April 2021 – Page 4 – James Baldwin

The (Fe)Male Prison

I know it seems counterproductive to think about the role of women in a book all about men, but Hella’s been on my mind a lot this past week. I commented on Faith’s last post about the ways in which Hella constitutes an “easy way out” for David. Even though he does not love her, he values all that she represents as a woman: a socially acceptable heterosexual relationship, a couple of kids and white picket fence, and the promises of the American Dream™.

What I find especially remarkable about Hella is just how incredibly unremarkable she is. Hella is hardly featured in the novel; aside from a brief appearance in the final chapters, she exists primarily as a vague, nebulous concept to which David periodically alludes but who never fully develops as a character. In fact, for all the many times she’s mentioned by other characters, all we really know about her is that she really submits to the patriarchy: her self-proclaimed purpose in life seems to be nothing more than to marry a man and to raise his children–to exist as someone’s “obedient and most loving servant,” which she professes is “all [she’s] good for” (EN&S 323-324)

Despite an initial reactionary distaste, it now occurs to me that Baldwin never intended to develop Hella because she’s not really a person at all: she’s a doorstop! Hella’s function is analogous to Madeleine’s in “The Male Prison.” As Baldwin describes it, “Madeleine kept open for [Gide] a kind of door of hope, of possibility, the possibility of entering into communion with another sex. This door, which is the door to life and air and freedom from the tyranny of one’s own personality, must be kept open, and none feel this more keenly than those on whom the door is perpetually threatening or has already seemed to close” (CE 233).

In exactly the same way that Madeleine appeals to Gide, so, too, does Hella appeal to David: not as an autonomous human being with her own thoughts and feelings, but as a representation of the nuclear family and the traditional gender roles into which David so damnably wants to fit. Hella is nothing more than a solution to David’s problems–a “steady ground, like the earth itself, where [he] could always be renewed” (EN&S 302).

Women in Giovanni’s Room

As I read Giovanni’s Room, I could not quite put my finger on what Baldwin’s intentions were regarding Hella or his portrayal of women generally. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, he constructed well-rounded female characters and seemed to demonstrate an understanding of the difficulties women face regarding sexual relationships, childbirth, and motherhood. As a result, I had high expectations for his treatment of Hella in Giovanni’s Room, and I was puzzled to read Giovanni’s speech about women to David at the beginning of Part Two. Giovanni, probably due to jealousy, inquires about Hella and makes a number of broad generalizations about womenー what they want, who they are, and so on.

“Nobody likes to travel, especially not women” (283).

“Women are just a little more trouble than I can afford right now” (284).

“There is no need, thank heaven, to have an opinion about women. Women are like water. They are tempting like that, and they can be that treacherous, and they can seem to be that bottomless, you know?ーand they can be that shallow. And that dirty” (285). He goes on to say he possibly doesn’t really like women, but he still asserts he respects them… and that he used to beat them. All the while, he refers to Hella, a grown woman, as a “silly little girl” (285). When David defends Hella and her intelligence and complexity, Giovanni, who has never met her, describes her as a flighty busybody. Giovanni displayed absolutely no respect for women or for Hella during that entire interaction. Perhaps Baldwin wanted to display his jealousy, but the point of this scene still nags at me. I found it difficult to continue sympathizing with Giovanni after this part of the story.

Finally, we meet Hella, and she gives her own speech about women. She explains to David how humiliating it is to be a single woman and having “to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself” (322). Here, Baldwin seems to understand that unmarried women during this time were sized up constantly by those around them, only being free once married, though that kind of freedom pales in comparison to that of a man. While Hella dislikes these constraints, she works within their confines to carve out a life for herself. Baldwin restores dignity to Hella’s character after Giovanni’s diatribe about her.

I tend toward the conclusion that Baldwin is showing us all the complexities of Giovanni’s dynamic with David. His jealousy and the tension between the normative relationship of Hella and David and the same-sex one between David and Giovanni. I also recognize that this is a story of what it’s like to be a man, not a woman.

