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Notes of A Native Son

It ad to do with his blackness, i think - he was very black - with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful.

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Manoa Nagatalevu Tupou
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3K views26 pages

Notes of A Native Son

It ad to do with his blackness, i think - he was very black - with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful.

Uploaded by

Manoa Nagatalevu Tupou
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Notes of a Native Son JAMES BALDWIN The Harlem Ghetto Harlem, physically at least, has changed very little in ‘my parents’ lifetime or in mine. Now as then the build- ings are old and in desperate nood of repair, the streets are crowded and dirty, there are too many human beings pper square block. Rents are 10 to 58 per eent higher than ‘anywhere else in the city; food, expensive everywhere, {is more expensive here and of an inferior quality; and now that the war is over and money is dwindling, clothes are ccrefully shopped for and seldom bought, Negroes, tradi- tionally the last to be hired and the frst to be fred, ate finding jobs harder to get, and, while prices are rising implacably, wages are going down, All over Harlem ‘now there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, {in my childhood, we awaited winter: itis coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone ean do about i. Al of Harlem is pervaded by 2 sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows shut, Yet the white man walking through Harlem isnot at all likely to find it sinister or more wretched than any other slum. Harlem wears to the casual observer a exsual face; no fone remarks that — considering the history of black men and women and the legends that have sprung up about them, to say nothing of the ever-present policemen, wary sr 8 Mores oP A NATIVE SON on the shat camer —the fae neds sme eMenvely cssl and may nt bo a open oF a exces wei icome If an outbreak of more then sua vilnee ecur tn 1885 on 145, 8 met wth somow and Shap aad age the soil hort ofthe rt of the City fads om tis spoon hey were sgh al along, Sia he bostity inns poses sre mad, commit tees est up, imvetigtion enue Steps ar taken fo taht te wong. witout, however, expanding o de- wetsaing the ght Tho in sto make fas of @ Toca Heit proces about ae lp 8 make-up toaeper Thus we have the Bos’ Cb on Wost 18th Sheet" playground at West 1olt and Fh Avene: tnd, since Nogies wil ot be allowed to ve in Stayve= Sint Town, Mevopaltan Life ogtly erecting a owning project call Riverton in he conte of Harem; foweee iis not likly that any ut the profesional Gln of Negroes and not ll fhm — wl be ale to rat Peta these projets have Doon stimulted by per etl mated Nog lenders snd by the Negro pes Eonceming Negro lads, the best that oe etn Sy 8 that Bey ten an impostble orton and tht the hand- FRlimotated by gntie coger malta hs poston wit boutrecking ign. Te wikly that anyone oqated ith Hark serous asumes thatthe pes tes fm lag ne ot a ped eter upon the pjcology ofthe otnns there And ye ftir to have the playground; beter han noth- Ing and Te il a leas make Ife somewhat easier for Frees who wl ten Inow that tet cen are not er anah danger of bing run down in th tet Si- ‘name cxrs0 w larly, even though the American cult of literacy has chiely operated only to provide a markot for the Reader's Digest and the Daily News, literacy is sill better than illiteracy; so Negro leaders must demand more and better schools for Negroes, though any Negro who takes this schooling at face value will find himself virtually ineapaci- tated for life inthis democracy. Possibly the most salutary effect of all this activity is that it assures the Negro that he is not altogether forgotten: people are working in his behalf, however hopeless or misguided they may be; and aslong as the water i troubled it cannot become stagnant. The terrible thing about being a Negro leader les in the term itselfF1 do not mean merely the somewhat con- descending diferentation the ter implies, but the nicely refined torture a man can experience from having been created and defeated by the same circumstances. That fs, Negro leaders have been created by the American scene, which thereafter works against them at every point; and the best that they can hope for is ultimately to work themselves out of thei jobs, o nag contemporary Ameri- ‘ean leaders and the members of their own group until a bad situation becomes so complicated and so bad that it cannot be endured any longer. Its ike needling a blister ‘until it bursts. On the other hand, one cannot help observ- Ing that some Negro leaders and politicians are far more concemed with theie careers than with the welfare of Negroes, and their dramatic and publicized battles are battles withthe wind. Again, this phenomenon cannot be ‘changed without a changé in the American scene, In a Jand where, itis sad, any citizen can grow up and become president, Negroes ean be pardoned for desiring to enter Congress. Cy ores oF A Nar Sox ‘The Negro press, which supports any man, provided he is sufficiently dark and well4mown — with the exception of certain Negio novelists accused of drawing portraits unflattering to the raco—has for years received vastly confusing criticism based on the fact that it is helplessly and always exactly what it calls itself, that is, a press devoted entirely to happenings in or about the Negro world. This preaecupation can probably be forgiven in view of the great indilference and frequent hostility of the “American white press. The Negro press has been accused ‘of not helping matters much—as indeed, it has not, nor ddo T see how it could have. And it has been accused of being sensational, which itis; but this isa criticism diff colt to take seriously in a country so devoted to the sensa- tional as ours ‘The bestselling Negro newspaper, I believe, is the Amsterdam Star-News, which i also the worst, being gleo- fully devoted to murders, raps, raids on love-nests, inter racial wats, any item — however meaningless — concern- ing prominent Negroes, and whatever racial gains can be reported for the week —all in just about that order. Appatently, this polley works wel; it sells papers — which fs, afterall, the aim; in may childhood we never missed an ction, The day the paper came out we could hear, far down the street, the news vendor screaming the latest scandal and people rushing to read about it. “The Amsterdam has been rivaled, in recent years, by the People's Voice, a journal, modeled on PM and referred to as PV. PV is not so wildly sensational a paper as the “Amsterdam, though is coverage is much the same (the news coverage of the Negro press is naturally pretty limited), PV's polities are less murky, to the left of center ‘ronan oners0 o (the Amsterdam is Republican, a political affiation that has led it into some strange doubletalk), and its tone, since its inception, has been ever more hopelessly militant, fall ‘of warnings, appeals, and open letters to the government which, to no one's surprise, are not answered —and the same rather pathetic preoccupation with prominent Negroes and what they are doing. Columns signed by Lena Home and Paul Robeson appeared in PV until sev- eral weeks ago, when both severed their connections with the paper. Miss Home's column made her sound like an embittered Eleanor Roosevelt, and the only column of Robeson’s I have read was concerned with the current witch-hunt in Hollywood, discussing the kind of movies under attack and Hollywood's traditional treatment of Negroes. It is personally painful to me to realize that 50 gifted and forceful a man as Robeson should have been tricked by his own bitterness and by a total inability to understand the nature of political power in general, or Communist aims in particular, into missing the point of his own critique, which is worth a great deal of thought: that there are a great many ways of being un-American, some of them nearly as old as the country itself, and that the House Un-American Activities Committee might find concepts and attitudes even more damaging to American life in a picture like Gone With the Wind than in the possibly equally romantic but far less successful Watch ‘on the Rhine. ‘The only other newspapers in the field with any sig- nificant sale in Harlem are the Pittsburgh Courier, which has the reputation of being the best of the lot, and the Afro-American, which reserables the New York Journal- American in layout and type and seems to make & con- Cy ores oF A NArIUE Sox sistent if unsuccessful effort to be at once readable, intelligent, and Gery. The Courier isa high-class paper, reaching its peak in the handling of its society news and jn the columns of George 8. Schuyler, whose Olympian serenity infurates mo, bt who, asa matter of fact, reflects with great accuracy the state of mind and the ambitions Of the professional, wellto-do Negro who has managed to find a place to stand, Mr. Schuyler, whois remembered still for a sattical novel I have not read, called Black No ‘More, is aided enormously in this postion by a genteel white wile and a chld-prodigy daughter —who Is se tusly regarded n some eieles as prof of the inompe Irensible contention that the mating of white and black {smote likely to produce geaius than any other combina- tion. (The Afro-American recently ran a series of articles cn this subject, “The Education of a Genius,” by Mrs. ‘Amacintha Work, who recorded in detail the development fer mulatto son, Craig.) ‘Ebony and Our World are the two big magazines in the field, Ebony Tooking and sounding very much like Life, and Our World being the black man’s Look. Our World is « very strange, disorganized magazine indeed, sounding sometimes like a college newspaper and some times like a call to arms, but principally, like its more skilfl brothers, devoted to the proposition that anything f white man can do a Negro can probably do bette. ‘Phony digs feature articles out of such things asthe “real” ‘Lena Horne and Negro FBI agents, and it travels into the far comers of the earth for any news, however trivia, concerning any Negro oF group of Negroes who are in any wrayemtal and/or ewaworiy. The tone of bth Ebony and Our World is affirmative; they eater to the “better ‘lass of Negro.” Ebony’s November 1947 issue carried an editoral entitled “Time To Count Our Blessings,” which began by accusing Chester Himes (author of the novel Lonely Crusade) of having a color psychoris, and went on to explain that there are Negro racists also who tare just as blind and dangerous as Bilbo, which is in- contestably true, and that, compared to the millions of starving Europeans, Negroes are sitting pretty — which comparison, I hazard, cannot possibly mean anything to any Negro who has not seen Europe, ‘The editorial con- cluded that Negroes had come a long way and that “as patriotic Americans” it was time “we” stopped singing the blues and realized just how bright the future was. These cheering sentiments were flanked — or underscored, if you will — by a photograph on the opposite page of an aging Nogro farm woman carrying home a bumper crop of ‘onions. It apparently