Books by and about James Baldwin

 Go Tell It on the Mountain  /   The Fire Next Time  /  Notes of a Native Son  /    If Beale Street Could Talk

Carol E. Henderson, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical And Critical Essays. Peter Lang Publishing, 2006.

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Notes of a Native Son 

By James Baldwin

Reviewed by Dachine Rainer

"Notes of a Native Son," the title essay in this small superlatively written and phenomenally intelligent collection by the young Negro James Baldwin, begins like this: “On the 29^th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3^rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.”

Mr. Baldwin has been enraged into a style; the harshness of his lot, his racial sensitivity, and the sense of alienation and displacement that is frequently the fate of intellectuals in this country has moved him to portray in lyrical, passionate, sometimes violent prose the complex, oblique, endless outrages by which a man, particularly a black man, can be made to feel outside the established social order.

Lacking identity with Negro culture, and finding it impossible to establish any genuine rapport with white intellectuals, the Negro intellectual is singularly isolated. The dissident Jew, with related problems, has an indigenous intellectual tradition that goes back several millennia, but the Negro comes from a preliterate culture in Africa and in the American South; to borrow the language of theology, the Jewish intellectual is merely a schismatic, the Negro intellectual, a heretic, and hence in perpetual exile. Their numbers—and this heightens the lack of belonging to an in-group—are understandably, few.

Whether James Baldwin is discussing anti-Negro manifestations, as in his criticism of Hollywood’s “Carmen Jones.” Or the disgraceful opportunism of political groups, like the progressive Party in Harlem (“Journey to Atlanta”), or Negro anti-semitism, he never fails to be evocative and illuminating. In “Equal in Paris,” he does something more, and in “Many Thousands Gone,” the only piece in the book that doesn’t measure up to the rest, something less. 

In the first, he goes beyond the specifically racial situation—he is arrested in Paris, through an error of sorts, and placed incommunicado in prison, and his account of the experience is the existentialist terms of the pathos inherent in the human condition; in “Many Thousands Gone,” an early essay, he psychologically repudiates his blackness to so alarming an extent that the piece reads like a literary exercise in schizophrenia. There are many examples: “Time has made some changes in the Negro face. Nothing has succeeded in making it exactly like our own. . .” And he speaks of the Negro as “they” and of himself as “us.”

Almost invariably, Mr. Baldwin brings a depth, intensity and clarity to his subject: the peculiar dilemma of Negroes, particularly of Northern Negro intellectuals who can legitimately claim neither Western nor African heritage as their own. His virtues are so great that one can make light of Mr. Baldwin’s weaknesses: his wit is caustic and nearer tears than laughter, and his earnestness virtually unrelieved. Humor—and how true this is for the Negro!—is the only safety mechanism in the perpetual extreme situation, and one wonders how Mr. Baldwin who reveals so little has survived so well, for he is certainly the most perceptive Negro writing today, and, quite possibly, even granting Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison their very generous due, the most eloquent.

Source: Commonweal (January 13, 1956)