James Baldwin : The Man Child

Deal Me In 2021 – Week 42

…he walked on, and all the earth, for that moment, in Eric’s eyes, seemed to be celebrating Eric.

This story finishes James Baldwin’s collection Going to Meet the Man: Stories. It’s one that has at least a slight surprise ending that kind of reminds me of a Flannery O’Connor story or at least Southern Gothic in style. The ending is suspenseful and once it’s ended the reader, even if they didn’t see it coming, can say “All right, that makes sense”.

Eric is eight years old. He doesn’t necessarily understand what’s going on in the adult world of his parents and his father’s friend Jamie. Baldwin wisely lets us mostly know only what Eric knows and what Eric is told by his father. That makes us try to put the pieces of information together and figure out what’s going on with the adults. In the end, we realize we don’t have all the information. Neither does Eric.

I read this story for Week 42 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

Rudolph Fisher: A City of Refuge

Deal Me In 2021 – Week 40

Rudolph Fisher’s “A City of Refuge” also uses as its theme the moving of African Americans from the South to the North – specifically New York City.

King Solomon Gillis leaves his home in North Carolina quickly as he had killed a white man. We don’t get the complete story of this aspect of Gillis’ life and as a result we can’t help but root for Gillis as he arrives in his new world.

While we want to root for him, we also can’t help thinking that he’s just a little naive as he walks the New York streets and immediately gets involved unknowingly with less than respectable people dealing in a less than respectable business. The narration is all third person and mostly from Gillis’ point of view though occasionally there are small sections of narration from the point of view of those less than respectable.

Fisher’s writing and development of character – especially Gillis – is superb, pitting his optimism against New York’s reality. One of the initial paragraphs, as Gillis gets off the train, especially grabbed me even if it’s sentiment quickly faded:

Distant thunder, nearing. The screeching onslaught of the fiery hosts of hell, headlong, breathtaking. Car doors rattling, sliding, banging open…Heat oppression, suffocation – eternity…More turnstiles. Jonah emerging from the whale.

Clean air, blue sky, bright sunlight.

This story is included in Black American Short Stories: A Century of the Best edited by John Henrik Clarke. I read it for Week 40 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

James Baldwin : Going to Meet the Man

Deal Me In 2021 – Week 39

I stepped in the river at Jordan.

Out of the darkness of the room, out of nowhere, the line came flying up at him, with the melody and beat. He turned wordlessly toward his sleeping wife. I stepped in the river at Jordan. Where had he heard that song?

A second week in a row with a James Baldwin story. This one is the title story from his collection Going to Meet the Man: Stories.

Gruesome. Horrifying. Just two words that could describe this story. Jesse, a white deputy sheriff in the south comes home to his wife ready for a night of romance but unable to perform. A white man’s impotence gives an unusual power to this story. As Jesse recounts in his mind the beating he gave a black man in his jail, his mind goes back to his childhood recalling his parents taking him to a lynching.

This lynching is described in as terrifying a manner as anything I’ve read.

The relationship between Jesse and his father brings together the idea of what can be passed down from generation to generation. While the white man struggles with what he’s done as an adult, his memories as a child brings back his prowess.

Again – terrifying.

This story is not for the faint of heart.

I read it when I selected the Nine of Hearts for Week 39 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

James Baldwin : Exodus

Deal Me In 2021 – Week 38

When she was a woman grown, well past thirty as she reckoned it, with one husband buried – but the master had given her another – armies, plundering and burning, had come from the North to set them free. This was in answer to the prayers of the faithful, who had never ceased, both day and night, to cry out for deliverance.

James Baldwin’s “Exodus” brings together two women of two generations. Two generations of “freedom”. Florence, the protagonist, remembers the stories her mother has told her about when, as a slave, she was suddenly free. However, Florence doesn’t remember the actual events, only the stories.

It’s difficult to tell, but it seems Florence’s mother thinks that freedom was enough and maybe her memories of slavery and the freedom that came from it are enough. They are real.

But Florence decides, against her mother’s wishes, in 1900, to move from the South to the North. This is her exodus, her freedom.

