On “Notes of a Native Son”

This term, I am teaching my seminar on James Baldwin’s nonfiction. We begin with Notes of a Native Son, read closely Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time, sit with No Name in the Street and The Devil Find Works, and end with The Evidence of Things Not Seen. In between, we read fugitive essays, speeches, and interviews. And in all the years of my reading and teaching Baldwin, this time, in this moment, I noticed something different. That a kind of madness shadows the page. Maybe it is the madness in me that trained my eye. Baldwin struggles to hold himself together. And I am not simply referring to the suicide attempts. That much is evident. I am talking about his manic attempts to keep himself together in the face of an exasperating world. That the madness of the country, that I wrote about some time ago, touches each of us, especially those who must bear the brunt of it all.

I suppose all of this came into view, because I am not quite right. Grief, death, and melancholy saturate this place, and because of the ongoing demand for profit we haven’t had the time to tend to the broken pieces. People we love didn’t die right, and where I am from when people don’t die right, they refuse to stay in the ground. Of course, there is the anger and hatred. The country seems haunted. Ghosts are using our own hands to take our breath away. And I have to bear witness to it all. Sometimes, honestly, I just want to scream at the top of my lungs.

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The maddening part is the repetition: having to bear witness to the same thing over and over again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. I know intimately what Baldwin meant in his last interview when he said “you are a broken motor. You’re repeating, you’re repeating, you’re repeating, and it causes a breakdown, lessening of will power. And sooner or later your will gives out, it has to. You’re lucky if it is a physical matter. Because it could have been mental.” I know now what he meant.

When I asked my students to read the essay, “Notes of a Native Son,” I was prepared to talk about Baldwin’s vexed relationship with his father – ready to talk about how he aligns his father’s death, the 1943 Harlem riots, and the birth of his sister in this marvelous parable about the perils of the nation and the difficulties of self-creation. But what hit me squarely in the face, like a red brick, was the prevalence of madness in the piece. In fact, I have come to see the essay as a meditation on madness. There is the madness of the nation that refuses to know itself and shapes the world in such a way to avoid confrontation with that refusal. The consequences for those who bear the brunt of that refusal are brutal. The whip of the whirlwind. Baldwin’s stepfather illustrates as much. We are forced to live with the idea that, because of the color of our skin and because of the color of yours, that somehow that says something about our value, our worth. We must move mountains to keep that insidious idea from taking hold in our guts. Not because we are obsessed with white people, but because we want to live. Eventually, Baldwin’s stepfather would be “locked up in his terrors,” where “the disease of his mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him.”

Baldwin’s father believed what the world said about him. And, as a result, he “lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit…” And Baldwin admits, confesses really, that bitterness had, in fact, become his own. He tells the story of the moment in New Jersey, on Route 1, down the street from Princeton, where, with a friend, he entered a diner for the fourth or fifth time, waited to be served, only to be ignored and then told that “We don’t serve Negroes here.” Blinded with rage he hurls a glass at the waitress’s head only to shatter the mirror behind the bar. This scene is prefaced by a description of his state of mind: “I first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels.” The madness of his father against the backdrop of an insane world is now his own. And this bildungsroman — this coming-of-age story — reveals the depth of the madness that consumes and what is needed to break the fever – to break free.

One has to let go of the hatred that fuels the rage, Baldwin writes. And here the hatred is directed towards the nation and towards the stepfather. But he says of his father:

I had hated him, and I wanted to hold on to this hatred. I did not want to look on him as a ruin: it was not a ruin I had hated. I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hatreds so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

As Baldwin prepared to bury his father, to bury the man who caused so much pain and anguish in his life, he confronted the aftermath of the riots. “That bleakly memorable morning,” he writes,

I hated the unbelievable streets and the Negroes and whites who had, equally, made them that way. But I knew that it was folly [a form of madness], as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered, blackness and whiteness did not matter: to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

For Baldwin, as I read him here, the path to the other side of madness involves accepting the world for what it is (to not be naïve about the failings and beauty of men and women; to not fall privy to the sirens who sing of race and its enchanting fantasies) and also to fight with all your strength against the injustices of the world and what that evil has placed inside of you.

Of course, his view evolved. I write about this in Begin Again. This is a young Baldwin. He hasn’t witnessed the murder of Medgar, Malcolm and Martin yet. He hasn’t seen the country turn its back on all those young people who risked everything in the bowels of the South to get the country to live up to its creed. But the rage in his blood he identified in 1955, that blind fever, kept coming back until the day he took his last breath. Why? Because the nation, because these people, want to be white.

And now they have vomited up Donald Trump and we have to deal with this madness again. The pounding in the skull and the irritable bowels return as we struggle to beat back the “intolerable bitterness of spirit,” because these people have done this shit again.

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