Summary
This essay begins by describing a small village (Leukerbad) in Switzerland where Baldwin stayed in the early 1950s. Before visiting this village, he had not realized that there were places in the world where no one had ever seen a black person. The village is small and located in the mountains, but it is not so inaccessible. The city of Lausanne is only three hours away and there is a mid-sized town at the foot of the same mountain. Tourists seeking a cure for their health problems come for the hot spring in the village. Baldwin came initially to stay for two weeks in the summer. He never thought he would return, but in the winter decided to settle there to write. There are few distractions in the village, and it is cheap.
Baldwin discusses people’s reactions to him in the village. Children shout “Neger! Neger!” after him in the streets. They point out his physical characteristics such as his hair, skin, and teeth. In response, Baldwin tries to be pleasant as he says he was taught in America. Yet he realizes that they are not doing this because they like him: “No one, after all, can be liked whose human weight and complexity cannot be, or has not been, admitted.” They do not treat him as human but as a “living wonder.” The village also has a custom of “buying” an African native and converting them to Christianity. Children also put on blackface during the Carnaval celebrations before Lent.
His experiences in this Swiss village lead Baldwin to more historical speculations. Referring to the Irish novelist James Joyce he writes, “Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” He gives examples of how this history lives on inside people. For example, he describes white men arriving in an African village with intentions to conquer and the way black people would look with curiosity at how different the hair and skin of these strangers are from their own. However, the Europeans would only take this curiosity as a sign of their own superiority. The situation for Baldwin in this Swiss village is entirely different. He feels overpowered by white society but realizes they think very little about him: "whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence." The villagers' astonishment at his physical characteristics can do nothing but “poison [his] heart.”
Baldwin then makes the argument that individuals cannot be blamed for historical events much larger than themselves. European culture may have power over him, but these villagers did not singlehandedly create this culture. Yet they “move with an authority which I shall never have.” Even a remote village like this is comfortably part of the West. Even the most illiterate and uneducated among the villagers is closer, Baldwin argues, to the civilization of Dante, Shakespeare, and da Vinci than he is. He says that the famous cathedral at Chartres in France, or the Empire State Building in New York, would speak to them differently than to him. Comparing the ancestors of these villagers with his own, he writes; “Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.”
These realizations cause rage within him, rage that cannot be conquered by the intellect. It cannot be hidden either but can only change shape. Each black person feels this rage, Baldwin argues, but each deals with it differently. It stems from a person’s “first realization of the power of white men.” It is also a rage against white innocence and naivety—their lack of awareness of the power they hold. Baldwin then discusses the legends that white society has about black people, as expressed by expressions “as black as hell.” He writes: "Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it." Yet he argues that these legends reveal more about the people who create them the people who they are mean to control and explain.
Baldwin returns to the village, describing how attitudes towards him both change and stay the same. Some children want to be his friend. Some of the elderly residents like chatting with him while others only look suspiciously. He compares these experiences to the ones he had in New York: "The dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born, between the children who shout Neger! today and those who shouted Nigger! yesterday—the abyss is experience, the American experience."
This is followed by more historical reflections. Baldwin thinks back to the time when Americans were still Europeans and they came to a continent full of black people and thought “these black men [are] not really men but cattle.” The African-American slave was unique in having his entire past erased at once. While people in places like Haiti can sometimes trace their ancestry all the way back to kings, African Americans can only go back so far as a bill of sale—a receipt.
Yet African Americans have deeply shaped American society. The “Negro question” even led to civil war in the country. Europe never had to have this argument with the same explicitness. Europe’s colonies were always at a remove; they did not threaten European identity directly. Yet in America, where the slave was directly part of the society, one had no choice but to have an attitude towards race. All of this reveals “the tremendous effects the presence of the Negro has had on the American character."
The ideals of democracy on which the US was founded clashed with the reality of slavery. Establishing democracy on the American content was a radical move, Baldwin writes, but nowhere near as radical as finally opening up the concept to include black people. Yet white supremacy continues to threaten the most important value of the west, democracy. While white supremacy is everywhere, it is particularly loud and direct in the US. For Baldwin, this is caused by “the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.” This necessity has led to all sorts of violence, like lynching, segregation, and terrorization. Yet the African American is a citizen: not a visitor but deeply embedded in the country. All these techniques of avoidance eventually fail. The white and black American have shaped each other and this search for a way of living together may eventually even contribute something new to the world.
Analysis
In this famous essay, one of the most esteemed in the book, Baldwin ties together many of his important themes: being an African American in Europe, his relationship to Western culture, legends told about race, and the intertwined character of white and black in America.
Compared to Paris, Baldwin finds much more extreme attitudes towards him in this small Swiss village. Being in Europe pushes him to reflect on the roots of American culture, which go back to the Europeans who first began enslaving and selling people in Africa. This leads Baldwin to reflect on what Western culture means to him compared to what it means to the average white European. As Baldwin wrote in the introductory “Autobiographical Notes” to this book, he is a “bastard of the West.” Despite being shaped by this culture, he is in some respects outside of it.
In terms of the legends used to grapple with race, Baldwin again makes the important point that myths reveal more about the people who create them: “by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is.” In this vein, the history of slavery, segregation, and racism are deeply revealing about the character of white American society. These phenomena show that America holds onto a fantasy that “there are some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist.” Baldwin works to deflate this illusion, arguing that African Americans have and remain central to the meaning of the country. The identity of both black and white depend on each other. Baldwin ends by looking at the larger world of the 1950s, in which African and Asian people all over the world are pushing for freedom from the European colonial powers (a process known as decolonization). In this changing world context, America may have something unexpected to offer the world: “It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."