Sex and Power

I have been thinking a lot about our discussion during Wednesday’s class regarding how Jesse in “Going to Meet the Man” thinks of sex as being about power and domination rather than love. In reading this story, we can all recognize what a horrible, distorted sense of love and affection Jesse has for his wife, if he has any sense of this at all. He does not seem to think of Grace as more than an object to fulfill his sexual needs, and since she does not even really have the ability to do that, she probably means very little to him. However, I feel like David in Giovanni’s Room also falls into this trap of associating sex with the power that one can have over another. David demonstrates his concern with this part of his relationship with Giovanni during their fight when David accuses Giovanni of wanting to feel strong in their relationship and wanting David to be his “little girl” (337). Giovanni says that he does not think about their relationship in this same way, but David does not seem to be able to separate sex from the power he feels he needs to demonstrate to prove his masculinity. Because of this, I have a difficult time trying to decide if I think David actually loves Giovanni. On the one hand, I do not think that David would have been able to have a relationship with just any man because it takes a lot for him to allow another person to see his true self. For him to be able to do this with Giovanni, I think that he must have had to love him at least a little bit. However, I also think that David did not even let Giovanni see his full true self, as he remained guarded, deceptive, and concerned with the power dynamic of their relationship even as he was saying that he loved Giovanni. Regardless of the extent to which David loved Giovanni, though, it is clear that any relationship that cannot consider sex as separated from power is going to be problematic.

Queerness & the Roles We Play

As I finished reading Giovanni’s Room, I reflected on David’s fixation on how homosexuality is perceived by the general public and by himself. There are moments in the narrative where David does not seem to be experiencing his own life, but rather observing it passively, as if watching a play. It is also obvious that there is a disconnect between what he thinks and what he feels, which leads him to lead a life devoid of authenticity. I wanted to look deeper into how Baldwin portrays this dissonance in David’s character, and to examine how David’s inability to “act out,” as it were, the role he wants to play, leads him further into isolation. David’s first sexual encounter with someone of the same sex happened when he was in America, and when he was still very young. In the description of the night he and Joey shared, it is described as a night of purity and joy, perhaps the only moment in the novel to do so: “we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love” (225). This was short-lived, however, since the moment that snapped David back to reality is when he remembered that “Joey is a boy,” and that filled him with fear. He immediately thinks of how others would perceive what had happened, (“I wondered what Joey’s mother would say when she saw the sheets. Then I thought of my father…) rather than how he had felt. In the shame that others might have placed on him, he made his decision to do what he thought was right, even though it did not feel right.

Additionally, I also feel like David’s identity is inextricably tied to the fact that he is an American living in France. His American identity is brought up often by the people with whom he keeps company, and is also a large part of any conversation he has with Giovanni. I think this is the reason why he observes the fluidity of gender and sexuality in Paris as something abnormal, since he was not exposed to it back in America, where he formed the majority of his identity as a man and his perceptions on masculinity. David is still holding on to what he considers to be “normal” in a society where he is the one with ‘abnormal’ (“queer for women”) preferences. When Giovanni asks why David won’t tell Hella about them, David reminds Giovanni that “people have very dirty words for — for this situation… Besides, it is a crime — in my country and, after all, I didn’t grow up here, I grew up there” (286), as if the laws of another country would reach him here across the ocean.

David often feels like he is being observed like a “zoo animal,” but at the same time he engages in the same act of judging others based on his own prejudices and stereotypes. When he, Giovanni, Jacques, and Guillaume leave for breakfast one morning, he observes how “everybody, without seeming to, is looking at us and [he] is beginning to feel like a part of a travelling circus” (262). The quote that made me want to write a blog post about this is on page 263: Guillame’s suggestion had the effect — but subtly, as though a wind had blown over everything or a light been imperceptibly intensified — of creating among the people at the bar, a troupe, who would no play various roles in a play they knew very well.” I could not help but think that this motion — of people settling into roles which they knew very well, roles that they knew they could (and to some extent, should) play — highlighted the inner turmoil that David feels throughout the novel, since it is his inability to do so that leads to Giovanni’s death and to his despair.

Power and Execution

In Giovanni’s Room and “Going to Meet the Man,” Baldwin makes an argument for love and against hatred. Giovanni and David’s relationship fails because David is unwilling to admit his love, rather hoping that he will be able to live a straight American lifestyle after he leaves Paris. Similarly, Jesse is unable to love his wife Grace because he sees sex as a form of domination rather than love. But even though these two men are the causes of their failed relationships, they do not face the greatest consequences in each of these stories that involve execution. Rather, Giovanni and the man at the lynching are killed as a result of the main characters’ inability to love. David and Jesse both associate sex with power rather than love, which results in their worlds being worse off for themselves, but more so for the people they infatuate over.