The contrast between the generations, between their ideas of freedom, gives the story a slight peculiarity. It’s not only the story of racial injustice and the fight for freedom. It’s the story of one generation needing to be free from the ideas of the last generation.

This story is included in Black American Short Stories: A Century of the Best edited by John Henrik Clarke. I read it when I selected the Eight of Hearts for Week 38 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

James Baldwin: Come Out the Wilderness

Deal Me In 2021 – Week 32

Always, this journey round her skull ended with tears, resolutions, prayers, with Paul’s face, which then had the power to reconcile her even to the lowest circle of hell.

Ruth, the African American woman and the protagonist in James Baldwin’s short story “Come Out the Wilderness” finds herself in a relationship with Paul, a white artist. As the story begins, the relationship is beginning to fizzle out.

Ruth shines as the narrator even if things aren’t completely rosy. The struggles she has due to race and gender issues in her society make for some deep and thoughtful self-inflection and interior conversation. In the story, she doesn’t resolve her confusion and wandering. It doesn’t appear that she does what the story’s title implies. I think the story’s title might be saying what she needs or wants to do. How to do it might be another story.

This story is included in James Baldwin’s collection Going to Meet the Man: Stories. I read it when I selected the Ten of Hearts for Week 32 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

James Baldwin: Previous Condition

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Deal Me In 2021 – Week 15

I had got to the point where I resented praise and I resented pity and I wondered what people were thinking when they shook my hand. In New York I met some pretty fine people; easygoing, hard-drinking, flotsam and jetsam; and they liked me; and I wondered if I trusted them; if I was able any longer to trust anybody. Not on top, where all the world could see, but underneath where everybody lives.

James Baldwin is an incredible writer as I’ve found out reading through much of his fiction. “Previous Condition” is no different as he examines the current life of Peter, a black actor trying to make his way in New York City.

The central plot point involves Peter being discovered living in a room rented for him by one of his friends. A room where African Americans are not allowed to live. He’s told to leave before the police are called – so he does.

Baldwin graphically and easily displays his writing ability in showing the reader the frustration, the humiliation, the helplessness, the mistrust and even the hatred Peter feels for not just the land lady kicking him out but for his society as a whole.

Peter’s Jewish friend (who rented the room for him) and his Irish American girlfriend both are able to listen to Peter and empathize but they don’t seem to be able to help him.

This story is included in Baldwin’s collection Going to Meet the Man. I read it when I selected the Queen of Hearts for Week 15 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

James Baldwin: This Morning, This Evening, So Soon

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Deal Me In 2021 – Week 10

James Baldwin’s short story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” begins with the black American musician nameless narrator having lived in Paris for twelve years married to a Swedish woman with whom he has a young son. And he also happens to have recently starred in a film by an acclaimed French director.

Then we get more and more characters and layers and flashbacks and jumps forward in time and think: when and how is this going to get wrapped up? It doesn’t – except for the fact that underlying all of it is the narrator’s racial identity and the influence of American racism to his life, character and family.

In addition to this unusual way of telling this story, I can’t help appreciating it for the usual brilliant Baldwin writing as in this description of the narrator playing music for a white audience:

Under cover of the midnight fiction that I was unlike them because I was black, they could stealthily gaze at those treasures which they had been mysteriously forbidden to possess and were never permitted to declare.

This story is included in Baldwin’s collection Going to Meet the Man. I read it when I selected the Jack of Hearts for Week 10 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

James Baldwin: The Outing

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Deal Me In 2021 – Week 8

Something about James Baldwin’s short story “The Outing” reminds me of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile only it would be more like “Salvation on the Hudson”. There’s no murder and not really any mystery but there are numerous characters with numerous back stories all riding up the Hudson River on a tour boat for a church outing.

The adults all seem to have this church thing down while the teenage boys aren’t so sure they want to be like their supposed role-models.