escaped the editors of Ebony that tho very existence of thelr magazine, and its table of con- tents for any month, gave the lie to this effort to make the best of a bad bargain, ‘The true raison d'éére of the Negro press can be found in the letters-o-the-editor sections, where the truth about life among the rejected can be seen in print. It isthe ter- rible dilemma of the Negro press that, having no other ‘model, it models itself on the white press, attempting to cemulate the same effortless, sophisticated tone —a tone its subject matter renders utterly umoonvineing. It i sia- ply impossible not to sing the blues, audibly or not, when the lives lived by Negroes are so inescapably harsh and stunted, It is not the Negro press that is at fault: what- fever contradictions, inanities, and political infantilism ‘can be charged to it ean be charged equally to the Ameri- on ors oF Anant Som ‘can press at large, Ttis a black man's newspaper straining, for recognition and a foothold in the white man’s world Matters are not helped in the Teast hy the fact that the white man’s world, intellectually, morally, and spiritually, Ihas the meaningless ring of a hollow drum and the odor of slow death, Within the body of the Negro press all the wars and falsehoods, all the decay and dislocation and struggle of our society ate seen in relief. "The Negro press, like the Negro, becomes the scapegoat for our ills. There is no difference, after all, between the “Amsterdam's handling of a murder on Lenox Avenue and the Daily News’ coverage of a murder on Beckman Hill; nor is there any difference between the chauvinism of the ‘ovo papers, except that the News is smug and the Amster dam is desperate, Negroes ive violent lives, unavoidably; a Negro press without violence is therefore not possible; and, further, in every act of violence, particularly violence t white men, Negroos fel a certain thrill of identi cation, a wish to have done it themselves, « feeling that ‘old scores are being settled at last. It is no accident that Joe Louis is the most idolized man in Harlem. He has succeeded on a level that white America indicates is the only level for which it has any respect. We (Americans {n general, that is) like to point to Negroes and to most of their activities with « kind of tolerant seom; but it is our- selves we are watching, ourselves we are damning, or — ‘condescendingly — bending to save. T have weitten at perhaps excessive length about the ‘Negro press, principally because its many crities have ‘always seemed to me to make the irrational demand that the nation’s most oppressed minority behave itself at all, times with a skill and foresight no one ever expected of sm ance cxter70 65 the late Joseph Patterson or ever expected of Hearst; ‘and T have tried to give some idea of its tone because 18 seems to me that i is here thet the innate despera tion i betrayed. As for the question of Negro advertising, which has caused so much comment, it seems to me auite logical that any minority identified by the color ofits skin and the texte of its hair would eventually ‘grow selfconselous about these attributes and avoid ad- ‘ertising lotions that made che hair kinker and soaps that darkened the skin, ‘The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible, It is axiomatic that the Negro is religions, whichis to say that he stands in fear of the God our ancestors gave us and before whom we all tremble yet, There are prob- ably more churches in Harlem than in any other ghetto inthis city and they ate going full blast every night and some of them are filled with praying people every day. ‘This, supposedly, exemplifes the Negro’s esental sim plety and good-will; but it is actually a fairly desperate emotional business These churches range from the august and publicized [Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street to reso- tnlassifable lofts, basements, storefronts, and even private dwellings. Nightly, Holyroller ministers, spivitualists,selEappointed prophets and Messiahs gather their flocks together for worship and for strength through joy. And this is not, as Cabin in the Sky would have us believe, merely a childlike emotional release. Their faith ray be deseribed as childike, but the end itserves is often sinster. It may, indeed, “keep them bappy”—a phrase canrying the inescapable inference that the way of life imposed on Negroes makes them quite actively unhappy 0s ors oF 4 save son —but also, and much more significantly, religion operates hhere as @ complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: white people own the earth and commit all manner of abomina~ tion and injustice on i; the bad will be punished and the good rewarded, for God is not sleeping, the judgment is not far off. It does not require a spectacular degree of per- ception to realize that bitterness is here neither dead nor sleeping, and that the white man, believing what he ‘wishes to believe, has misread the symbols. Quite often the Negro preacher descends to levels less abstract and leaves no doubt as to what is on his mind: the pressure ‘of life in Harlem, the conduct of the Ttalian-Fthiopian ‘war, racial injustice during the recent war, and the terrible possibility of yet another very soon. All these topics pro- vide excellent springboards for sermons thinly coated with spirituality but designed mainly to illustrate the injustice of the white American and anticipate his certain and long overdue punishment, Here, oo, can be seen one aspect of the Negro’s ambiv- alent relation to the Jew. To begin with, though the trae

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