A "protest play," unfortunately, always has a hard time of it artistically, and even more so if, like Baldwin, the playwright doth protest too much. And not only too much but too much too soon. Right at the outset [of Blues for Mister Charlie] we are clobbered with a tirade which is an inflammatory inventory of all the injustices toward the Negro, and, justified as these grievances are, they strike a false note: … Baldwin would shudder at the thought of having written a pop-art play. But that is what it is: pop art and agit-prop. (p. 48)

What is most serious is that the play pretends to be about racial injustice and the Negro's struggle for his human rights, while it is actually about something else. I am not saying that Baldwin is deliberately deceiving us, which would be bad enough, but that he is deceiving himself, which is, artistically speaking, worse. (p. 49)

It seems to me that Blues for Mister Charlie is a homosexual play, which would be fine if it came out and admitted it. But so far from doing this, it actually sneers at homosexuality: according to Richard, all white women, however eagerly they make love to Negroes, have "got some piss-assed, faggoty white boy on a string" whom they will cravenly marry. Yet persecuted blacks and persecuting whites seem to become subliminally identified with victimized but sexually free, noble homosexuals and tormenting, sexually frustrated heterosexuals; it is typical for the sexual misfit to blame the society's sexual mores for all his troubles. Why else would the racial issue be reduced here to sexual terms, and sex be seen as the true, secret strength of the Negro, the ultimate cause of white discrimination against him, fear and hatred based on sexual envy?

Out of this comes the most monumental falsification of all: the myth of Negro supremacy. Agreed that the myth of white supremacy is as unscientific as it is deleterious, but is the opposite myth any more justifiable, any more salubrious?… [So] it goes: white arrogance must bow down before black arrogance, rather than all arrogance come to an end. (p. 50)

[In The Devil Finds Work Baldwin] takes a long look at American movies, analyzing films such as Birth of a Nation, In the Heat of the Night, The Grapes of Wrath, The Exorcist, and Lawrence of Arabia and discussing stars such as Sidney Poitier and Paul Robeson. On the surface there seems to be little holding the choices together. But Baldwin is a consummate writer, and his ruminations on the films, or the fragments from his life that they recall, are illuminating. His blackness is the glue of the book, and the reader finds that his view from the mountaintop, in exile, is a clear and important one.