Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (4/4)

Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (1/4)
Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (2/4)
Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (3/4)

The oldest memory was the aforesaid lynching, which was literally a scene of excluding an outcast. In the United States, one’s race is determined by the One-Drop Rule; i.e. a principal that counts anyone as a black person, if he/she has at least one black ancestor. ⁴ The institution does not allow a single drop of black blood in a white person. In the meantime excessive bleeding in the scenes of violence appeals the visual identity of the blood of two races.

Moreover, the frail deposition of the “pure” white race, for the reason of the exceptional definition, is revealed, notwithstanding the fact that the concept of races was invented from social necessity of the white authority. The number of black people was destined to increase unless the miscegenation was strictly prevented. Jesse’s fear of the expected changing balance of population, which would lead to the changing balance of political power, is revealed assuming the form of irritation as, “pumping out kids, it looked like, every damn five minutes.” (935)

During the lynching, Jesse witnesses the biggest genitals he had ever seen, and recognizes his mother’s face enraptured by the sight. It is important that Jesse’s masculine gender image was produced by the reflection of the participants. Jesse could not see the victim enough by himself, and what he experienced was mostly the reaction of the crowd.

At last he found out the gender image in the victimized black man. Jesse stopped looking back on the past, awakened his wife, urging, “Come on, sugar, I’m going to do you just like a nigger, just like a nigger, come on, sugar, and love me just like you’d love a nigger.” (950) By pretending himself to be a black man, and regarding his wife as a black woman, he regained his sexual ability. In other words, he accepted what he had refused, though they were only images which had distance between the realities. As a result, he may become a father of a new life, undoubtedly a white child, but also having something to do with the black race. This closure is organized as it leaves a grotesque impression in proportion to the racial prejudice of the reader.

Consequently, Going to Meet the Man can be counted as one of the “everybody’s protest novel” for both its form and content. Baldwin’s writing is distinguished from other protest novels for he chose white male elite as the protagonist, and accepted the race relations in the American South of those days. The personality of Jesse is also affirmed repeatedly; however, the narration is questioned by the repetitive usage of “he supposed,” thus it is not presented as the objective truth, but as a subjective view, negatively referring to the excluded possibilities. ⁵

The novel is eminent in another point that Baldwin comprehended the racial discrimination as a duplication of gender images. Instead of directly presenting the sexual strength of black people, he exposed the contradiction that both the images of the black and women had been constructed by the minds of white men, and yet they were distressed by inferior complex or fear toward what they have convinced. Their unreasonable fear was actually to some extent reasonable as long as the definition of one’s race depends on the One-Drop Rule.
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4 The color of one’s skin is not necessarily important.
5 “And he was a good man, a God-fearing man, he had tried to do his duty all his life, and he had been a deputy sheriff for several years. “ (934)

Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (3/4)

Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (1/4)
Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (2/4)

“What a funny time […] to be thinking about a thing like that,” (935) Jesse says to his wife. It is two o’clock in the morning, and his utterance took place in their bedroom. However, Jesse is experiencing his first impotence, and both of them are thinking about the black people, which the husband detests to excess. He does not only curse them by saying, “What had the good Lord-Almighty had in mind when he made the niggers?” (934) but by working as a sheriff, he attempts to exclude them from the community. Described as following, the man seemed to be the last person to be distressed by impotency in the first place:

He was a big, healthy man and he never had any trouble sleeping. And he wasn’t old enough to have any trouble getting it up―he was only forty-two. (934)

Jesse becomes totally bewildered and imputes the responsibility saying, “It’s not my fault!” first to his wife, then to the black. Indeed, he heard a car coming closer to their house, and recognized the headlight traveling across the room. Although the windows were shuttered and Jesse could not verify, he believes that they were blacks in the car. Furthermore, he reached for his gun in fear. Jesse’s strange conviction and fear are important concepts that the author reiterates in the text.

By degrees, he traces back to the past—from the day before, to his childhood—seeking the reason for his physical problem. In short, the story begins with a white male elite’s impotency and ends with his recovery. It is clear all the more when the title is put into concern, that Going to Meet the Man is readable as a quest for the masculine gender image.

To begin with, Jesse recalls a black ringleader whom he tortured in the daytime. The victim is described as, “one eye, barely open, glairing like the eye of a cat in the dark,” which bears a close resemblance to Pluto, a cat beaten by a white narrator in Edgar A. Poe’s The Black Cat. Furthermore, the adolescent’s message, somehow lengthy for a dying person, should remind some readers of another Poe’s novels; William Wilson. It is interesting that neither story concede the singularity of the narrator’s self, but contrasts with another character that has the excluded identity of the narrator. Especially The Black Cat is worth comparing with Going since it refers to the intimate relation between race and gender. The narrator of The Black Cat makes an attempt on two cats’ lives; succeeded with the first one, but ended in failure with the second. Both cats were black, though the second’s chest was speckled with some gray hair proposing the miscegenation of its parents. Black cats were more than cats; they were menace to the narrator’s relationship with his wife. Therefore, the word “ringleader” is suggestive. The dying young man is called so as if he can jeopardize the wedding ring. Jesse’s sexual complex can also be recognized from the description that he “grabbed his privates,” (937) while listening to the black man.

