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Carol E. Henderson,
James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical And
Critical Essays.
Peter Lang
Publishing, 2006.
Go
Tell It on the Mountain / The Fire Next Time
/ Notes of a Native Son
/
If Beale
Street Could Talk
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Notes of a Native Son
By James Baldwin
Reviewed by Langston Hughes
February 26, 1958
I think that one definition of a great artist
might be the creator who projects the biggest dream in terms of
the least person. there is something in Cervantes or
Shakespeare, Beethoven or Rembrandt or Louis Armstrong that
millions can understand. The American native son who signs his
name James Baldwin is quite a ways off from fitting such a
definition of a great artist in writing, but he is not as far
off as many another writer who deals in picture captions of
journalese in the hope of capturing and retaining a wide public.
James Baldwin writes down to nobody, and he is trying very hard
to write up to himself. As an essayist he is thought-provoking,
tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he uses words
as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat,
rise and take a bow in disappearing.
In "Notes of a Native Son," James
Baldwin surveys in pungent commentary certain phases of the
contemporary scene as they relate to the citizenry of the United
States, particularly Negroes. Harlem, the protest novel, bigoted
religion, the Negro press and the student milieu of Paris are
all examined in black and white, with alternate shutters
clicking for hours of reading interest. When the young man who
wrote this book comes to a point where he can look at life
purely as himself, and for himself, the color of his skin
mattering not at all, when, as in his own words, he finds
"his birthright as a man no less than his birthright as a
black man," America and the world might as well have a
major commentator.
Few American writers handle words more
effectively in the essay form than James Baldwin. To my way of
thinking, he is much better at provoking thought in the essay
than he is in arousing emotion in fiction. I much prefer
"Notes of a Native Son" to his novel, Go Tell It on
the Mountain, where the surface excellence and poetry of his
writing did not seem to me to suit the earthiness of his subject
matter. In his essays, words and material suit each other. The
thought becomes poetry, and the poetry illuminates the thought.
What James Baldwin thinks of the protest
novel from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Richard Wright, of the
motion picture Carmen Jones, of the relationships between
Jews and Negroes, and of the problems of American minorities in
general is herein graphically and rhythmically set forth. And
the title chapter concerning his father's burial the day after
the Harlem riots, heading for the cemetery through broken
streets--"To smash something is the ghetto's chronic
need"--is superb. That Baldwin's viewpoints are half-American,
half Afro-American, incompletely fused, is a hurdle which
Baldwin himself realizes he still has to surmount. When he does,
there will be a straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about
the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an
illuminating intensity that should influence for the better all
who ponder on the things books say.
Mr. Hughes, the poet, is author of the recent
book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life.
| Selected Works
Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953
Notes of a Native Son, 1955
Giovanni's Room, 1956
Nobody Know
My Name (, 1962
Another Country, 1962
The Fire Next Time, 1963
Blues for Mister Charlie (a play, produced in 1964)
Going to Meet the Man, 1965
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, 1968
A Rap on Race, with Margaret Mead, 1971
If Beale
Street Could Talk 1974
The Devil Finds Work, 1976
Just Above My Head, 1979
The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1985
The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction,
1948-1985, 1985
Perspectives: Angles on African Art, 1987
Conversations with James Baldwin, 1989
Early Novels and Stories, 1998
Collected Essays, 1998 (ed. by Toni Morrison) |
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*
Take this
Hammer—a James Baldwin documentary
KQED's film unit
follows poet and activist James Baldwin in the spring of
1963, as he's driven around San Francisco to meet with
members of the local African-American community. He is
escorted by Youth For Service's Executive Director Orville
Luster and intent on discovering: "The real situation of
negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco
would like to present." He declares: "There is no moral
distance . . . between the facts of life in San Francisco
and the facts of life in Birmingham. Someone's got to tell
it like it is. And that's where it's at." Includes frank
exchanges with local people on the street, meetings with
community leaders and extended point-of-view sequences shot
from a moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview and Western
Addition neighborhoods.
Baldwin reflects on the
racial inequality that African-Americans are forced to
confront and at one point tries to lift the morale of a
young man by expressing his conviction that "There will be a
negro president of this country but it will not be the
country that we are sitting in now."
* *
* * *
Wake Up Everybody—Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes (1975)
Africa Makes
Some Noise—Documentary on
contemporary music from Africa
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
 |
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
10 April 2012
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