James Baldwin

Baldwin talks a lot about his relationship with his father, as well as his reaction to his father’s death. One comment that truly stuck with me while reading this was ‘It was only that I had hated him and I wanted to hold on to this hatred… it was not a ruin that I had hated.'(p. 75)

This line from the reading stuck with me because it showed me that Baldwin only had this emotion to hang onto once his father died. Without his father and the hatred pointed toward him, there was no other emotion to feel but pain. The fact that his father dying did nothing but exercise the thoughts of pain and hate in his head was interesting to me, especially once he brought up his aunt sooner after. Baldwin describes his aunt as ‘beautiful’, or at least that is how he considered her in his childhood. Baldwin seems to recall everyone as nice r kind or beautiful, except for his father. Yet, his aunt is reduced to nothing more than a ‘little black monkey’ as she mourns the death of her brother. Baldwin clearly allows the feelings he has for his father to affect the relationships others may have had with his own father.

This reminds me of Go Tell It On a Mountain, since in that story the father and son dynamic was also strained. I believe that it was strained, but not in full form of hatred. We see how important a father figure is and how it can affect an entire upbringing. It can affect the views on religion, being, and violence. I question if violence in the home, through beating can be made into how people view the world. I believe that a spanking is different than actually being abused throughout childhood. I know that this story talks about how beatings can be related to love and furthermore, religion can be associated with being a good person. So, in Notes of a Native Son the hate Baldwin saw was just his realization that love and the Church did not have to be associated with violence.

In Baldwin’s opening story ‘Go Tell It on the Mountian’, religion is a constant topic of conversation. I find it an exciting appeal to many different issues. Religion throughout this story is prominent in the family dynamic. I especially found it interesting when the mother talked about how the boy’s father was a good man. When the boys truly think about it, they decide he must be a good man because he prays so often, and the mother does nothing to disagree with this perspective.

As someone who was raised Catholic, but has a father who is Seventh Day Adventist, church was a huge part of my life while growing up. I had the black church experience on Saturdays and then Catholic mass on Sundays. I will say the black church and Catholic mass are two completely different experiences. Catholic mass is about reading the Gospel and having a lesson taught to you for about an hour. (in my opinion). When I would go to my father’s church, I would experience the passion and the ability to truly feel what the pastors were saying because of their delivery. So, in a sense, I understand why religion was portrayed as a way of being considered ‘good’.

The ties to religion and violence also build into this same scene. The fact Roy talks about how they are lucky to have a father who makes them go to church and read the Bible, though this line does sound sarcastic in my eyes, it talks about having the ability to associate church with love and violence, such as hitting the boys when they do something wrong. This does in fact associate the ways of violence and religion having mixed lines, especially for John who has such strong ties to his faith.

When reading the first part of Go Tell It on the Mountain and Field’s piece “Pentecostalism and All that Jazz: Tracing James Baldwin’s Religion” I noticed many connections between religion and the Bible and Baldwin’s literary work. One that particularly caught my attention was the prevalent state of nakedness that dominated John’s feelings. On page 38, John stresses about what he would have to do if his mom was not feeling well. “He would have to prepare supper, …take care of the children…and be naked under his father’s eyes” (Baldwin, p. 38). When he looks at his baby picture in his house, he feels the shame of his nakedness in comparison to his siblings’ nakedness, even though he is a baby. Baldwin writes, “But John could never look at it without feeling shame and anger that his nakedness should be here so unkindly revealed” (Baldwin, p. 26). A lot of John’s feeling of nakedness reminded me of the origin and creation story with Adam and Eve. In the same way that Adam and Eve, once they committed original sin, became aware of themselves, their bodies, and their shame; they hid their naked bodies from each other and were overcome with vulnerability and guilt. The portrayal of John’s character is done similarly. In every example in which John acknowledges his nakedness, he feels shame and this nakedness and shame is tied to John’s sin. Like Adam and Eve, John submits to the temptations of his sexuality, has sinned, and now feels shame and guilt. John’s sin, not only his masturbation but his true sexuality, that being homosexuality, makes him feel shame in the world and this shame appears to him to be very visible to everyone. John is always under the assumption that others know of his sin, especially his stepfather. Now not only must he stand before God the Father on judgment day but must also stand before his step-father, naked and exposed. This also connects to a larger theme in which religion and the institution of the Church often view and depict sexuality outside of the tradition of the man and woman and outside of marriage to be shameful. These boundaries and standards of religion and the Church prevent people like John from having good relationships with the Church, religion, and even himself. I am curious to see how much this theme of nakedness and shame similar to the shame of Adam and Even when they committed their sin of temptation expands for John when he continues to explore his sexuality throughout the novel.

Baldwin and Wright respond to an intellectual landscape with limiting depictions of blackness in differing ways. Both authors agree that not only do white authors dehumanize and demonize African Americans in their work, but African American writers themselves write narratives that pander to a white audience. As black men engaging with a Eurocentric intellectual tradition, they take on the role of Caliban, (from Shakespeare’s The Tempest) using the language of his master, Prospero, against him. Their approaches to combatting eurocentrism through their literature display differing interpretations of black political thought.

