Meet the Man. Some things I do for practicality: I have the most notes on these two books. Notes is a collection of essays and Baldwin’s first non-fiction work (published in 1965). Going is a collection of fiction stories (published ten years later).
I chose Notes because it was the first Baldwin book I ever read. Plus, I gave you some non-fiction heat from La Virtuoso (Toni Morrison) last week. The sentimental values of my first Baldwin text and having a good chunk of notes (primarily quotes) from Notes (sorry for that) is how we landed here.
Though I had to scrape the memory bank to remember what each essay in Notes was about, I had fun doing it. I didn’t say I was entirely successful, but it was fun.
Jimmy B pens magnificently.
A son of the concrete, Harlem specifically, Baldwin’s writing feels like turning on a bright light while searching a room for an elusive object. Suddenly, or at least usually, things become more apparent. When assessing race and its vast web of consequences, mainly in America, but in Europe too (since he spent a lot of time in France), he was a virtuoso himself.
Our affinities for artist(s) have an origin story.
And the explanation is more often emotional than logical. Disclaimer: I am blindly biased to most things NY(C). Jimmy B went to . This next bit will confuse those unfamiliar with the NYC public high school system. The same applies to NYC natives not from the Bronx or Manhattan/Harlem since kids from other boroughs (naturally) know nothing about the ones furthest from them. To a Bronx child, Brooklyn might as well be Philadelphia (distance-wise). STOP ASKING PEOPLE FROM THE BRONX OR HARLEM WHERE TO GO OUT IN BROOKLYN OR QUEENS, WE LITERALLY DON’T KNOW WHERE THE J & F TRAINS GO (bars, double entendre).
Where was I? Baldwin and Clinton. That’s where I wanted to go to school. parties were poppin’, but I could not go there. Brother got kicked out, so Mother Dearest said not a chance in hell. That one Clinton party I went to pre-high school…
…and they had a great soccer team. Jimmy B, I didn’t end up going to your alma mater. We did the opposite: I left the Bronx and went to school in Harlem, you left Harlem and went to school in the Bronx.
People! This is how I became infatuated with Baldwin and his work. Felt personal. I could read with my head and heart when he talked about our town and its crevices. Like an elder telling you about “how the place used to be.” It’s as if he were speaking to me directly.
I’ll close this section with a shout out to Sconex, the head honcho public high school social media platform and its wild ways. The real remembers.
Baldwin was incredibly transparent with his audience.
“What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has hide to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people.”
“I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
<< Setting it up like the book >>
Part one.
Everybody’s Protest Novel:
Baldwin despised Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The popular narrative about the novel is that it highlighted/depicted the evils and harsh conditions of slavery, helping to lay the groundwork for the Civil War. While any singular explanation for the kickoff of the Civil War — historical events, generally — is incomplete, I believe two strong reasons were inextricably tied to the following:
- Economics of the plantation south vs. industrial north, and
- Political power shifts, more specifically the power of federal vs. state governments, really the north vs. the south, vis-à-vis expansion of the U.S. and how the power balance would be impacted
In effect, the sustainability of #1 and #2 (i.e., who is paying for it, ultimately) vs. appealing to a national conscience (abolitionists’ efforts). Historically, across societies with rigid hierarchies/caste systems, the former (economics/politics) usually holds more water than the latter (conscience/humanity). However, the latter is eventually interwoven into the narrative (for the most part). More straightforward to then understand why Abraham Lincoln believed that emancipation was a military necessity and that preservation of the Union, irrespective of the enslaved’s prospects, was the real goal. Exceptions abound. I recognize the generalization(s), but they hold weight.
Where were we? Baldwin doesn’t like the damn book. First off, how do you even please a writer like Baldwin? True to form, he felt the novel lacked depth. The book failed to uncover the complexity of Black lives caught in the web of the plantation society. Put bluntly — Uncle Tom’s Cabin was generic (to Baldwin, of course).
“Our passions for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of meaning. These categories which were meant to define and control the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos; in which limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions.”
This quote has stood the test of time — across many domains of human life — powerful.
Many Thousands Gone:
Baldwin goes on to criticize Richard Wright’s as well for portraying a character, Bigger Thomas, that adds to the stigmas/“passions for categorization.” Baldwin has a complex relationship with Wright, his idol & mentor, which you’ll surely appreciate if you course through his books. Start with , the essay “Alas, poor Richard.”
“The idea of Bigger as a warning boomerangs not only because it is quite beyond the limit of probability that Negroes in America will ever achieve the means of wreaking vengeance upon the state but also because it cannot be said that they have any desire to do so.”
“One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds. This is why his history and his progress, his relationship to all other Americans, has been kept in the social arena. He is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his continuing status among us were somehow analogous to disease — cancer, perhaps, or tuberculosis — which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured.”
Pause.
