Summary

This chapter discusses issues of “purity” within the context of race relations in the United States. Baldwin addresses the social relationship between races, here specifically referring to black and white Americans. He writes, “I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears to be able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct, on black-white relations.” (56). In reference to this failure in private life, Baldwin references a "blond girl in the Village" whom he knew, and how it was never safe for them to walk together on the streets, and how this "brutal and humiliating fact...thoroughly destroyed whatever relationship...