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.

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