Summary
Baldwin begins a new essay, also referred to as a letter; this one is not addressed to any one in particular, but rather from “a region in my mind.” Baldwin begins the essay by referring to an event in his own life, instead of summarizing his family history as he did in his letter to James. He introduces the setting as the summer that he “became fourteen,” during which he experienced a religious crisis. Baldwin clarifies that he means by this that he discovered the common Christian ideas: God, saints and angels, and hell. He was drawn to a Christian interpretation of God because America was a Christian country, and this seemed to him like the only possible explanation. Baldwin also explains that he turned toward religion in the first place because, at this age, he first developed an acute sense of fear. This fear stemmed from his growing awareness of the evil both within and without: his own pubescent thoughts, and the criminals and prostitutes he saw in his neighborhood. In his immediate environment, most of his friends began to drink, smoke, and become sexually active. All of these changes alarmed and unsettled the young Baldwin.
More specifically, Baldwin recalls the transformation that occurred in his peers. Girls who were active in church—by singing in the choir or teaching Sunday school—and were the children of very religious parents began to suddenly seem tainted. They not only changed physically, thanks to puberty; they also seemed to become more “present,” in the same way that the criminals in the neighborhood seemed to him. Baldwin clarifies that this sense of presence drove him to feel as though he could not predict what he or anyone else would do next. He felt lost and conflicted in the midst of his discovery of sexuality, which was both exciting and terrifying. More than the changes caused by puberty, Baldwin was also alarmed by a change in attitude that he observed in his peers. For girls, he sensed that they became “matrons before they had become women,” meaning that they developed a single-minded focus on finding a husband and making him well-behaved and responsible. For boys, he saw them realize they could not do better in life than their fathers had. These boys began to drop out of school and go to work in similar professions to ones their parents worked in because they did not feel that they could advance by continuing to be in school. James, however, insisted on staying in school even though he did not believe it could necessarily take him far in life.
Baldwin explains that black boys in particular also developed a keen sense of their limitations in life. After dropping out of school, his friends began to “fight the man.” They were not certain what this meant, but had a sense that there was some greater force holding them down. They did know that this force was related to the white man. Baldwin gives more concrete examples of how this kind of limitation manifested, and how it was clearly connected to white Americans. When Baldwin was thirteen, he heard a cop mutter as he passed, “Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?” Even earlier, at ten years old, he was frisked by police officers who joked about his sexuality and ancestry and left him lying in an empty lot in Harlem. On a broader scale, many of his friends served in World War Two and were broken by the experience; they came back to a country that still did not treat them with respect. In response to these many humiliations, Baldwin’s peers often felt that they had no alternative left but to turn toward escapes like alcohol, drugs, or religion. If they could not advance in life, they often were left with self-destruction.
For Baldwin, it seemed as though misery and sin were evident everywhere, and his only personal alternative was Christianity. He saw violence, prostitution, alcohol and drugs all over his neighborhood, and heard of crime as something that was real as opposed to a possibility. It seemed to him as though it was impossible to defeat circumstances simply by working hard, because the circumstances that African Americans faced were so dire. For many, the best solution was violence. If they could not get respect through other means, they often turned to fear in order to receive better treatment. Baldwin explains that this reaction came out of the reality that black Americans did not necessarily want to be accepted or loved by white Americans, but simply wanted to be treated better; thus, they did not require that their methods gain them admiration, but simply the results they needed. Baldwin repeats the message he gave his nephew in his first letter: African Americans cannot be responsible for teaching white Americans to love them, as these white Americans must first learn to accept and love themselves and one another.
Baldwin also returns to the argument he made in his first letter about how power and ignorance shape the relation between white and black Americans. He acknowledges that many of his readers would believe he was exaggerating in his portrayal of African Americans’ circumstances. Their dismissal, however, would stem from their ignorance of how poor African Americans actually lived at this time. Baldwin points out that African Americans have always fought back against the circumstances in which white Americans put them. For example, as servants they would often steal items from the houses they worked in. White employers would turn a blind eye to this in order to preserve the unspoken power balance and their own presumed ignorance of what was really going on with the people they were oppressing. Even African Americans who were more servile by character were keenly aware of the disparity between them and their white employers. Although white Americans might believe their position was granted by God, to African Americans their power was clearly upheld by criminal and violent means; it was a power they feared, as opposed to respected. Thus, responding to this kind of power with violence seemed like a natural solution to many of Baldwin’s peers.
