Notes of a Native Son

by James Baldwin

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Notes of a Native Son is a collection of ten essays that James Baldwin published in magazines such as Commentary, Harper’s, and The Partisan Review between 1948 and 1955. It also includes “Autobiographical Notes,” written for this volume. Taken together, the essays reveal self-knowledge, cultural understanding, and articulateness that are astonishing when one considers that Baldwin wrote these essays without the benefit of a formal college education and before he was thirty years old. Baldwin makes clear in “Autobiographical Notes” that he was driven to be a writer, to use his imagination on his own experience, and thereby to create order out of chaos by facing his past and America’s past fearlessly and honestly. To make himself into a writer, he had to become articulate, to understand and come to terms with his culture, and to know himself. The essays of Notes of a Native Son present the outlines of his quests and show what he had learned by 1955.

The book is divided into three sections. The three essays of the first section are cultural commentaries on representations of the African American in the arts. They show Baldwin’s mature assessment of the complexity of his position as an African American intellectual. The three essays of the second part examine aspects of African American life during and shortly after World War II. These essays show Baldwin’s origins, the home and the culture that he had to understand in order to become himself. The four essays of the third part discuss Baldwin’s experiences living in Europe. These pieces reveal the crucial process by which Baldwin gained—through expatriation—the distance from his cultural history that allowed him to know and accept the identity from which he speaks in all the essays.

Although the outlines of Baldwin’s quest to become a writer are apparent in this collection, and although certain concerns—such as identity and culture—pervade the essays, the topics are various. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” the opening piece, Baldwin notes that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1852) and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) seem both to accept the American theology of white supremacy. This essay alienated Wright, who had befriended the younger man. The much more detailed discussion of Native Son in “Many Thousands Gone,” the second piece, widened this rift rather than healing it. Baldwin did not change his thesis about Native Son, even though he was careful to discuss the importance of Wright’s novel to African American writers. Critic Horace Porter believes that this essay, somewhat oddly written in the voice of a white liberal, was in part Baldwin’s attempt to declare artistic independence from Wright, his literary father. Baldwin’s title essay suggests that he is offering himself as a substitute for Wright’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, as the native son of the next generation of African American writers. In “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough,” Baldwin reviews Carmen Jones (1954), an Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto Preminger film updating Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen (1875), with a black cast and dubbed voices. Although the film was a popular success, Baldwin saw clear evidence of the pretense of acknowledging African Americans while remaining utterly ignorant about the reality of African American life and consciousness.

“The Harlem Ghetto,” the first piece of the second set, offers a portrait of urban African American life and consciousness after World War II. The Harlem described is little different from the Depression era Harlem in which Baldwin grew up; therefore, the piece tells both about current conditions and about his background, with special attention to politics, media, religion, and especially...

(This entire section contains 925 words.)

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anti-Semitism in Harlem. “Journey to Atlanta” discusses African American attitudes toward politics, using the story of his brother’s exploitation by the Progressive Party during the 1948 election campaign. In the autobiographical “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin tells mainly about his relationship with his stepfather, though he never in this piece explains that David Baldwin was his stepfather, that his own birth was illegitimate, and that he never knew his biological father’s identity. Knowing this information, however, only increases the essay’s power. In telling of David Baldwin’s funeral on James Baldwin’s nineteenth birthday, James acknowledges his deep ambivalence toward the man who seemed to show him so little love.

The four essays on Baldwin’s early years in Europe return repeatedly to the theme of identity. “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” discusses the associations of African Americans with one another and with African colonials in the postwar climate of Paris. “A Question of Identity” examines American students in Paris after the war and how they deal with the pressure that being in a foreign culture exerts on them to examine their own personal and cultural identities. “Equal in Paris” tells the story of Baldwin’s mistaken arrest for the theft of a bedsheet, an incident that taught him that the protective laughter of whites that he so hated in the United States was, in fact, a universal phenomenon. Realization that his race was not uniquely the victim of such laughter began a phase of his liberating understanding of his native culture. “Stranger in the Village” relates Baldwin’s experience of being the first black person ever seen in the remote Swiss village to which he retired to finish Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). This visit gave him insight into how the American experience has changed African American and white identities since the first slaves were brought to America.