The second episode which recurred to his mind was about a black boy who refused a chewing gum. The boy is not more than ten, though he says, “I don’t want nothing you got, white man,” (938) and shuts the door behind him. ³ As a deputy sheriff, Jesse is generally an agent of racial discrimination in the community, in place to enforce the law and justice, but at least in this scene, he is forced to be the object.

Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (4/4)

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3 Judging from Baldwin’s former arguments, the way this boy "protested" is invalid since it is only a repeition of racism.

The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays and Reviews (Penguin Classics) Edgar Allan Poe David Galloway

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Toni Morrison

Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (2/4)

Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (1/4)

First, realistic aspects of the novel should be discussed, since it is influential with the persuasiveness of the work. The demonstrators are mentioned by Grace as, “They going to be out there tomorrow,” thus it is conceivable that the present time in Going is set in the days of the civil rights movement; i.e. early in the 1960’s, which coincides with the period of writing. (933) According to the statistics, the number of lynchings reached a peak in 1882 in the American South, and yet they still appear in records of the 1920’s. (Raper, 480) This historical background corresponds with Jesse, a man of 42, witnessing a black man tortured, as an 8 year old boy. ¹

In Everybody’s, Baldwin criticized the renowned protagonist of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for being too patient to consider as a realistic character. (20) Conversely, the illusion that African-Americans exhibit certain unnatural characteristics is excluded from Going to Meet the Man, even when they are severely oppressed by the white. It is notable in the extreme at the sight of lynching, which recalls the scene of Passion, though the victim did not say, “Forgive them, father! They don’t know what they are doing,” as Jesus prayed in the Gospel according to Luke. (23; 34) Nor did “the sun stopped shining and darkness covered the whole country until three o’clock; and the curtain hanging in the Temple was torn in two,” after his last breath. (Luke, 23; 44-45) Rather, the black man uttered meaningless sounds, screaming in both fear and pain until he was finally burnt to death.

Moreover, descriptions of harsh violence do not allow the reader consider them as sensational dramatizations which are far from the historical fact. On the contrary, emasculating and burning the victim alive was one of the typical processes, when lynching functioned as a social ritual in the South. In The Tragedy of Lynching, Arthur Franklin Raper analyzed the reasons of lynching in the United States, and indicated that white men, the executors of lynching, were nervous about both direct and indirect risks of black men approaching white women. ²

Actually, more brutalities were recorded, as in the cases of C. J. Miller, or Henry Smith; their skins were stripped off, fingers were served from both hands and feet, or they were shot by innumerable bullets. (Wells, 92) Hence, if Baldwin had an intention to emphasize the cruelty, he could, without marring the reality of the text; though he did not in order to avoid sentimentalism.

Consequently, Baldwin was successful in defending the persuasiveness of Going by eliminating illusions which were generally inherited among traditional protest novels, and observing the reality of a particular actual community, the American South. However, as long as a novel is valued by the correlation between the narrative and the reality, it should be difficult to surpass historical documents. Now the emphasis of discussion moves on to examine the way Baldwin’s creative imagination affected the work.

Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (3/4)

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1 Jesse is a name allegorically interpretable as “Je see,” the viewer.
2 The main reasons were murder (37.7%), followed by rape (16.7%), and attempted rape (6.7%).

The Tragedy of Lynching Arthur Franklin Raper

The Red Record Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (1/4)

James Baldwin was one of the first writers to put in question the common feature of so-called protest novels written by earlier novelists. His awareness of issue toward racial discrimination is explained in the last lines of his essay, Everybody’s Protest Novel, which first appeared in print on 1949:

The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it has categorization alone which is real and which cannot be translated. (19)

Judging from above, the crucial problem of racism in the United States is not the situation of the white having predominance over the black, but the disposition that their race aside individualities are buried in oblivion. Baldwin required reconsidering even the novelists who were thought to have been “conscientious,” such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Richard Write, for they share a kindred premise in their writing; good blacks and bad whites. He insisted that their narrative is simply an inverted image of the binary opposition between the races, revealing the limited imagination of the authors; even strengthening the stereotype produced by the white.

Paradoxically, dealing with racial discriminations may collude with racism itself. This theory became a milestone in the tradition of protest novels, at the same time putting Baldwin, as one of such novelist, into a dilemma. The purpose of the following notes are to examine Going to Meet the Man, a representative novel by the same author, written 16 years after the essay, and to discuss how it is organized as an “everybody’s protest novel.”

Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (2/4)

James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories (Library of America) James Baldwin Toni Morrison

Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, the Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, the Devil Finds Work, Other Essays (Library of America) James Baldwin Toni Morrison