to be used as meaningful modes for the expression of uniquely personal identity, and not simplistic ways of limiting or pigeonholing character.

Ultimately, the issues of race and sexuality become issues of identity and individuality. Baldwin, though a black homosexual, felt free to express himself through white, female, or heterosexual characters, and his voice, whether it be as the authoritative social observer of Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name, the third-person narrators of Go Tell It on the Mountain and Another Country, or the intimately confessional protagonists of Giovanni’s Room and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, is always searching for meaning, for a solution to the problem of expressing oneself forcefully and honestly in an imperfect world that bombards the individual with preordained roles and assumptions. While ostensibly writing about “exiles,” “bisexuals,” or “artists,” all of which terms may have applied to Baldwin at points, he reserved for his characters the right to go beyond such labels and the freedom to feel and act according to the entire range of possible human behavior.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

First published: 1953

Type of work: Novel

A young black man in Harlem begins to confront the legacy of anger and guilt that he is inheriting from his family.

Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin’s first published novel, tells a passionate story closely paralleling the author’s own family background. It focuses on John Grimes, a black boy growing up in a religious home in Harlem under the stern hand of his preacher father, Gabriel. The action of the novel takes place in 1936, on John’s fourteenth birthday, with sections detailing previous events in the lives of John’s aunt Florence, his father, and his mother, Elizabeth.

Florence is a strident and bitter woman who left her ailing mother and irresponsible younger brother to come North. She married a man named Frank, who abused and abandoned her, and now she approaches old age feeling empty, living alone, and sharing in the life of her brother’s family.

Gabriel, her brother, had been a wild young man, but he repented, became a preacher, and married a fallen woman named Deborah. Succumbing to temptation, however, he impregnated a young woman he worked with and then refused to acknowledge his paternity. He watched his son Royal grow before his eyes and heard of the boy’s violent death in a knife fight. Gabriel drifted in despair, his wife passed on, and he came to New York to begin a new life. There he met Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was nine when her mother died, and, because her father ran a brothel, she went to live with her aunt in Maryland. There she fell in love with a young man named Richard; they moved to New York. Richard, wrongly accused of robbery, took his own life, leaving Elizabeth behind, alone and pregnant with John. Through Florence she met Gabriel, newly arrived from the South. They married, and Gabriel promised to treat John as his own. He preferred their other children, however, above all the fiery Roy, to his docile and pensive stepson, John.

The character of Gabriel is a sharper version of Baldwin’s own father, and, accordingly, his sternness and coldness elicit John’s hatred. Everyone assumes that John will become a preacher like Gabriel, but, approaching manhood, John is having deep religious doubts. He is also feeling guilt over the sin of masturbation and is subtly becoming aware of his admiration for and attraction to Elisha, another young man in the church.

During the course of the day depicted in the novel, John’s younger brother Roy is slashed in a fight, Gabriel strikes Elizabeth in anger, and Florence confronts Gabriel with his past in the form of a pained letter from his long-dead first wife. The novel’s central action, however, is John’s personal journey, culminating in the climactic third part titled “On the Threshing Floor.” Through a long night in the family’s church, the Temple of the Fire Baptized, John experiences a frenzy of fear, inspiration, and awakening, a spiritual rite of passage before his family and congregation, in which he gives himself over to powers outside himself, infused as they are with familial and racial history, and begins to see the road he must travel.

The action of Go Tell It on the Mountain is not expansive; rather, it focuses on inner turmoils and private moments. Time moves slowly, and the interspersed flashbacks elucidate present moments or events. Through the accumulation of information, Baldwin slowly brings into focus how centuries of racial oppression—slavery, injustice, rape, violence—have shaped the lives of one Harlem family and how the complex family picture affects a sensitive young man at a crucial juncture in his life.

Giovanni’s Room

First published: 1956

Type of work: Novel

The inability of a young American in Paris to confront his bisexuality leads to his male lover’s tragic downfall.