At this age, Baldwin felt that he was very close to getting involved in a criminal lifestyle, himself. There were no “moral barriers” between him and this lifestyle, since morality had been so skewed by the power dynamics between African Americans and their white countrymen that he did not feel it would necessarily be immoral to become a criminal, as well. He was also determined not to end up accepting a fixed place within the order of the country. He did not want white people to define his identity and assign him limitations. But he realized that this process was already happening, and would continue happening if he did not find a way out. That way out could only come in the form of some kind of “gimmick,” or special skill, that could lift him above his ordinary circumstances. Since he did not have musical or athletic skills, he turned to the church as his “gimmick.” He was also further driven to this lifestyle because he felt tainted by his interactions with criminals in the neighborhood; because many prostitutes approached him, he believed that there must be something about him that attracted such depraved attention.
Baldwin comes back to the general social forces that shaped his world in order to provide further context for the reader. He explains that, for most black boys growing up in America, they realize eventually that “this world is white and they are black,” meaning that white people hold all available power. Children grow up with an intrinsic sense of this difference, which drives them to feel a constant fear of punishment not only by their parents, but by this undefined force that surpasses even their parents’ power. They learn that their parents fear an authority greater than themselves, which shapes their childhood sense of power dynamics. For example, they see that their parents react with a particular kind of fear to moments in which their child challenges the white power dynamic—such as insisting on doing the same things as any white boy—that differs from the fear they express over falling down the stairs or straying too far from home. This particular fear shapes their knowledge of the white world around them. Baldwin grew up denying this fear by believing that his father was simply old-fashioned, or mistaken. But he notes that he learned over time that this kind of fear must be faced. Because he did not face it as an adolescent, it rose up as a wall between him and the world that drove him to service in the church.
Baldwin initially joined his friend’s church because of the pastor’s influence, but soon realized that he had many suppressed issues despite his new religiosity. He remembers that the pastor asked him, “Whose little boy are you?” a question that was also addressed to him by the criminals in the neighborhood. He felt compelled to give himself over to this pastor as her little boy, in order to embrace something that represented the opposite of these criminals. Over the summer, however, he felt his guilt and fear growing. One day, in church, he collapsed in a moment of anguish, during which the congregation stood over him and prayed. He felt completely forsaken, and realized that he had no way out of his limited world other than the love of other people. However, because other people in his life would not offer him such love, only God’s love was left. But God’s love seemed twisted and empty in a world that viewed God as white and mistreated African Americans, despite claiming that they were also God’s children. Baldwin did not find any answers to these dilemmas through his collapse, but was told afterward that the moment represented his salvation. Feeling exhausted and defeated, he found relief by accepting that this was salvation and turning to religious rituals. Later, he would realize that the main principles of Christianity were actually “Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror.” But at the time, he embraced these so profoundly that he went on to become a Young Minister. Later, he felt a conflict between the possibilities he attached to preaching and the reality of a severely limited world. His ambivalence about the position arose in part from his awareness that he had become a Young Minister partly to compete with his father, who was a pastor. He felt that perhaps, by taking on this position, he had finally outshone his father. Later, he would realize that he had only managed to “immobilize” himself.
For a while, Baldwin found joy and purpose in his church. He felt that, in church, everyone could become equal while coming together in song and dance and prayer. He would turn to his times in church for fulfillment at the end of long school days, and felt that God must know him inside and out. Over time, however, he realized that he was hiding many things and lacking in self-awareness precisely because of his religion. His faith crumbled as he began to read fiction such as Dostoevsky and encounter Jews in school. His father insisted to him that his Jewish friends were doomed, and refused to admit them to the house. But Baldwin realized over time that he could not accept that these people were doomed simply for their background. He also became more aware of the fact that the Bible was written by white men and left black men in an inferior position; it categorized them and limited their aspirations in life the same way that American society did, by equating them with Ham, a cursed man. Eventually, Baldwin began to feel that he was doing something wrong by telling his congregation to love all other men, when other men were so cruel to African Americans. He was also aware of the divide between the wealthy pastors and the poor congregation. His church actually preached hatred, by rejecting those who did not believe the same things. Over time, Baldwin came to reject his church for all of these reasons.
Baldwin concludes this first section of his essay by emphasizing that white Christians perpetuated their own ignorance. They identified their religion with white people, when in actuality, historically, Christianity came out of the Middle East. Baldwin explains that rejecting Christianity is synonymous with rejecting white people's hold on black land. Originally, white men colonized other territories by using their religion as an excuse: they had a God-given right to this new land, even though it was inhabited by other people. By rejecting Christianity, Baldwin can thus reject this assumption of white supremacy. He ends on a drastic note: in order to be a moral human being, you must reject the Christian church entirely. It is too full of hypocrisies, historical crimes, and limitations to fulfill its promise to liberate and expand humanity.
