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Authors
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
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Baldwin’s novels are Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), Another Country (1962), Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979). His other books are a collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man (1965); a volume of nonfiction prose, The Price of the Ticket (1985); and two plays, Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) and The Amen Corner (1968). James Campbell’s Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (1991) is a biographical study. Critical interpretations include Lynn Orilla Scott’s James Baldwin’s Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey (2002) and Clarence E. Hardy III’s James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture (2003). Further essays are found in editor D. Quentin Miller’s Reviewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen (2000).
Born and raised in Harlem, James Baldwin published his first story, in a church newspaper, when he was twelve. Committed to being a writer, and deferred from military service because his father was dying, Baldwin worked at his chosen craft in New York City, where he met novelist Richard Wright in 1944. Four years later, inspired by Wright's move to Paris, and disillusioned by the racism and homophobia of the United States, Baldwin himself moved to France, from where he wrote essays that critiqued America's failed promises. Baldwin returned to the United States in 1957, chiefly to join in the struggle for African American civil rights. Not surprisingly, he emerged as one of the movement's most vocal participants, composing powerful commentaries in a style that incorporates the rhythms of gospel and the themes of preaching. Best known for his essay collections such as Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin also wrote well received short stories and novels, including Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Going to Meet the Man (1965) takes imaginative as well as political risks. In this story, an African American writer explores, from the inside, the mind of a southern white racist. Furthermore, brutal as he is, Jesse is not portrayed without a measure of sympathy: Baldwin presents him as the victim of an upbringing in a culture of race hatred, culminating in a lynching which, for all the talk around him and from him about the nonhumanity of black people, terrifies him and awakens in him a human empathy that he seems to be spending the rest of his life trying to suppress.
1. Baldwin's story is full of sound. Describe the way that sound is used thematically in Going to Meet the Man, to intensify the action and the memories and to provide understanding of Jesse's mental state.
2. Sexuality, violence, guilt, and hatred are intertwined in this story. Why? What connections do you see among them in Jesse's mind?
3. More than thirty years after the first publication of Going to Meet the Man, American writers and directors are often faulted for presuming to imagine the psychological life of someone of the other gender or from a different race or culture. Does Baldwin succeed at this difficult artistic feat? Is an act of understanding like this, published in the midst of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, an act of special significance? What aspects of the story help you to construct your answer?