Giovanni’s Room is an intimate, confessional narrative of an American named David who looks back on his turbulent experiences in France on the eve of his return to the United States. The novel works through two time frames simultaneously, for as past events are recounted, the relevance of the present moment gradually emerges. By the end, night has become morning, and only then does the story being told reach its conclusion.

Months earlier, David came to France with his girlfriend Hella, but uncertainty in their relationship and her wanderlust sent her traveling solo to Spain. David, with little money and none forthcoming from his father in the United States, befriends and exploits the generosity of a middle-aged homosexual, a Belgian American businessman named Jacques. With Jacques he moves through the world of Paris gay bars, and at one of them he meets a handsome Italian bartender named Giovanni. David and Giovanni have an immediate rapport, and on the night of their meeting they stay out until dawn under the patronage of Jacques and Giovanni’s boss Guillaume; they end up alone back at Giovanni’s room, where they embark on a sexual relationship.

Having little money, David moves in with his new lover. Though David has had homosexual feelings and experiences before, the intensity of his fascination for Giovanni, and his own position in life—nearing thirty, and, ostensibly, marriage with Hella—make his relationship with Giovanni new and threatening. As so often has happened in the past, David ignores the possible consequences of his actions and continually reminds himself of his freedom, at any point, to abandon this new situation.

Giovanni’s room, as the title suggests, has metaphorical significances for the story David is telling. It is cluttered with the debris of Giovanni’s life—an unhappy past in Italy, an uncertain future in France, a superficial present of drinking and pandering among a subculture characterized by gossip, jealousy, and scandal. Just as Giovanni satisfies David’s repressed desires, so does he find in David meaning and hope, and his room becomes, alternately, a haven or a prison, an Eden or a hell, a passageway to truth or a dead end, for both young men.

Throughout the telling of this history, the narrative returns to David’s present in a rented house in southern France, alone, without either of his lovers. Time passes slowly; he measures the hours of the night drinking, preparing to leave, thinking mournfully of Giovanni, and waiting for morning to come. He recounts his panic and denial at Giovanni’s growing dependence on him. Upon receiving news of Hella’s imminent return from Spain, he cavalierly seduces a woman acquaintance, for whom he feels no desire, to prove his independence and control. When Hella arrives, David abandons Giovanni; though they run into each other, he never admits to anything more than a casual friendship. Hella is puzzled but attributes David’s behavior to the ambiguities of life in exile.

Meanwhile, Giovanni falls out of favor with Guillaume and loses his job. He has become “passe,” a trifle no longer worth the attentions of the older men who frequent the bar. Without a job and without David, he becomes desperate; one night he comes to the bar drunk to demand his job back and, in a moment of fury, murders Guillaume. He takes to the streets and is covertly aided by David but eventually is caught, tried, and condemned to the guillotine.

With Giovanni’s crime, David becomes aware of how irresponsibly he has behaved and how much he has been evading the truth. He takes Hella to the south to escape the horrors of Paris, which for him has taken on the dimensions and associations of Giovanni’s tiny room, but he cannot face Hella and runs away, only to be found by her days later among the homosexual subculture of Nice. His secret is revealed, and Hella departs for the United States, leaving David alone to face Giovanni’s execution, which seems also to be his own, with the coming dawn.

In Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin colorfully depicts the life of certain Paris milieus, but his focus is primarily on the three characters in the lovers’ triangle. The dialogue is peppered with phrases of French that add atmosphere and reinforce the sense of anonymity and ambiguity so crucial to David’s sensibility. Baldwin explores his chosen themes—bisexuality, exile, self-deceit, and guilt—with candor and boldness, remarkably so, given the age in which he wrote. The tone of the novel is one of rigorous self-examination and honest resignation; David has come to accept, although too late, responsibility for his actions. As such, his growth through the novel is a passage into maturity, a painful and tragic loss of innocence.

Another Country

First published: 1962

Type of work: Novel

A young black jazz drummer’s suicide subtly affects the lives and loves of those he leaves behind.

Another Country is an intricate novel about a diverse group of idealistic but often troubled individuals in New York City. The novel is unified by the character of Rufus, a young black musician who commits suicide early in the novel but remains a vital presence in the awareness and memory of others.

