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)