The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American
Beginning with a quotation from one of Baldwin’s favorite authors, Henry James, on the issue of the complexity of being an American, Baldwin proceeds to delineate exactly why this assertion might be so. In attempting a response to the question inherent in the title, Baldwin discovers that the answer is perhaps even more complex than James assumed: the American identity is complicated by issues of racial division which runs far deeper than mere prejudice, discrimination and cultural bias.
Princes and Powers
The Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists convened at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1956 occasioned this essay. On its surface, the work is not much more than a detailed recording of events taking place at the Conference: a review of speakers and their lectures. Lying beneath this prosaic façade, however, is something much more revolutionary, especially for black readers of the time. A worldwide conference of serious study of issues related to black writers and artists at which the luminaries were actually the black writers and artists rather than white men speaking about them. At the same time, Baldwin raises concerns about the fundamental validity of aspect of progress being undermined by a conceptual praxis in which the relationship of black writers is essentially one of negation of European influence.
Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem
This essay examines the nature and role of community within the African-American experience. The essay begins with Baldwin noting that where the house he grew up in one stood there is now (at the time of composition) a housing project. The housing project is, of course, as closely associated with blacks knt he minds of many whites as any other stereotype. The essay considers the notion of community not just from the perspective of the inhabitants of domiciles, but the police (white) presence which both protects and engenders fear as well as from the perspective of how the Northern and Southern experiences of black community differs.
A Fly in the Buttermilk
This essay is also concerned with the division between life for blacks in the North versus life for blacks in the South. Baldwin develops a specific a sociological perspective towards the wildly successful institutionalized segregation through Dixie which diverges somewhat from the political perspective. Rather than viewing the issue of division of races as simply a political tool to right to perceived “wrongs” of the abolition of slavery and the awarding of civil rights, Baldwin argues that it is a tactic used in pursuit of a strategy for a much longer goal: generational reconstitution of blacks which conform precisely to the “Negro they wished to see.”
Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South
Baldwin was born in New York and became an expatriate living in France during the latter part of his life. What he most assuredly was not was a Southerner. This essay recounts the author’s visit to George and his exposure for the first time to the realities of the hardcore violence racism which he had, of course, heard all his life from first-hand witnesses. In this essay, he too becomes a witness.
Faulkner and Desegregation
William Faulkner is a curious character in the history of the South, for certain. He is perhaps the single most influential writer to ever come out of Dixie and he is notable for a much more progressive attitude toward writing black characters than many of his southern literature peers. For Baldwin, however, Faulkner’s unsettling duality cannot be ignored and this essay directly addresses, questions, and criticizes the Nobel laureate’s assertion that “Our position is wrong and untenable, but it is not wise to keep an emotional people off balance.”
The Male Prison
With this essay, the focus of the exiled outsider dispossessed from his rightful place in the American tapestry moves from race to sex. From the starting point Andre Gide—like Baldwin, a homosexual writer—the essay proceeds forth to examine the notion that resistance among society to such a sexual preference is based on the idea of it being “unnatural.” As evidence, Baldwin rightly points to other examples of even more extreme unnatural behavior which has been dismissed as singularly deviant in the individual rather than as an infectious blight upon the future of the species.
The Northern Protestant
The shift from racism to sexual discrimination suddenly seems to swerve completely out of control with the introduction of perhaps the most unlikely character in the book: Swedish film legend Ingmar Bergman. For any fan of either artist, this will likely be a highlight. While one can expect Baldwin to find kinship with a white French writer who is also homosexual, or African-Americans ranging from survivors of Jim Crow atrocities to international celebrities, the common bond linking Bergman’s composition of the geographic and internal landscape of his homeland with that of Baldwin is surprising, but unsurprisingly effective.
Alas, Poor Richard
This is actually a three-part essay which re-examines the writing career of another famous African-American novelist, Richard Wright. Early on, Baldwin had infamously criticized Wright’s fundamental personality—some would go so far as to say dismissed it entirely. The reconsideration over the course of these three essays does not start out optimistically as Baldwin quite early into the first essays makes a startling confession that he had always tended toward the view that Richard Wright was “a Mississippi pickaninny, mischievous, cunning, and tough.”
The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy
The collection concludes with an essay taking aim at another famous American writer to come along during the same period as Baldwin. The subject of this essay is particularized as a response to Mailer’s own criticism of Baldwin which Baldwin slyly turns on its head to reveal a provocative strain of prejudice against both race and homosexuality. The essay further deepens this particularized subject with the sudden introduction of a quote from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The result is that the essay ultimately becomes a condemnation of sorts of attempts by 1950’s hipster writers to co-opt the outsider status of blacks in America under the guise of some jazzy Beatnik counterculture. This criticism is ultimately tempered by Baldwin’s admission that while Kerouac has no real idea what he means when he writes of wishing he were black, there is real pain in his need to reject the mainstream because, after all, “One can never really see into the heart, mind and soul of another.”