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Notes of a Native Son established James Baldwin as one of the most important black essayists in the United States. Yet, as he explained in the introduction added to the 1984 edition, Baldwin had not originally intended to produce a book of essays. His need to understand himself and his place in American culture led him to write a series of magazine articles grappling with the special problems facing black Americans. The success of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), and of his first play, The Amen Corner (1954), had aroused interest in his work, but Baldwin found publishers reluctant to accept his second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), because of its frank treatment of homosexuality. In order to earn enough money to go on writing fiction, Baldwin agreed to gather together nine of his previously published articles and write the title essay as well as a brief preface.

Although it originated as a series of separate magazine pieces, Notes of a Native Son is unified by recurring themes and by the arrangement of the essays. The book is divided into three parts and a preface, “Autobiographical Notes,” which introduces Baldwin’s determination to be “an honest man and a good writer.” The preface’s brief account of his childhood and emerging literary aspirations not only provides background for the essays that follow but also establishes the book’s dominant underlying theme: a black artist’s search for his identity. Baldwin explicitly recognizes that “the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality.” He goes on to argue that the black writer must find a way to overcome hatred and fear in order to provide an honest assessment of both his own personal experience and his complex, often painful relationship to American society and Western culture.

The three essays in part 1 attack the inadequate or dishonest treatment of the black experience in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1852), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and the film Carmen Jones (1955). Baldwin’s central point is that the traditions in which the black artist is expected to work provide false, sentimental, and dehumanizing portraits of black life. “Everybody’s Protest Novel” begins with an analysis of Stowe’s famous antislavery novel, condemning the bad writing and sentimental self-righteousness, which, according to Baldwin, masks the author’s underlying racism, the author’s “secret and violent inhumanity.” The essay goes on to assail the oversimplification of life inherent in novels of social protest, even those by black writers, such as Wright’s Native Son.

Wright’s novel receives more detailed and more critical attention in the second essay, “Many Thousands Gone.” Baldwin insists that the United States has been afraid to face racial issues honestly and has therefore sought escape in the reductive nature of sociological analysis. This attempt to treat the black man as a social cipher instead of a complex human being is illustrated by Wright’s portrayal of Bigger Thomas as a subhuman brute in Native Son. The novel’s sensationalism and stereotyping express the nation’s guilt and fear but prevent a deeper confrontation with the real problems. The desire to evade the realities of black life is also the dominant theme of “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough,” a brief critique of a film remake of the opera Carmen that used an all-black cast.

The second part of Notes of a Native Son consists of three essays exploring the grim realities of the black experience. In “The Harlem Ghetto,” Baldwin touches on a wide range of subjects—including black leaders, the press, religion, and the relationship between Jews and blacks—but his underlying concern is with the sense of bitter desperation that he finds in almost every phase of black life. “Journey to Atlanta” explains how black Americans have been trained to distrust politicians and to despair of political change. “Notes of a Native Son,” the longest essay in the book and the only one written specifically for it, marks a shift from detached analysis to the moving presentation of personal experience. By describing his reaction to his father’s death and funeral, Baldwin comes to terms with his own heritage and provides his most powerful account of the corrosive effects of racism.

The third section contains four essays based on Baldwin’s experiences in Paris and Switzerland. Although the ostensible subject is the black American in Europe, Baldwin’s central concern in this section is with American culture, especially the complex racial heritage that distinguishes Americans from Europeans. In these essays, Europe forces the sensitive black traveler to confront his alienation from his past, his people, and himself.

The two final essays in this section rely more vividly on Baldwin’s personal experience. “Equal in Paris” describes the eight days he spent in a French jail as the result of a misunderstanding involving a bed sheet a friend had taken from a hotel. Ironically, for the first time in his life, Baldwin found that he was free of racial prejudice, that he was being judged solely as an American and not as a black man. “Stranger in the Village” offers the clearest exposition of the lessons Baldwin learned from his travels in Europe. Staying in an isolated Swiss village whose inhabitants had never before seen a black man, Baldwin realized that he was irretrievably cut off from European culture and that he needed to accept and affirm his identity as a black American.

Historical Context

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Baldwin wrote and published the majority of the essays in this collection during the late 1940s and early 1950s, a period when the Civil Rights Movement was gradually gaining momentum. During this time, the Communist Party, which had offered many African Americans hope for achieving civil rights, was in decline. This was largely due to the political influence and censorship imposed by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities. Being a member of the Communist Party meant constant surveillance by the FBI, a reality that the generation of writers before Baldwin had experienced firsthand.

