Transition

In his essay Notes on a Native Son, James Baldwin speaks from a more political point of view in a voice that seethes with anger yet is also realistic in its acknowledgement of the harm that could be done if such anger is not harnessed. The essay in our anthology is chapter one of Baldwin’s book of the same name, which is a tour de force of cultural criticism from the 1950s, one that not only portrayed the realities of black life but also offered hope despite the rage it documented. Baldwin’s writing has a visceral quality to it that is lacking in Richard Wright’s prose. I found that Baldwin synthesized the problems faced by blacks and addressed them from a political as well as a personal perspective.

Wright too spoke of the injustices he suffered because of his race, but his demeanor seemed too gentlemanly and reticent to me. As I noted in my earlier blog entry, I thought Wright’s anger was muted and there was almost a fatalistic acceptance of the treatment he received. The persona of the narrator, in Wright’s essay never seemed to merge with the collective persona of the black people, which is what I liked so much when I read Baldwin. Baldwin, in the words of Cheryl Butler, “soaked up like a sponge the motions of all who surrounded him” (53).

Wright’s work remained rooted more in the personal with the occasional nod to the universal character of his suffering. If Wright’s Jim Crow essay unfolds in a series of anecdotes that are mostly personal, Baldwin’s opens with a bang and pulls in both his personal world and the one he inhabits. While Baldwin also recounts anecdotes, his style leans more toward using a mixture of disparate images and scenes that effectively show the chaos confronting him and others like him. Baldwin doesn’t wait to move methodically from the personal to the universal, but mixes them right away in the opening paragraphs. In the first ten or so lines of he piles on the information in a staccato bursts of short sentences that accentuate the urgency of the situation. We find out that his father died a few hours before his mother gave birth to her last child, a race riot broke out in Harlem shortly after the father’s funeral, the day when Baldwin also celebrated his nineteenth birthday. Baldwin’s essay vents his anger and that of others around him. I found a sense of catharsis in Baldwin’s that I felt was missing in Wright’s.

Of course, both authors protested the prevalence of injustice for blacks, but Wright’s lacked the forcefulness found in Baldwin’s. Although protest essayists speak in autobiographical terms they also speak on behalf of the “the disenfranchised from a relatively privileged position of access,” Brian Norman notes (29). But it seemed to me that the focus of Wright’s leaned more toward the personal, while Baldwin focused not only on what he felt but also on how his family (particularly the father) and those around felt. Baldwin mixes his experience with those of others in order to access “truths tested by the ‘crucible of experience’” (Norman 29). I found Baldwin more compelling to read, despite his polemics because he reached beyond Wright’s indignation and recitation of oppression to an articulation of “ truth about self, about his fellow man, and about the general state of society” (Butler 53).

Butler, Cheryl. The Art of the Black Essay: From Meditation to Transcendence. London: Routledge, 2002.

Norman, Brian. The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division. Albany: SUNY, 2007.