We have talked heavily about who had the power in David and Giovanni’s relationship. and I believe it is David, for he associates his sex life with his ability to enter a straight space. He does not enjoy having sex with Hella, but does so anyway because he wants to be a “natural” American man; he wants a family, a house, and steady income. And he holds this idea of a “natural” life over Giovanni throughout their entire relationship, reminding him of the looming threat of Hella returning to Paris, which will cause David to return to his “natural” self. Giovanni does not understand why David cannot love him, and it is because David believes Giovanni will not give him any power, both economic and social, if he has a full time relationship with him. Hella on the other hand will give David that power because she gives him access to the straight married world that David’s father wishes him to enter before he gives his son any more access to money. David flees his relationship with Giovanni because it does not give him any social or economic power, and because of this Giovanni sets his own path towards execution; David’s infatuation with power, then, serves as one of the blows in Giovanni’s long path towards execution, with the final blow being the guillotine. Had David practiced a life of love rather than power, Giovanni would probably not be facing death. Similarly, Jesse also experiences an execution in his story, but rather than being the cause of it, he is the result of it: a man who has been taught hate and power is the way of the world.

Jesse, in a sense, is a more extreme version of David; he is incapable of love, but does not even consider that love is a possibility in his life. Instead, he arouses himself with images of hate and power, specifically the castration of the man at his first “picnic.” His sense of power is not an economic or social one like David’s, but a purely physical one where domination over the body is equivalent to happiness in sex. He sees the castration as something pleasurable because it is the ultimate form of domination over the body, in that it is both a murder and a sexual destruction. Baldwin shows us how harmful a life of hatred can be, with people infatuated with destruction and domination rather than love. Jesse is an extreme example, but he is the logical conclusion to a child being taught a doctrine of hatred; it follows that he equates execution with sexual fulfillment because his father taught him that execution is where people come together.

Through Giovanni’s Room and “Going to Meet the Man,” Baldwin shows us how the dogma of power corrupts the purity of love. In both stories a father figure teaches their son “natural” ideas of the family and its power in society. David learns that the straight American family is a path toward happiness because it gives him access to wealth. Jesse is taught that physical domination brings happiness because it brings power to those who dominate. While the ends of Giovanni and the castrated man is far worse than the ends of David and Jesse, Baldwin still shows us that obsession with power has ruined both of the main characters of these stories. David is left sickened and disturbed by the image of himself in the mirror and Jesse is left impotent unless he thinks of violence. While Giovanni and the man are physically executed, David and Jesse are spiritually executed, left with empty and unfulfilling lives because they were taught to practice accessing power over trying to love.

Sex, Violence, and Power

Robert Gnuse’s article argues that the seven biblical passages condemning homosexuality are not referring to relationships between two free, adult, and loving individuals, but abuses of power and control. With this frame of thinking, it is clear that Christians should use their faith to condemn sex that is pedophilic, describes rape or attempted rape, or is done with hatred in the heart. Instead, the scripture is used to attack the LGBTQ+ community and equate all same-sex relationships with subjugation and immorality. To undermine this mindset, in Going to Meet the Man Baldwin depicts a relationship that, from an outsider’s perspective, is the model for virtuous and ethical sexuality. There is a heterosexual union between a man and a woman that Christians would openly support more than the union of a same-sex couple.

However, we uncover that Jesse’s sexual perversions fit into the biblical descriptions of immoral sexuality as compared to homoeroticism. Jesse rapes Black women, gets aroused from assaulting young boys with a cattle prod, and finally gets off on the memory of the murder and subjugation of a Black man from the power of white men. The Biblical condemnation of homosexuality serves to protect young boys and men from being violated or penetrated by another man trying to hold mastery over them. Baldwin directly connects Jesse’s sexuality with violence and control when Jesse feels himself “violently stiffen” as he sees the effect of his brutality on the beaten young man in the jail cell. In his attempt to describe raping Black women to the boy, Jesse slips and says to him “You lucky we pump some white blood into you every once in a while—your women” referring first to the man before correcting himself to say his women–creating homoerotic tension (938). Jesse also fits into the predatory stereotype commonly assigned to gay men as he attempts to charm little Black boys with candy and gum only to assault them as they get older.

Despite all of this, Jesse still believes he is acting out his life and sexuality in a pure and honorable manner. Jesse thinks, “And he was a good man, a God-fearing man, he had tried to do his duty all his life” (934). Here we see the conflict with what Jesse has been raised to believe is good and moral, and the horrendous nature of his thoughts and actions. He believes he is charged to destroy those who “fight against God and go against the rules laid down in the Bible for everyone to read” (939). This shows the tension between the finer rules laid out in the Bible and Christians’ execution of these laws with violence and hatred. Jesse completely neglects the overall mission of Christ which is to love others.

