While the tale of how we suffer and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell . . .
Wrapping up this little four-book James Baldwin marathon with this really excellent short story collection. The oldest short story here, Previous Condition, was originally published in 1948, so the stories here span a period of over fifteen years of Baldwin’s career, so perhaps the most striking thing about them is that they are of a very consistent quality. The first story, The Rockpile, is the weakest in the collection. It and The Outing both revisit characters from Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain. The Rockpile is mainly of interest because it allows us to revisit those characters. The Outing, which follows the characters on a church picnic, is better. None of the other stories explicitly reference Baldwin’s first three novels, but if you’ve read them, you’ll certainly notice a lot of thematic familiarity. Sonny’s Blues put me in mind of Another Country with its portrait of a troubled jazz musician and his strained relationship with his sibling, a brother this time, not a sister as in Another Country. This Morning, This Evening, So Soon features a character preparing to return to America after a time spent in Europe and the feelings of dread and uncertainty he faces about going back, being a black man in a relationship with a white woman and with a biracial son. This one evoked both Giovanni’s Room and Another Country for me. This is not to say that these stories don’t stand on their own; they do because Baldwin is a master at capturing large emotions and themes in small moments of time. This Morning, This Evening, So Soon takes place over a single evening, but it ranges far afield in its emotional and thematic ideas and the stakes are high.
Other stories are different from what we’ve seen from Baldwin so far. The Man Child follows a cast of rural white characters and the way one of the wealthier farm families looks down on Jamie, a failed farmer, and the fall-out of that clash. Come Out the Wilderness is the only story here that has a main female character and it’s a fascinating look at how she has to navigate office politics and deal with sexual harassment from her boss. The fact that both characters are black adds an extra layer of difficulty to her position within the company.
The best story, ultimately, is the final one, the title story. It’s told from the perspective of a racist white police officer in the American South and it’s one of the most disturbing pieces of fiction I’ve ever read. Some of the content is violent and graphic certainly, as when the officer tortures a Civil Rights leader in a jail cell, but the inescapable horror of the story is the heat of the man’s hatred. Being inside this perspective, seeing through this man’s eyes and thinking his thoughts is a claustrophobic, stifling experience. As the story begins, he is unable to perform sexually with his wife and, after thinking through the events of the day, he recalls becoming aroused while beating a protestor earlier in the day. And then he goes back in his mind to the day he saw his first lynching, when he was only 8 years old and taken to the event by his father. The depiction of the lynching is graphic and incredibly difficult to read, but as the officer remembers it, he finds himself soothed. For him, the memory is one of peace and love, connection to his father, connection to his community. Even as we are seeing through his eyes, though, our experience is very different, made all the more horrifying because of the rosy filter of childhood we’re looking through. Baldwin talked a lot about the ways poor whites were negatively impacted by racism. He would often say that they were mentally enslaved in much the same way black southerners had been physically enslaved. I think that’s very much what this story is about. Because, relatively speaking, it’s easy to break a physical chain (though there are certainly societal chains that surround those for Black Americans then as now), but to break a psychological or an emotional chain is much harder. This is especially true because these chains were often forged at the earliest reaches of a person’s memory or even in that pre-memory period of a person’s life.
I’ve gone into more detail about this story, though I haven’t told exactly how it ends, because, while I am not a guy who goes in for trigger warnings, I think you kind of need to know what you’re getting into before you read this story in particular. Baldwin’s books are often very disturbing, deeply sad or passionately angry, but Going to Meet the Man is disturbing and upsetting and horrifying on a level nothing else I’ve ever read by Baldwin has been. It’s nothing short of an absolute masterpiece and it’s the perfect way to end this collection of stories. The other stories are emotional, sad and disturbing at times, though they do have some hope as well. But the book ultimately builds to this final story and it’s like a brick to the head. The force of Baldwin’s prose is a hammer and you will not walk away from this story unscathed. Nor should you. Sixty years on, Baldwin’s power is undiminished. Read at your own risk. 4 stars.
tl;dr – gripping collection of short stories is mostly excellent as expected for Baldwin and it builds to a final story that is among the most harrowing things Baldwin ever wrote. 4 stars.