Book 1, “Easy Rider,” follows Rufus on the night of his suicide. Memories tell his history: growing up in Harlem and learning about racism, becoming a successful jazz drummer, meeting and falling in love with a simple, good-hearted southern woman named Leona, feeling impotent against society’s view of their interracial relationship, letting anger and alcohol inhibit his music, distrusting and abusing Leona, driving her to a mental hospital, losing his sense of worth, and, ultimately, jumping off the George Washington Bridge. The first book ends with Rufus’s death.

The second book, “Any Day Now,” follows the people closest to Rufus as they go on without him. His best friend, Vivaldo, an aspiring writer of Irish Italian descent, loves him and feels guilty for not saving him. At Rufus’s funeral, Vivaldo is drawn to Rufus’s younger sister Ida, and they soon become lovers. Ida is quiet, beautiful, proud, and bitter. Whereas Vivaldo can accept individuals without regard to color or gender, Ida can never escape, even as she becomes a successful singer, awareness of her limited position as a black woman.

Losing Rufus brings Vivaldo and Ida closer to Vivaldo’s friend and former teacher Richard and his wife, Cass. Richard has just sold his first novel, a popular murder mystery, and Cass is realizing the limits of his artistic vision. It is Cass who sends news of Rufus’s death to Eric, an American actor in Paris who was once his closest friend. After three years abroad, Eric is returning to New York to appear on Broadway, with Yves, his young French lover, soon to follow.

Another Country is unified not so much by a single action as by an interwoven pattern of events and themes. The story often jumps abruptly from scene to scene, and the narrative voice enters the minds of the characters—especially Vivaldo, Cass, and Eric. Seeking honest means to express themselves, they engage in parties and discussions, arguments and sex, with the mystery of Rufus always nearby. Vivaldo is plagued by jealousy when Ida spends time with her fast-talking producer, but she accuses him of making the racist assumption that all black women are whores. Eric, anxious about his future with Yves and somewhat dazed to be back in New York, becomes a haven for the disillusioned Cass; she comes to him, and they begin an affair. As the weeks pass, Vivaldo’s jealousy becomes more isolating, Cass’s infidelity more frivolous, and Eric’s future with Yves more certain.

In the culminating book 3, “Toward Bethlehem,” Vivaldo comes to Eric for friendship and comfort and, both filled with the memory of Rufus, they spend a night of passion together. Meanwhile, Richard has confronted Cass, and she must face her actions. Soon thereafter, Ida confesses to Vivaldo that she has indeed been unfaithful and realizes that, in trying to vindicate her brother’s death by exploiting the white system, she has become a whore after all. Ida and Vivaldo come to a precarious understanding, and Cass predicts that she and Richard will do the same. The novel ends as Yves arrives from Paris to Eric’s welcoming embrace.

Baldwin’s careful structuring of his plot elements employs simultaneous action—different scenes occurring at the same time—and discrepant awareness—knowledge available to the reader but not to individual characters—to highlight the self-absorption, misunderstanding, and folly endemic to human interactions. Parallel situations, such as Vivaldo’s courtship of Ida and Eric’s courtship of Yves, Rufus’s mistreatment of both Eric and Leona, Richard’s and Ida’s professional successes, and Ida’s and Cass’s infidelities, illuminate the complexity of Baldwin’s world.

In Another Country, conventional racial and sexual assumptions are rejected, and the characters struggle on equal terms to make the connections they need. The novel’s cryptic title functions on several levels, referring to exile (Eric’s experience in France), to oppression (the black experience in America), to idealism (the yearning for a land free of social evils), and, most important, to the experience of love—entering, conquering, possessing, and inhabiting another person, tenderly or violently, emotionally or physically, with all that such otherness offers to the one who dares to love.

Notes of a Native Son

First published: 1955

Type of work: Essays

Black people hold a precarious position in American political and artistic life, and their validation is essential to the fulfillment of the American identity.

Notes of a Native Son is a collection of essays published previously in various periodicals. Though not originally written to be published together, they share Baldwin’s concerns over the resolution of the United States’ racial dilemma and the question of American identity.