No Grace

When I read “Going to Meet the Man,” I honestly found Jesse’s character so disturbing that I didn’t really want to think about why Baldwin chose to use the name “Grace” for the character of Jesse’s wife. However, when Prof. Kinyon brought it up in class, it was helpful to start to think through some of the symbolism and consider what commentary Baldwin might be making. It was also helpful to try to make sense of why this story, which is primarily about racial violence, is in the unit about queer identity. Baldwin never chooses names carelessly, and there’s a lot of meaning behind Grace’s name in this story.

In my research for my senior thesis, I’m reading a lot by theologian Mark Jordan, who studies sexuality, silence, and violence in Christianity. One of his insights is that the erotic is a privileged form of speech in how we talk about human relationships with God—that is, it’s some of the best language we have for describing intimacy between God and humans, as art like “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” illustrates. Without a way of being honest about sexuality, of course our relationships with God and one another will be distorted, which all too often leads to violence.

Jordan’s insight helped me make a bit more sense of “Going to Meet the Man.” With a distorted understanding of sexuality, one based around violence and racism rather than love, how could Jesse possibly attain grace? As we started to discuss in class, Baldwin’s work always circles back to trying to reclaim the Christian message of love. Viewing the story through this lens helps me understand how Grace’s character might fit into the broader themes about love, sexuality, violence, and redemption that run through Baldwin’s work.

One question I still have after reading this story is, why would Baldwin choose Jesse as the main character’s name? In the Bible, Jesse is an important part of Jesus’ ancestry, the father of King David. It’s safe to assume that Baldwin was well aware of Jesse’s role in Christianity, so why would he give this name to such a despicable character?

“They had taught him what it meant to be a man”

In “Going to Meet the Man” and Giovanni’s Room, the father figures of the main characters undertake the responsibility of showing their sons what it means to be a man. In “Going to Meet the Man,” the narrator recounts the way Jesse remembers his father and his father’s friends, saying, “They were his models…and they had taught him what it meant to be a man” (939). Jesse’s memory of a lynching in his childhood shows exactly how his father taught him his understanding of manhood. Rather than simply allowing Jesse to tag along to the murder, Jesse’s father ensures that the murder becomes formative for his young son’s conception of manhood, hoisting Jesse up on his shoulders to witness the murder and repeating that Jesse was “never gonna forget this picnic” (949). In Jesse’s father’s mind, manhood was intimately related to white supremacy and power.

Similarly, in Giovanni’s Room, David’s father attempts to impose his conception of manhood on his son. In the heat of a drunken argument with his sister, David’s father says, “All I want for David is that he grow up to be a man. And when I say a man, Ellen, I don’t mean a Sunday school teacher” (231). Through this line, David’s father seems to imply that a man is not a beacon of purity; prior to this conversation, David’s father was “interfering” with a woman, one of his nightly activities. Ellen responds, saying, “A man is not the same thing as a bull.” In other words, his depiction of man is lacks humanity and love.

Strikingly, these two descriptions of manhood precede opposite reactions by the main characters. As the murder ends in “Going to Meet the Man,” Jesse describes loving his father more than ever (949). However, after David hears Ellen and his father’s conversation, he recounts despising his father and hating Ellen (231). Yet, despite these polar opposite reactions, each of the principal characters adopts their father’s understanding of manhood, showing that the father’s example either influences this opinion of manhood or serves as an example their sons are fated to repeat. Jesse associates manhood with power—just as his father has sex with his mother only on the eve of this expression of white power, Jesse cannot achieve an erection and fulfill his manly duty of making love to his wife unless he too thinks about power and domination over others.

More surprisingly, David also adopts the mistaken depiction of manhood presented his father. Unwilling to fully love Giovanni, David has loveless intercourse that he does not allow to mean anything. Though not to the same extent as his father, David is a bull in the sense that his affairs are loveless and meaningless. Just as David’s father runs around with women without looking for commitment, David is unwilling to commit to a relationship filled with real love. In each of these texts, the father figures show their son’s that manhood does not entail love—the Sunday school teacher, in David’s father opinion, shows too much love and not enough manhood and the white supremacist can only love in a limited way. Though each of the characters responds differently to this message, David and Jesse ultimately repeat the loveless lives of their fathers, reinforcing the ineptitude of a live without love.