In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Allwright that all-white Democratic primaries were unconstitutional. Following this decision, the NAACP launched a significant voter registration campaign in the South. Members worked to gather eligible voters, educate them on the issues, and ensure they completed all the necessary paperwork to vote in upcoming elections. Three years later, W. E. B. Du Bois made an unsuccessful attempt to involve the United Nations in investigating racial discrimination in the United States.

Facing a tight presidential race in 1948, Harry Truman sought the African American vote by promoting a civil rights platform at the Democratic National Convention. This move angered southern Democrats, who left the convention and formed their own party, the States Rights Party. After his election, Truman proceeded to desegregate the armed forces.

In 1950, Martin Luther King, Jr., was still a graduate student at Boston University. However, within a few years, he emerged as a prominent leader in the civil rights movement and was eventually labeled the most dangerous man in America by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

In the early 1950s, two murders underscored the severe impact of racism in the United States. The first was the assassination of Harry T. Moore, a prominent NAACP organizer in Florida. The second was the brutal murder of Emmett Till, who was killed for whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. Till’s mother insisted on an open-casket funeral, and images of his severely beaten face were widely published in newspapers. Despite the increased awareness of the need for civil rights, the movement faced significant setbacks. In 1956, Alabama enacted a state law banning any faction of the NAACP from operating within the state, and South Carolina prohibited NAACP members from holding state jobs.

The literary landscape of the 1940s underwent significant transformation, beginning with Richard Wright’s departure from the somewhat idealized literature of the Harlem Renaissance Movement. His fiercely voiced Native Son (1940) marked this shift. In contrast, Ralph Ellison, disagreeing with Wright’s rigid, socially protest-driven writing, created the more lyrical Invisible Man in 1952. Shortly after, James Baldwin penned his semiautobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which is a coming-of-age story detailing a young man’s disillusionment with the unfulfilled promises of the American democratic system.

Other notable works by African American authors during this era include Ann Petry's 1946 novel The Street; Gwendolyn Brooks' 1953 poetry collection A Street in Bronzeville; and Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, which won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.

By the 1930s, over 300,000 African Americans resided in New York City, with two-thirds of them living in Harlem. During the 1940s, Harlem saw a steep rise in rents even as the condition of apartments deteriorated. Overcrowding and underemployment heightened tensions, and in 1943, when soldier Robert Bandy intervened as two white policemen were arresting an African-American woman, he was shot. Rumors quickly spread that Bandy had been fatally shot in the back in front of his mother. This sparked immediate protests, leading to broken storefront windows and looted merchandise. By morning, six people were dead, an estimated two hundred were injured, including Bandy, who had been shot in the arm.

Despite these challenges, Harlem also produced immense talent. Many renowned African American artists began their careers in Harlem. Music legends such as Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis all started there. In literature, figures like Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, and later, Maya Angelou, emerged from Harlem's vibrant cultural scene.

Literary Style

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Narrator

Baldwin employs a range of narrators in his essays. He often opts for the first person singular, as seen in ‘‘Autobiographical Notes’’ and ‘‘Notes of a Native Son,’’ which suits the personal nature of these pieces. In ‘‘Many Thousands Gone,’’ Baldwin switches to a first person plural narrator, using "we" in a distinctive way. For example, he states: ‘‘Today, to be sure, we know that the Negro is not biologically or mentally inferior.’’ This technique allows Baldwin to distance himself from the "Negro" mentioned and either align himself with non-Negro individuals or, in an abstract sense, connect black and white communities, fostering a psychological unity between the races.

In other essays within this collection, Baldwin adopts a more journalistic third-person perspective, as seen in ‘‘Carmen Jones’’ and ‘‘Encounter on the Seine,’’ although he occasionally reverts to the first person narrator.

Setting

Baldwin’s essays reflect his travels between Europe and the United States. Born in Harlem, he frequently uses this setting, along with broader New York City, in several essays. Some essays, such as ‘‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’’ and ‘‘Many Thousands Gone,’’ lack a specific setting. These essays read more like lectures, while those with defined settings resemble short stories. ‘‘Journey to Atlanta’’ naturally takes place in Atlanta, Georgia, and the section known as ‘‘Part Three’’ includes essays about Paris and a small village in Switzerland.

