The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday Nov. 23, 2019. Nine of us met and all agreed that this was a hard book to digest. Even though we talked for nearly two hours, we didn't have time to comment on all of it.
The eight stories collected in the book are:
- "The Rockpile"
- "The Outing"
- "The Man Child"
- "Previous Condition"
- "Sonny's Blues"
- "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon"
- "Come Out the Wilderness"
- "Going to Meet the Man"
Most of the stories seem to end with no resolution at all. I think that we're used to stories having some kind of satisfying ending, which Baldwin does not give. The other thing is that when Baldwin used flashbacks, there wasn't really any transitional phrase to cue the reader that what's being described is something that happened in the past. Shelara pointed out that this collection was published in 1965 and Baldwin was being modern at that time by employing the stream of consciousness technique made fashionable early in the century. I had mentioned this abrupt moving from the present to the past to another reader earlier this week and she said "that's jazz!" It's funny that she said this because my favorite story in the collection is "Sonny's Blues." Below is an excerpt of when Sonny's brother (who disapproves of his lifestyle) goes to hear him play:
pp.138 - 140
"I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing - he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water...
And Sonny hadn't been near a piano for over a year. And he wasn't on much better terms with his life, not the life that stretched before him now. He and the piano stammered, started one way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started again; then seemed to have found a direction, panicked again, got stuck....
Something began to happen. And Creole let out the reins. The dry, low, black man said something awful on the drums, Creole answered, and the drums talked back. Then the horn insisted, sweet and high, slightly detached perhaps and Creole listened, commenting now and then, dry, and driving, beautiful and calm and old. Then they all came together again, and Sonny was part of the family again...
Most of the social commentary books we read today often mention James Baldwin, but those citations, which are profound, are from his essays. I suggest that we should go back and read his fiction, where he illuminates such examples of his grasp of the inner lives of his characters that it's like he's lived inside of them. Barbara M. said, "he wrote from inside a person's skin."
One of the women in our group, Judy, said that Baldwin is speaking to white people, saying, "look how racism is affecting you!" This was based on the musings of the deputy sheriff in the title story, how he remembers attending a lynching when he was a little boy, how that experience shaped the man he was to become: Shelara said that the young child's soul died on the day he witnessed the lynching.
pp. 245 - 248
"His father reached down suddenly and sat Jesse on his shoulders...He turned his head a little and saw the field of faces. He watched his mother's face. Her eyes were very bright, her mouth was open: she was more beautiful than he had ever seen her, and more strange. He began to feel a joy he had never felt before. He watched the hanging, gleaming body, the most beautiful and terrible object he had ever seen till then...His father's face was full of sweat, his eyes were very peaceful. At that moment Jesse loved his father more than he had ever loved him..."
The above passage was a flashback from the deputy's childhood. As an adult the deputy brutally beats a young Black man arrested for trying to register people to vote. The beating is taking place while the other prisoners are singing freedom songs in their cells. The singing is what took his mind back to the lynching he witnessed as a child. The fight for civil rights is making the deputy unsure of who he can trust to feel the way he does. Things are changing. Things that were once okay are now not okay.
The deputy is reflecting on all this as he lays in bed beside his wife, after being unable to perform sexually. He muses that just today, while he was kicking the prisoner in the head he got an erection, remembering further, that even as a child,when he witnessed the black man being castrated and burned alive,he felt the "tightening in his scrotum." These memories cause his body to finally perform.
Another example of Baldwin speaking from the voice of a young white boy is in the story "The Man Child." In this story the little boy stands to inherit all the land his father owns, some of which he acquired by buying from (or cheating out of?) his so-called best friend. The question is whether this story is a metaphor for whites having the upper hand over blacks or just an example of how whites exercise the rights of entitlement even over less advantaged whites. The violence at the end is all the more heart-stopping because we're hearing it from the voice of the victim.
In the story "Come out of the Wilderness" the protagonist is a Black woman in a relationship with a white man. Her fear is that this man no longer wants her and she's on edge waiting for him to tell her. The woman, named Ruth, has come to New York from the rural South. Connie said that low self-esteem was her issue. Shelara went further and said that it's self-hate. When her boss, a Black man who's also from the South shows interest in her, it pushes Ruth over the edge. Judy said that Mr. Davis was suspect as well, that perhaps his intentions were less than honorable. This led to us discussing that back in 1965 it was common for a woman's boss to expect you to go out for drinks with him. Robin pointed out that even with Mr. Davis (who seems so nice,) Ruth was ashamed of herself. He reminds her of the kind of southern Black man she's turned her back on.
Barbara L.R. said, "I read this book after watching the film Reconstruction: America After the Civil War last week. These stories take place 100 years later and not much has changed!"
Barbara M. told us about a youtube video that features Carol Anderson, the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. author, in this video, shows the morphing of the blatant racist practices of the past into the practices of today such as racial suppression, gentrification, and sub-par schools to name a few.
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