Love and Hate

ThroughoutGoing to Meet the Man, there is a certain contrast between love and hate. I found it interesting that Baldwin chooses to tell this tale of horrifying hatred during the act of lovemaking was performed. Jessie is unable to get an erection, which is when he recounts an incidence of extreme hatred towards a black man. This gruesome tale of a black man getting mutated and lynched by the white public is told without paying much attention to what action the man did to deserve this inhumane treatment. Baldwin writes that Jessie “beg[ins] to feel a joy he had never felt before. He watche[s] the hanging, gleaming body, the most beautiful and terrible object he had ever seen till then.” (Baldwin 335) The joy is contrasted with the hatred which has caused the “hanging” body. This contrast allows the reader to really feel disgusted at the white man who is turned on by this hate. It makes the story more impactful for me because Jessie does not find anything wrong with the joy he is receiving after seeing such heinous treatment. It makes me despise this white man, who represents the general white male population at that time. Baldwin also contrasts love and hate when he points out that “at that moment Jesse loved his father more than he had ever loved him.” (Baldwin 336) Jessie’s love for his father stems from his father introducing him to the hatred which he carries with him in his adulthood.

In his adulthood, when Jessie cannot get an erection, he finally gets one by recounting the story of a black man getting lynched. Jessie “[thinks] of the morning and grab[s] her, laughing and crying, crying and laughing, and he whisper[s], as he stroke[s] her, as he [takes] her, [and says] “Come on, sugar, I’m going to do you like a nigger, just like a nigger, come on, sugar, and love me just like you’d love a nigger.” (Baldwin 338) He is turned on by hate and then makes love to his wife. Yet, he only thinks about a white mob lynching a black man. Not only is the act of lovemaking made possible because of hate towards the black population, but even during the act of lovemaking Jessie does not think about his wife, and thinks about the lynching. He is literally in love with hate.

The contrast between love and hate makes the readers despise Jessie as it reveals his personality which involves only unreasonable hatred to his core, even while lovemaking.

Race and Sexuality as Social Constructions

Reading ahead in the syllabus, I was interested to see that Going to Meet the Man was included in our unit on James Baldwin’s queerness. Of course, this attuned my reading to queer motifs in the short story. Going to Meet the Man is undoubtedly a story about systemic white supremacy, anti-Black police brutality, and a horrific lynching. The white family literally enjoys a picnic at the lynching, reminding the reader that Baldwin is speaking, first and foremost, about race. But there are also important passages relating to sexuality. For example, the short story opens with Jesse’s inability to achieve an erection with his wife. Although “[e]xcitement filled him like a toothache…it refused to enter his flesh.” It is only at the end, when Jesse thinks about the brutalized Black male body that he is able to achieve an erection: “He thought of the boy in the cell; he thought of the man in the fire; he thought of the knife and grabbed himself and stroked himself and a terrible sound…came out of him.” It is notable, then, that Baldwin depicts Jesse as both sexually perverse and horrifically racist.

I don’t think that Baldwin is claiming that Jesse is “gay.” As a queer man himself, it is hard to believe he would write a story in which part of Jesse’s perversion is his homosexuality. Still, I am reminded of how the United States itself constructed sexuality along similar lines as it constructed race, an idea which I first learned about after reading Siobhan B. Somerville’s Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. In the monograph, Somerville argues that “it was not merely a historical coincidence that the classification of bodies as either “homosexual” or “heterosexual” emerged at the same time that the United States was aggressively constructing and policing the boundary between “black” and “white” bodies” (3).

An example that Somerville offers is the year 1892 –– the year that Plessy v. Ferguson was decided by an all white, all male Supreme Court. This case was the most dramatic pronouncement of how American culture was fundamentally racialized along Black/white lines, according to Somerville. That same year, another court case entered the national limelight: the case of Alice Mitchell, who murdered her female lover because she believed there was no reason for the two to live if they could not get married. This case, widely sensationalized by national American media sources, hardened the distinction between homosexuality/heterosexuality, resulting in the widespread criminalization of sexual “inverts” (queer people).

I bring up this reading because Going to Meet the Man attunes the reader to topics of both race and sexuality as they are constructed in America. Baldwin centers white sexualization of the Black body, such as when Jesse sees the Black man’s “privates…huge, huge, much bigger than his father’s, flaccid, hairless, the largest thing he had ever seen till then, and the blackest.” It is notable that Baldwin is voicing these fetishizing thoughts, with an attention to skin tone, through a white narrator. Hence, in Going to Meet the Man, Baldwin intertwines the themes of race and sexuality, especially as the two are constructed by anti-Black hegemonies.