Yet their bodies continued to change and grow, preparing them, mysteriously and with ferocious speed, for manhood. No matter how careful their movements, these movements suggested, with a distinctness dreadful for the redeemed to see, the pagan lusting beneath the blood-washed robes. In them was perpetually and perfectly poised the power of revelation against the power of nature; and the saints, considering them with a baleful kind of love, struggled to bring their souls to safety in order, as it were, to steal a march on the flesh while the flesh still slept. A kind of storm, infernal, blew over the congregation as they passed; someone cried, ‘Bless them, Lord!’ and immediately, honey-colored Sister Russell, while they knelt in prayer, rose to her feet to testify.

It’s interesting that Baldwin’s sympathies are mostly with the teenagers but he doesn’t completely right off the adults even if he doesn’t hesitate to emphasize their periodic hypocrisies. Baldwin at least appears to understand that the church had a cultural impact that had some benefits even if he “outgrew” some of the specifics in the same manner in which the teenage boys in the story might be.

This story is included in Baldwin’s collection Going To Meet The Man. I read it when I selected the Ace of Hearts for Week 8 of my Deal Me In 2021 short story project. Check out my Deal Me In list here. Deal Me In is sponsored by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

Just Above My Head by James Baldwin

Hall Montana, the narrator in James Baldwin’s novel Just Above My Head, tells this story with all the joy and all the rage I’ve come to expect from Baldwin’s novels. He weaves both of these emotions together in such a way that the reader doesn’t necessarily recognize one or the other but knows that both are embedded deeply into not just Hall but Hall’s family and friends, too.

The novel begins with the death of Hall’s gospel singer brother Arthur which allows Hall to recount the story of both of their lives. The brotherly love between Hall and Arthur is in the forefront of the novel and provides the bulk of the story’s emotional appeal. Secondary, but no less important, are the relationships between Hall and two different women and the relationships between Arthur and two different men. These relationships still powerfully support the bond between the brothers.

As in other Baldwin novels, gospel music lyrics get interspersed throughout the story. While the imagery in these songs adds both depth and atmosphere to the novel, it doesn’t turn it into a religious story. At the same time, Baldwin doesn’t erase the potential impact of the beliefs behind the music. Ultimately, Hall plows through a ton of emotion and a ton of reflection to come to his conclusion:

…how could we sing, how could we know that the music comes from us, we build our bridge into eternity, we are the song we sing?

Another Country by James Baldwin

During a scene in James Baldwin’s Another Country, Vivaldo Moore gets high on a New York City rooftop with some people he just met and makes this observation:

The sky looked, now, like a vast and friendly ocean, in which drowning was forbidden, and the stars seemed stationed there, like beacons. To what country did this ocean lead? for oceans always led to some great good place: hence, sailors, missionaries, saints, and Americans.

Amidst a group of friends in Greenwich Village, Harlem and Paris, France, Baldwin lays bare the racial and sexual landscape of late 1950’s New York City which isn’t really that much different from the America of today.

In smokey bars, bistros and bedrooms, these characters have some of the most honest and viscerally raw conversations I’ve read in a long time – its an honesty that cuts so deep its difficult to not feel the pain of everyone regardless of race, gender and sexuality.

The rocky interracial relationship between Vivaldo and singer Ida Scott is interspersed with music from Bessie Smith’s blues to Mahalia Jackson’s gospel of which many of the lyrics talk of a better place than these current situations which is possibly where the title of the novel comes from. They are all looking for another country where differences don’t tear people apart.

Whether this country is physically geographical or spiritually in another realm is scattered throughout the characters’ conversations and Ida’s singing. Both concepts are brought together at the novel’s end when Eric’s French boyfriend, Yves, lands in the Big Apple:

…even his luggage belonged to him again, and he strode through the barriers, more high-hearted than he had ever been as a child, into that city which the people from heaven had made their home.

The novel references numerous song lyrics of which one is “Up Above My Head” written by Sister Rosetta Tharpe:

Up above my head, I hear music in the air
Up above my head, I hear music in the air
Up above my head, I hear music in the air
I really do believe, I really do believe there’s a Heaven somewhere…

Check out Rhiannon Gidden’s amazing version of this song right here. And also check out Baldwin’s amazing and highly relevant novel.