James Baldwin

Going to Meet the Man

I've read Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston but I think Baldwin is the King of Black literature. What I just read has changed the way I view literature. I think James Baldwin is a genius for creating such ugly and gruesome characters like Jesse and every white character in Going to Meet the Man. I think he wanted to make people see how ugly white people were and by the end of the story I think I'm even a little scared of them.

The story begins with Sheriff Jesse and his wife Grace trying to have sex but Jesse is too tired from overworking. However, he then begins thinking about arresting a black woman and gets aroused by that but then catches himself and is disgusted at the thought of a black person. Baldwin then goes on this epic rant about Jesse and his feelings of the blacks which I think is Baldwin at his best, "He felt that he would like to hold her, hold her, hold her, and be buried in her like a child and never have to get up in the morning again and go downtown to face those faces, good Christ, they were ugly! and never have to enter that jail house again and smell that smell and hear that singing; never again feel that filthy, kinky, greasy hair under his hand, never again watch those black breasts leap against the leaping cattle prod, never hear those moans again or watch that blood run down or the fat lips split or the sealed eyes struggle open. They were animals..." (The rant is much longer) The hatred for these black people is so... I don't know how else to express it other than to state that it is unlike anything I've ever read. James Baldwin made them entirely evil. Not even Jesse as a kid is shown to be entirely innocent - he becomes overwhelmed with joy when they are chopping off the man's privates, "His father's face was full of sweat, his eyes were very peaceful. At that moment Jesse loved his father more than he had ever loved him. He felt that his father had carried him through a mighty test, had revealed to him a great secret which would be the key to his life forever." Also Baldwin writes, "He began to feel a joy he had never felt before. He watched the hanging, gleaming body, the most beautiful and terrible object he had ever seen till then." Right after the lynching party, the white folk go on over to have some food. It’s ridiculously evil and unsympathetic.

                In two instances, he writes as though a character is possessed by something evil. First, is Jesse's dad whose tongue and eyes look different the day Jesse is taken to the "picnic," "They were looking at something he could not see. His father's lips had a strange, cruel curve; he wet his lips from time to time, and swallowed. He was terribly aware of his father's tongue; it was as though he had never seen it before. And his father's body suddenly seemed immense, bigger than a mountain. His eyes, which were grey-green, looked yellow in the sunlight; or at least there was a light in them which he had never seen before." Later in the story, he writes, "He thought of the boy in the cell; he thought of the man in the fire; he thought of the knife and grabbed himself and stroked himself and a terrible sound, something between a high laugh and a howl, came out of him and dragged his sleeping wife up on one elbow." I envisioned demons possessing bodies and I know possessions are big in Pentecostal churches. Baldwin was a preacher at a Pentecostal church, so I think he incorporated that into this story.

                Another observation I made about Baldwin's writing is the way he wants the readers to know the innocence of the blacks. He makes it appear as though they were Christ like in various occasions. One of them was when the blacks praise God and tells Him to forgive the whites, "they were singing for mercy for his soul, too." which reminds me of Luke 23:34, "Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." And they divided up his clothes by casting lots." A second one was the complete humiliation of death, "All his weight pulled downward from his hands; and he was a big man, a bigger man than his father, and black as an African jungle cat, and naked."


                James Baldwin's story is a memorable one but I want to note on something minor that I find in many minority writers which is being extremely specific in their themes and I think that can sometimes be a downfall because it lacks the excitement of vagueness that we find in the works of Henry James. Sometimes readers don't like to be limited when they are trying to interpret the art they read. I think Perkins Gilman incorporates the right amount of mystery in her most famous work The Yellow Wallpaper while not forgetting her purpose of writing which is writing about her frustration about male-domination.