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NOTES OF A NATIVE SON (175 pp.)-James Baldwin-Beacon Press...
...profit on't is, I know how to curse." Between Caliban's curses and nonstop Ariel flights of the liberal imagination, most writing on the Negro problem in America makes highly unprofitable reading, in the view of talented Negro Novelist James (Go Tell It on the Mountain) Baldwin. This sheaf of personal essays, written with bitter clarity and uncommon grace, is an effort to retrieve the Negro from the abstractions of the do-gooders and the no-goods...
...Everything Will Be All Right." The dilemma of the white American, as Author Baldwin sees it, is that he is caught between a West European legacy of white supremacy and the democratic ideal of equality and brotherhood. Unfortunately, the love of justice rarely bridges the absence of love. For his part, the Negro "hates and fears" the white man, but he cannot retreat to his African heritage, which was severed at the auction block; he can only find his identity within "the cage of reality" of the American scene...
This scene bustles with false, as well as real, progress. The "protest" novel, as Author Baldwin sees it, is a signpost of false progress: "So far from being disturbing [it] is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene . . . We receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all . . . 'As long as such books are being published,' an American liberal once said to me, 'everything will be all right.' " Far from dignifying the humanity that lies more than skin-deep, these books straitjacket the Negro...
Black Devils & Revenge Fantasies. A fictional monster like Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas brings out the worst in both races, Author Baldwin suggests, for he arms the whites with proof of the black devil they see lurking and smirking in the lowliest handyman, and satisfies the Negro's revenge fantasies by permitting him to be what the white world has dinned into him that he is, a would-be rapist and killer. According to Author Baldwin, the Negro's pent-up hostility shows up in far stranger places, e.g., the rock-'n'-roll sects...