Student Essay on Notes of a Native Son

Notes of a Native Son

Summary:   Twenty-four year old James Baldwin, a black writer so enraged at the racism to which he was subjected during a visit to New Jersey that he believed he was about to commit murder, left the United States for Paris, France. Reflecting on his decision in a 1985 interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Baldwin made it clear that his relocation did not indicate agreement with the jingoistic sentiments of any catchphrase such as America: Love It or Leave It".

America: love it or leave it" was a popular slogan in the 1960s. Plastered on signs and bumper stickers, the phrase was a response to the people, most of them young college students, who loudly and angrily protested America's involvement in Vietnam, inviting the wrath of those who believed that one's country deserved the unconditional support of the citizenry no matter how questionable the actions of the government.

Two decades earlier, twenty-four year old James Baldwin, a black writer so enraged at the racism to which he was subjected during a visit to New Jersey that he believed he was about to commit murder, left the United States for Paris, France. Reflecting on his decision in a 1985 interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Baldwin made it clear that his relocation did not indicate agreement with the jingoistic sentiments of any catchphrase. "America is my country," Baldwin said. "Not only am I fond of it, I love it" (265). In an earlier conversation with Chicago journalist Studs Terkel, Baldwin explained why his flight to foreign soil was important. "I began to see (America) for the first time. If I hadn't gone away, I would never have been able to see it; and if I was unable to see it, I would never have been able to forgive it" (15).

The America that Baldwin saw is documented in Notes of a Native Son, a collection of essays written between 1948 and 1955 in which he provides a vision of America that is not dramatically at odds with the one presented in the eighteenth century writings of St. John de Crevecoeur, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, but from the perspective of a man who knew that the truths that Jefferson held to be "self- evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and unalienable rights" (19), still required proving to a lot of people, perhaps even to the author of the Declaration of Independence himself.

"It is no accident that Joe Louis is the most idolized man in Harlem," James Baldwin writes in Notes of a Native Son. "He has succeeded on a level that white America indicates is the only level for which it has any respect." It is also no accident that blacks, more than anyone else, have placed the fighter known as the "Brown Bomber" on a pedestal, because "in every act of violence, particularly violence against white men, Negroes feel a certain thrill of identification, a wish to have done it themselves, a feeling that old scores are being settled at last" (64).

In this collection of essays written between 1948 and 1955, Baldwin touches on many topics, ranging from the unfortunate depiction of blacks in novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Native Son, to his own troubled relationship with his father, to the refuge of sorts he finds from racism by fleeing America for Paris, France, but one theme is dominant throughout: the search for identity by a people whose "past was taken from (them) literally, at one blow" (169).

In some respects, Baldwin's early life is not unlike Franklin's. Both were raised in households crowded with children, both rebelled against their fathers' outlines for their lives, and, no matter how high the quality of the formal education they received, both recognized the value of self-education, reading voraciously on their own, and, ultimately, finding their fortunes through the word -- Franklin as a printer, Baldwin as a writer. But the color of his skin, or, more accurately, the attitude of white America toward the black man, prevents Baldwin from fitting the "pattern" of Franklin. "The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible," he writes, and no matter how much Baldwin might agree with Lucy Elizabeth's Franklinian belief that hard work, good character, and an honest nature are qualities that can bring about success, Baldwin, born in 1924, one year before Russell Baker, knows that most of America agrees with Lucy that the Negro should know his place, and that America knows how to keep him in it. "I know it's not easy to live in a world that's determined to murder you," Baldwin says in an interview with Ida Lewis. "Because they're not trying to mistreat you, or despise you, or rebuke you or scorn you. They're trying to kill you...That's what it means to keep the Negro in his place" (91).

Even after numerous advances in civil rights, however, Baldwin does not see the score as having been settled. Slavery has ended, but the belief in white supremacy remains, even with those whites who echo the cry for equality. Negroes, he writes, "have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons...anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn" (74). To illustrate the point, Baldwin tells of a social gathering of the Progressive Party, a liberal political action group, at which a black singing quartet, intent on protecting their voices, declines an invitation to follow their fourth number with a fifth, so enraging Mrs. Branson Price, "a gray-haired white woman of incurably aristocratic leanings" (78), that she orders their black manager to leave the premises with comments that reveal her true color: "Had he forgotten that he was in Georgia? Didn't he know better than (to) sit in a white woman's office"" (83). As Baldwin told Ida Lewis, "All that brotherly love was bullshit" (91).

For the Negro, Baldwin finds that life in America is a cruel paradox. His identity having been stolen by white America, "he must, henceforth, accept that image we then gave him of himself: having no other and standing, moreover, in danger of death should he fail to accept the dazzling light thus brought into such darkness" (30). Not only was the African a heathen in desperate need of the salvation that only the American colonists could provide by possessing the courage to bring the light of the Lord to the jungles (29), his black skin "is the color of evil; only the robes of the saved are white" (21). And, so "the African, exile, pagan...fell on his knees before that God in Whom he must now believe; who made him, but not in His image" (21).

For Baldwin, the true salvation came once he fled America, an action he took to escape the racism that left him so enraged upon a visit to New Jersey that it seemed inevitable that he would either be murdered or commit murder (97). It was in Paris, France that, as he told Henry Louis Gates, Jr., he "began to see (America) for the first time" (15), and, more importantly, continued his journey to self-discovery, and, in the process, remade himself. Otto Friedrich, in writing Baldwin's obituary in Time magazine, remembers sitting in a Paris restaurant with the then struggling writer, and watching as Baldwin drew a rectangle on the tablecloth, then, smiling faintly, writing his dream inside the rectangle: "Go Tell It on the Mountain, a novel by James Baldwin," it read (80), and though he was not on American soil when his dream became reality, the seeds were planted in the United States. Like Baker, Baldwin's talents were noticed by a teacher, in his case, a white woman who directed a play he wrote at age nine, then encouraged his theatrical bent, as well as raising the suspicion of his father, by taking him to "real" plays (91). Like Franklin, his skills brought him to the attention of powerful people, such as Mayor La Guardia, who sent him a letter to congratulate him on a song he wrote (3). Although Baldwin's literary fame may be pointed to as an example of how hard work and talent can reap rewards for anyone in America, no matter the color of their skin, Baldwin sees it differently. Regarding Negro politicians, he notes that their rise is "utterly dependent on the continuing debasement of fourteen million Negroes." Likewise, while prominent Negroes like Joe Louis and Baldwin himself "have proven the worth of the Negro people...no housewife expects Marian Anderson's genius to be of any practical aid in dealing with the landlord, so nothing is expected of Negro representatives" (75).

Baldwin's biographer, David Leeming, says, "oppressed minorities constantly face the danger of believing the myths attached to them by their oppressors" (6), and Baldwin at one time had to admit to himself that not only did he hate white people, he was equally contemptuous of blacks. "I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt" (7). The irony inherent in this view characterizes the Negro's situation in America. Like everyone else, he is told that hard work, character, honesty, and ability can, and will, lead to success in America. Less clearly stated but certainly understood in twentieth century America is that, in the eyes of society, an individual's value is dependent on success. For the Negro, for whom many opportunities are denied because of racism, success often carries a heavy price. "In Harlem," Baldwin writes, "Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it" (83). If, as Baldwin told Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The price of becoming American is beating the hell out of everybody else" (265), hence the respect accorded Joe Louis, it may also require beating the hell out of yourself, as well.