Imagery

Baldwin’s skill as a fiction writer shines through his ability to craft almost cinematic imagery in his essays. The most cinematic is ‘‘Notes of a Native Son,’’ which is also the most personal essay in the collection.

Notable dramatic scenes in Baldwin’s work include the depiction of his father’s death in a hospital room and the water-pitcher-throwing incident, both found in ‘‘Notes of a Native Son.’’ Another essay with vivid scenes is ‘‘Equal in Paris,’’ particularly the jail sequences. An illustrative example of Baldwin’s scene-setting ability comes from ‘‘Stranger in the Village’’:

If I sat in the sun for more than five minutes, some daring individual was sure to approach and cautiously touch my hair, as if fearing an electric shock, or place a hand on mine, amazed that the color did not rub off.

Compare and Contrast

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1900s: Several newspapers focused on African-American issues are in circulation. Among these are Samuel E. Cornish’s Freedom’s Journal and Frederick Douglass’s North Star, both serving as platforms for discussing slavery.

1950s: By this decade, nearly every major city in the United States boasts its own African-American newspaper. Two of the oldest are the Philadelphia Tribune and the Chicago Defender.

Today: As previously all-white newsrooms become integrated, many of the best African-American journalists join major newspapers, leading to a decline in talent at traditional black newspapers. Consequently, many of these newspapers vanish. However, magazines targeting an African-American readership thrive.

1900s: The migration of large numbers of people from the South fills Harlem with a diverse population of low-, middle-, and upper-class African-American families. This environment nurtures pioneering intellectual thought, and the arts flourish.

1950s: After World War II, Harlem’s economic status declines as middle-class residents migrate to other integrated areas of New York City. Although Harlem remains a haven for black artists, it suffers from an infant mortality rate that is double that of the rest of the city.

Today: Harlem experiences a gradual economic revival as rental rates in the rest of the city soar and white residents move in to renovate old buildings. The presence of former President Bill Clinton’s office in Harlem further stimulates interest in the area.

1900s: In early 1900s films, many African-American roles are played by white actors in blackface. The few roles available to African Americans often portray them as simpleminded, providing comic relief in movies.

1950s to 1970s: By the mid-20th century, more roles for African Americans emerge. Sidney Poitier wins the Academy Award for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963). African-American producers like Gordon Parks (Shaft, 1971) and Ossie Davis (Cotton Comes to Harlem, 1970) achieve financial success.

Today: Spike Lee, an African-American filmmaker who writes, directs, and acts in his movies, gains widespread appeal despite the often harsh themes of racial prejudice in his films. His notable works include Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo’ Better Blues (1990), and Bamboozled (2000).

Bibliography and Further Reading

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Sources

Campbell, James, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin, Viking, 1991.

Dupee, F. W., ‘‘James Baldwin and the ‘Man,’’’ Review of The Fire Next Time, in New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963.

Ford, Nick Aaron, ‘‘The Evolution of James Baldwin as Essayist,’’ in James Baldwin, A Critical Evaluation, edited by Therman B. O’Daniel, Howard University Press, 1977, pp. 85–98.

Hughes, Langston, Review of Notes of a Native Son, in the New York Times, February 26, 1958.

Jarrett, Hobart, ‘‘From a Region in My Mind: The Essays of James Baldwin,’’ in James Baldwin, A Critical Evaluation, edited by Therman B. O’Daniel, Howard University Press, 1977, pp. 120–25.

Kinnamon, Keneth, James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974.

Leeming, David, James Baldwin: A Biography, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

———, ‘‘Notes of a Native Son,’’ in Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, Edition 1, Vol. 1, HarperCollins Publishers, 1991, p. 783.

Further Reading

Fabre, Michel, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980, University of Illinois Press, 1993. This book explores the history of African-American writers in France, including figures like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. It highlights that, in addition to famous expatriates like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, many African-American intellectuals, such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, also sought the creative freedom of Paris.

Polsgrove, Carol, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement, W. W. Norton and Company, 2001. Through interviews and archival research, Polsgrove reveals the insufficient support from many white intellectuals during the Civil Rights Movement. Nonetheless, she acknowledges the courage of several African-American authors, particularly James Baldwin.

Standley, Fred L., and Louis H. Pratt, Conversations with James Baldwin, University Press of Mississippi, 1989. This compilation of interviews, spanning from 1963 to Baldwin's final interview in 1988, provides insights into Baldwin's thoughts on various subjects such as apartheid, religion, the Civil Rights Movement, sexuality, and his writing process.