Moment of transparency. Initially, I thought I had 7 pages of notes written down for the book. Turned out to be 3–4, so I’ll continue to focus on the essays on which I have the most feedback. There’s one last essay, “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough.”
…alright, next Part.
Part Two.
The Harlem Ghetto:
As a citizen and member of said community, Baldwin’s illumination of 20th-century Harlem and all its nuances centers you squarely in the setting as a reader. He begins the essay by evoking imagery of Harlem as a place where everything was always more expensive despite an inferior quality of life (“…too many human beings per square block.”). This hasn’t changed across the city. There are still too many humans per square block. But it keeps you stimulated.
There’s cause for the densely packed communities. Not surprising, I hope, a classic case of institutionalized you-live-there-we-live-here–
“…since Negroes will not be allowed to live in Stuyvesant Town, Metropolitan Life is thoughtfully erecting a housing project called Riverton in the center of Harlem; however, it is not likely that any but the professional class of Negroes — and not all of them — will be able to pay the rent.”
That ‘and not all of them’ inclusion is very…Baldwin. Lots of people in Harlem, but the inability to pay rent was high. The history of “rent parties” and what people did to “get by” is thematically important in contextualizing Baldwin’s quote. Fun fact about Riverton: former Mayor David Dinkins, who spoke at my high school graduation, lived in the community, and .
I vaguely recall, from other works, Baldwin developing an apathy for church, which he felt was unnecessary to attend and contradictory in many ways. I don’t doubt that there’s also that commonplace child reaction of feeling forced by parents to attend when you’d rather be doing something else. Baldwin indicts the (Black) church for being practically contradictory and more fanciful/harmful –
“…but [churches in Harlem are] actually a fairly desperate emotional business…Their faith may be described as childlike, but the end it serves is often sinister. It may indeed, “keep them happy” — a phrase carrying the inescapable inference that the way of life imposed on Negroes makes them quite actively unhappy — but also, and much more significantly, religion operates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: while people own the earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice in it; the bad will be punished and the good rewarded, for God is not sleeping, the judgment is not far off.”
My last quote from this essay is a heady one, arguably prescient:
“In America…life seems to move faster than anywhere else on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet.”
The final two essays in this section of the book are Journey to Atlanta (one quote from that section below) and Notes of a Native Son.
“Of all Americans, Negroes distrust politicians most, or more accurately, they have been best trained to expect nothing from them; more than other Americans, they are always aware of the enormous gap between election promises and their daily lives.”
…alright, next Part.
Part Three (Final).
This final stretch of the book was notable because Baldwin analyzed Europe (France, in particular) and the implications of race there vs. the U.S. Whenever I read Baldwin’s takes on life outside the U.S., I wondered if there was a honeymoon element or if he had taken these beliefs to the grave. Was it easier to dislike what you’re used to, and anything different feels like a relief? Or was the current racial and political environment so destitute that, even with a storied colonial past, places like France were still a respite? I don’t know.
Let’s go right to the final essay of the book.
Stranger in the Village:
Like The Harlem Ghetto, I had the most notes for this essay. And boy, oh boy, it was a wild one. Baldwin starts out in a Swiss village (Switzerland), I believe by way of an invitation from a friend who is a native. And so it began –
[M, Quote] “Everyone in the village knows my name, though they scarcely ever use it, knows that I come from America — though, this, apparently, they will never really believe: black men come from Africa — and everyone knows that I am the friend of the son of a woman who was born here, and that I am staying in their chalet. But I remain as much a stranger today as I was the first day I arrived, and the children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the streets.”
You don’t just see the cousin word and not look it up immediately, right? Apparently, Neger was used by some speakers (Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland) to colloquially refer to someone with darker skin. This word has been increasingly removed from usage for most people, it seems, but was pretty standard throughout the twentieth century, the way I imagine it was for African Americans to refer to themselves as Negroes. I ain’t an etymologist, but Neger, Negroe, Negro (Spanish), etc., all grow (I’m sorry, I had to) from the same tree.
Baldwin notes a simultaneous level of apathy for his humanness and appreciation for his presence that he couldn’t quite wrestle with. The only thing he knows for sure is that (mentally, at least) he’s below, and they are above, despite their social primitiveness.
“…no element of intentional kindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.”
“But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by African and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrived to conquer and to convert…I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture control me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know my existence.”
And finally…
“…most of them [have not] seen more of Europe than the hamlet at the foot of their mountain. Yet they move with an authority which I shall never have.”
“…the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefather, or his neighbors.”
I would pay good money to see a Dave Chappelle skit on Baldwin in this Swiss Village. Gold material for the .
“One cannot claim the birthright without accepting the inheritance.”
I hear you, Baldwin, I hear you. Rest in peace.
A final word, for real.
Disclaimer: I read this book in 2021. If some of the review feels wanting, apologies. Please fill in where I may have left out (assuming you’ve read Notes of a Native Son); more hands/pens benefit readers.
And remember,
in all that you do, please, don’t ever stop reading.