Richard Wright characterizes African American literature as lacking in “forthrightness and independence. ” (Intro, X).  In his essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” he writes, “Negro writing in the past has been confined to humble novels poems, and plays, prim and decorous ambassadors who wend a-begging to white America… dressed in the knee-pants of servility… For the most part these artistic ambassadors were received as though they were French poodles who do clever tricks.” Their writing centered intelligent, tame protagonists who are led to an uncharacteristic act of violence, but Native Son does the opposite to expose the effects of the socioeconomic reality imposed on the negro. Through the character of Bigger Thomas, Wright takes on a philosophy of Afro-pessimism, arguing that due to the ongoing effects of racism, colonialism, and the history of slavery in the United States, the Negro is driven to violence. The character Bigger in Native Son, internalizes and lives out this philosophy and believes that “the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else” (Wright ).

In comparison, Baldwin, an avid reader, enjoyed books written by white authors and art coming out of Europe growing up. His appreciation for the works of authors like Henry James is evident in the quality and artistry of his written work. However, he knew himself to be “a kind of bastard of the West.” As a black man, he brings to the western tradition a “ a special attitude.” “These were not really my creations” he writes, “they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself.” Because he is not white, he cannot claim these great writers and artists as intellectual predecessors. In accepting this outsider perspective, he can freely and perpetually criticize the country which he loves so dearly. Baldwin admits that he had fear for both white and black people, but to submit to that fear, “gives the world power over him.”

This is the key difference between Baldwin and Wright’s work is that where Baldwin is optimistic yet critical of his country, Wright exposes the injustices of his country, and accepts them as unchangeable fact. As Baldwin writes, “[protest novels] emerge… A mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream.” The failure of Wright’s perspective is that it cannot see beyond the Master-Slave dialectic, submitting to the idea that racism is a fixture of American society, and we have to work within this system. Baldwin’s philosophy gives us hope. His job as a writer is to “examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source,” and reveal the context of the Negro problem: the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country. Using his unique perspective, he reveals complexity in Negro life, pushing against the dehumanizing assumptions of the Eurocentric framework and revealing its limitations.

In “Black Boys and Native Sons” by Irving Howe, Howe presents James Baldwin’s strong assertions about Richard Wright’s protest novel Native Son. Baldwin writes that although the novel was “undertaken out of sympathy for the Negro,” presenting Bigger as a monster, “a social victim or mythic agent of sexual prowess” confined Bigger as a Negro to “the very tones of violence that he [as a Black man] has known all his life.” The portrayal of Bigger Thomas and the implications that it provided for Black men and ‘Blackness’ was a topic I often questioned once completing the novel. Like Baldwin, I too wondered, if Wright’s goal was to show the negative effects of white America on Black Americans, then why paint the picture that Blacks were the problem in society? As we further discussed in class, Wright’s depiction of Bigger Thomas only further perpetuated the stereotype that white people had of Black men being violent and dangerous. Native Son articulated everything that Americans were thinking but were afraid to say out loud and because it did that, and confirmed a harsh and negative stereotype of Black culture, it was way more regressive than it was progressive. It presented a sociological issue that I found could not be fixed or at least could not be accurately addressed through Wright’s literary portrayal of Bigger. Native Son rather than empowering Black culture and progressing the already bad image that they had in society, instead incited and stirred up its white audience, verifying to them that the Black race was inferior. It perpetuated the same stereotype and tone of violence that Black men like Bigger were subjected to their whole lives and did not give Black people and even Black authors like Baldwin much room to grow and prove society and white America wrong about their preconceptions. Because Wright failed to humanize Bigger and defined him as a reactionary experimental figure that only operated on suffering and violence, the predominantly white audience of the novel who then shared that message with America were unable to understand and view Bigger as a realized individual. According to Howe, this negative portrayal communicated “that only through struggle could men with black skins, and for that matter, all the oppressed of the world, achieve their humanity.” As a result of Native Son, deepened racial divides, completely missing the mark of what Wright claimed it was not supposed to do. 

This exemplified to me how much literature can take responsibility for either deepening or diminishing societal issues like racism and racial inequality. As someone who studies Sociology, I acknowledge that there are a multitude of factors that contribute to societal problems but I never really imagined literature as having as much of an impact on shaping social narratives and perceptions in the way that Native Son did. Now, I am eager to read and find out how James Baldwin will use his literature to portray Negro men and Black culture. Although Howe stated that “Baldwin has not yet succeeded in composing the kind of novel he counterpoised to the work of Richard Wright” I am curious to see myself how Baldwin will counter the work of Wright in his own writings. Unlike Native Son, I hope that Baldwin’s work gives Black America the recognition it deserves and advances the image of Black men, Black women, and Blackness in general.