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