The first group of essays focuses on the black person as artist and on his or her image within the cultural canon. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin, once an enthusiastic fan of Harriet Beecher Stowe, labels her an “impassioned pamphleteer” and criticizes Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other “protest novels,” including Richard Wright’s Native Son, for falling short of their lofty aims, abusing language, and overtaxing credibility. Baldwin goes on in the second essay, “Many Thousands Gone,” to recognize Native Son as a literary landmark but questions its actual power, given the depersonalization and mythification of blacks as Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima. In essence, the “native son” is a monster created by American history, and it is American history that must confront and re-create him. The third essay in the group, “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough,” criticizes an all-black production of a theatrical standard for perpetuating racial stereotypes.

The second group focuses on the sociopolitical scene. “The Harlem Ghetto,” the earliest of the essays, documents the congestion and claustrophobia of 1948 Harlem. Baldwin considers token civic improvements—playgrounds and housing projects—to be at best superficial and at worst injurious. The position of black leaders is impossible, the black press merely models itself on downtown counterparts, and the popularity of churches only reflects the pervasive hopelessness.

This hopelessness is evidenced in “Journey to Atlanta,” which recounts the experiences of a group of black singers, including Baldwin’s brother David, as guests of the Progressive Party in Atlanta. The Melodeers, anticipating a week of open artistic exchange in the Deep South, encounter only disappointment and failed promises. They are coerced into canvassing for the party, have little opportunity to rehearse or perform, and are finally abandoned without support or return bus fare.

In the title essay, “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin juxtaposes his feelings upon his father’s death—the end of a lifetime of racial bitterness—with images of Harlem in August, 1943, despoiled from widespread rioting after the controversial shooting of a black soldier. The private and public worlds merge to reflect the cycles of life in a tormented community. As Baldwin’s father lay on his deathbed, Baldwin’s mother lay waiting to give birth to her last child. Before the rioting, Harlem also lay in wait—tense, sweltering, and crowded with white policemen ready to strike and uniformed black soldiers heading off to war in Europe. With the passage of time, death, life, and rage came to fruition, and Baldwin surveys the results. He recalls first becoming aware of his violent feelings against whites, and he knows that with his father’s death he must confront his filial hatred, just as Americans, black and white, must confront their shameful history.

The last group draws on Baldwin’s experiences in exile. “Encounters on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” depicts the relations between American blacks and Africans—relations that are not automatically warm and fraternal—and the simplistic and pitiful attitude Baldwin met among the French. In “A Question of Identity,” he analyzes what Americans such as himself seek in voluntary exile—an anonymity that expresses a longing for identity. Baldwin says that only by rejecting American values can one eventually affirm them, that the self-alienated discovers America by going to Europe.

The collection ends with two anecdotal essays. “Equal in Paris” relates Baldwin’s false arrest for the theft of hotel bedsheets and his comic but demoralizing adventures in Parisian prisons and courts. Finally, “Stranger in the Village” tells of the summer Baldwin spent in his friend Lucien’s Swiss village, a community that had never before seen a black person. The villagers approached him with curiosity and a bit of fear; he felt no malice, but he detected in their ignorance traces of the imperial and missionary traditions. Baldwin compares his experience there with the larger experience of blacks as supposed “strangers” in the “village” of the United States.

Notes of a Native Son demonstrates Baldwin’s ability to connect disparate experiences and images—emotional and political, abstract and concrete, past and present—into persuasive arguments. His prose is full and textured, and ideas have the force of weight. At times, Baldwin speaks though the first-person singular voice of African American history, an “I” that endured displacement, slavery, and all that followed. The tone becomes bitter, stubborn, and accusing. At other times, he adopts an empowered first-person plural voice, a “we” that assumes a white audience and refers to blacks from a distance. Yet Baldwin’s characteristic objectivity, a more precise and color-free voice, is always available, and in these essays he acknowledges the complexity of these issues, the partial truth of cultural assumptions, and the shared responsibility for social transformation.