Summary
James Baldwin wrote this preface three decades after Notes of a Native Son was published. It describes how he came to the decision to publish this book of essays and also describes major themes of the work.
Here, Baldwin introduces the theme of the “rock.” He begins with an allusion to the seventeenth-century Christian hymn “Rock of Ages” to describe an inaccessible part of himself that only the strongest tools can penetrate. With this book, he set out to “decipher and describe the rock” inside him. Baldwin then references other rocks described in folk songs before revealing that for him the “rock of ages” is a metaphor for what he calls his “inheritance.” This inheritance is connected to the conditions and history that made him who he is, specifically the experiences of being a black man in America. Baldwin contrasts this inheritance, which is “specifically limited and limiting” with something he calls his “birthright.” This is something universal: “vast, connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever.”
For Baldwin, the separation between his specific inheritance and universal birthright is connected to the specific history of racism in America, or the “conundrum of color.” While this conundrum (a difficult problem or question) has the strongest effect on black people, in fact, it shapes the lives of every American. Baldwin refers to the situation in South Africa, the country where Nelson Mandela and other activists were fighting against the racist apartheid system. Baldwin argues that the European colonizers of Africa have long called Africans “savages,” but their fortunes were based on stealing from these people. Now that the formerly colonized or enslaved have risen up in the twentieth century, Baldwin remarks, some still see it as an “error that the Savage can, now, describe the Civilized,” meaning they can talk back to former masters and use language to challenge the system. In the United States, Baldwin describes the pain of the “Black face and voice” of people that are not seen or listened to. This pain stems from “the unforgivable and unimaginable horror of being a captive in the promised land.” Yet Baldwin ends the preface on a more uplifting note, quoting the expression “the trouble don’t last always.” Eventually, the balance of power will shift. He concludes with the French phrase “En avant,” meaning “Forward!”
Analysis
In this book, Baldwin seeks to heal the split between his “inheritance” as a black person in America and his universal “birthright” as a human being. One insight writing this book gave Baldwin was that he “need[ed] to accept the inheritance to claim the birthright.” In other words, it is only by exploring and owning his specific experiences as James Baldwin the person that James Baldwin the writer can speak to more universal questions. He argues that racism has excluded African Americans like him from their birthright, but that he eventually realized he could claim his specific inheritance in order to take back that birthright.
Though he wrote this book in the 1950s, in this preface from the 1980s he argues that racism, or the “conundrum of color,” still shapes the United States: “The more it changes, the more it remains the same.” For Baldwin, race remains the key factor in understanding American life. While he approaches universal questions from a black perspective, he argues that race affects everyone. He writes, “the people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.” In this sense, he suggests that grappling with race is not only something African Americans must do in order to understand and their place in the world: white people need to also understand that their experiences are not universal but also influenced by a specific position in America’s racial hierarchy.