Weatherby, William J., James Baldwin: An Artist on Fire: A Portrait, Donald I. Find, 1989. Authored by a close friend of Baldwin, this biography offers a deeper understanding of Baldwin's literary works and life circumstances. Weatherby also provides literary criticism of some of Baldwin's writings.

Willis-Thomas, Deborah, and Jane Lusaka, eds., Visual Journey: Harlem and D.C. in the Thirties and Forties, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. This book showcases the work of five African-American photographers who documented segregated black communities in Washington, D.C., rural Virginia, and New York City during the 1930s and 1940s. The more than one hundred photographs provide a visual depiction of the living conditions of that era.

Bibliography

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Baldwin, James and Sol Stein. Native Sons: A Friendshipo that Created One of the Greatest Works of the Twentieth Century. New York: One World, 2004. A collection of letters and other documentation exchanged between Baldwin and Stein concerning the creation of Notes of a Native Son.

Bigsby, C. W. E. “The Divided Mind of James Baldwin.” In James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Edited by Therman B. O’Daniel. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1977. A lucid discussion of the major themes of some of the essays in Notes of a Native Son, including the centrality of love and suffering, and Baldwin’s resistance to the protest novel.

Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking, 1991. This full biography, by a man who knew Baldwin personally, is especially interesting because it draws on the Federal Bureau of Investigation files kept on Baldwin. Campbell deals frankly with Baldwin’s bisexuality. Included are sixteen pages of photographs.

Collier, Eugenia W. “Thematic Patterns in Baldwin’s Essays.” In James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Edited by Therman B. O’Daniel. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1977. A perceptive discussion of Baldwin’s concerns with freedom in American life, with problems in relationships, and with the growth of identity.

Hughes, Langston. “From Harlem to Paris.” In James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Views. Edited by Kenneth Kinnamon. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. A short and pungent review of Notes of a Native Son by one of the most important African American writers. Interesting for Hughes’s resistance to some of Baldwin’s stinging commentary on racism.

Jarrett, Hobart. “From a Region in My Mind: The Essays of James Baldwin.” In James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Edited by Therman B. O’Daniel. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1977. An insightful thematic discussion of Notes of a Native Son in the context of Baldwin’s later essays. Creative analysis of Baldwin’s rhetoric in “Stranger in the Village.”

Kinnamon, Kenneth, ed. James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. In this selection of twelve essays and Kinnamon’s introduction are discussions of several of Baldwin’s major works. Langston Hughes’s review of Notes of a Native Son praises and criticizes the book. F. W. Dupee’s essay looks at Baldwin’s development from Notes of a Native Son through The Fire Next Time. Also included is Eldridge Cleaver’s discussion of Baldwin’s essays from Soul on Ice (1968).

O’Daniel, Therman B. James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1977. This volume contains essays on Baldwin as novelist, as essayist, as short-story writer, as playwright, and as scenarist, as well as a section on his raps and dialogues and a bibliography. The secondary bibliography is extensive. There are four pieces on Baldwin’s essays.

Porter, Horace A. Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Porter gives considerable attention to Baldwin’s essays in order to study the development of his ideas about relating art and social protest. He devotes one chapter to Baldwin’s relationship with Richard Wright.

Pratt, Louis H. James Baldwin. Boston: Twayne, 1978. A useful introduction to Baldwin’s life and works. Chapters 1, 5, and 6 deal in various ways with Baldwin’s essays, including an examination of their artistry. Contains a chronology and an annotated bibliography. Pratt believes that the essays are Baldwin’s major contribution to American letters.

Standley, Fred L. “James Baldwin.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1987. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. This obituary article provides an excellent introduction to Baldwin’s career and writings, laying out concisely his major ideas and achievements and summarizing contemporary opinion about Baldwin’s contributions to American literature.

Standley, Fred L., and Nancy V. Burt, eds. Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. This volume is divided into sections including ones on fiction, nonfiction, and drama. The introduction surveys Baldwin’s literary reputation, and the collection opens with a 1979 interview with Baldwin. There are ten essays in the nonfiction section, including pieces by Langston Hughes, Stephen Spender, and Julius Lester. In the general section appear several more essays on Baldwin’s nonfiction work.

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