Analysis
This second letter begins with a mix of figurative language and more straightforward essay techniques, indicating that it will present a more didactic argument than Baldwin’s first letter did. The first sentence of the letter announces that it will take place “during the summer that I became fourteen.” The phrasing of this sentence introduces an element of figurative language. Baldwin is describing his literal change in age over the course of this summer. But he is also referring to a process of “becoming” this older age, which is a more figurative statement about what it meant to him to grow into himself at fourteen years old. For Baldwin, the year he “became” a fourteen-year-old signified a number of changes, in addition to the more straightforward change in age. As he describes this process, Baldwin refers to his “experiments” with girls his age as “at once as chill and joyless as the Russian steppes and hotter, by far, than all the fires of Hell.” Again, this simile introduces a more fluid and creative element to Baldwin’s language; he is not just building a persuasive argument, but also attempting to artfully express his own personal experiences. At the same time, he does introduce other elements that make clear this letter will present a straightforward argument, as well. Baldwin goes out of his way to define his wording more concretely in sentences that are less figurative. For example, he notes that “the word ‘safety’ brings us to the real meaning of the word ‘religious’ as we use it.” In this sentence, he is more carefully defining his language in the way that a traditional essay writer would. The text to come will be a mix of a personal and creative style alongside persuasive essay techniques.
More specifically, Baldwin uses rich details and imagery to convey the changes around him as he saw them at that time. He helps to bring readers into this moment in his life along with him, as he recollects this summer that he was fourteen. For example, when telling readers that his friends began to drink and smoke and become sexually active, he does not simply state this as a fact but rather notes that they “embarked—at first avid, then groaning—on their sexual careers.” This detail, that they were first “avid, then groaning,” helps readers to understand the process more viscerally, and to imagine what it must have felt like for Baldwin and his friends. Later, Baldwin describes the change in his female peers as “something implacable in the set of the lips, something farseeing (seeing what?) in the eyes, some new and crushing determination in the walk.” Again, this description provides readers with Baldwin’s personal impression of this time; he had trouble putting the changes he saw into concrete terms, but could note certain changes in his friends’ demeanor and appearance. For readers, this technique helps to bring them into the present moment of the text and to better understand the young Baldwin’s perspective.
Baldwin also helps to convey the sense of limitations and confusion that he and other African American boys felt at this moment of transition in their lives through his vague use of language. Again, he makes clear that he did not have the exact words to describe what he was feeling at this time in his life, but he does attempt to describe what the feeling itself was like: “And I began to feel in the boys a curious, wary, bewildered despair, as though they were not settling in for the long, hard winter of life…” Baldwin’s vagueness in reference to the sense of limitations his friends felt as they grew out of their childhoods and into a difficult adulthood allows readers to experience the confusion these boys must have felt at that time. Baldwin is equally imprecise in recounting his collapse in church, which represented a moment of crisis and confusion for him. For readers, Baldwin’s description of the event makes these qualities powerful and immediate by using subjective language like metaphors and symbols, instead of stating objectively what happened to him.
Throughout the essay, Baldwin’s use of vernacular or "street" language also helps him to give readers a closer sense of the moment he is describing, but his choice to put this vernacular in quotations maintains his narrative distance. He describes his friends as being “‘downtown,’ busy, as they put it, ‘fighting the man.’” By including these phrases that his friends used as slang, Baldwin continues to give readers an intimate glimpse into the milieu he is illustrating. However, he does not use them fluidly, in his own dialogue. Instead, he places them in quotation and notes that this was “as they put it,” not as he would have necessarily phrased it himself. Thus, Baldwin makes clear that he, as a narrator, has a certain degree of distance from the events he is describing. He is recounting this moment as an older man who is not part of this scene anymore. As such, it is more appropriate for him to quote from this kind of language instead of making use of it himself.
In addition to all of this figurative language, Baldwin does include the kind of moralizing that fits his text into the genre of essay, as well. For example, he reflects that “white people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this…the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.” This sentence deviates from Baldwin’s more vague allusions to the feelings he experienced as a fourteen-year-old. Instead, it presents his thoughts and conclusions as an older man who is reflecting on these experiences. As such, it is more typical for an essay, in which the author attempts to persuade readers of an argument. Here, Baldwin’s argument is clear: white people must learn to love if America is ever to resolve “the Negro problem.” In his conclusion, Baldwin takes an even stronger stance in favor of a particular argument: the concept of God should be disposed of, unless it serves to make people feel “larger, freer, and more loving.” This concluding note establishes the role of this letter as an essay, in which Baldwin presents his argument very clearly.
