Going to Meet the Man: Stories

I am slowly understanding why Mr. Baldwin elected to leave the United States for more than a decade in the 1940s and 1950s. He apparently is on record as saying that he needed to flee because his anger was going to destroy him if he did not seek a respite from American injustice. Upon reading this collection, I think I am really beginning to understand what must have been going through his mind. Read "Previous Condition" where a young African American man keeps being thrown out of hotels and denied jobs simply because of the color of his skin. There is nowhere he can go without meeting the hostile glances and conspiratorial whispers of people on the street simply because of his skin color. And there is a moment where it all came into focus for me, standing in the kitchen of his Jewish friend's Jules' apartment. And I quote: "Oh," I cried, "I know you think I'm making it dramatic, that I'm paranoiac and just inventing trouble! Maybe I think so sometimes, how can I tell? You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. Oh, I know, you're Jewish, you get kicked around, too, but you can walk into a bar and nobody knows you're Jewish and if you go looking for job you'll get a better job than mine!" (78) It is deeply disturbing to think that a person has the suspicion and rage of the world cocked against their temple, but that was how it was (and still is). I have read much about the Civil Rights struggle and as a Jew myself, have listened to many stories from members of my family about prejudice but these stories, they uncover something. After seeing what happened in New Orleans with Katrina and listening to the empty discussions of "good schools", No Child Left Behind and test score mania, it opens your eyes to the fact that performance, optimism and opportunity are perceptions that, when absent, can ruin lives in ways that are hard to qualify. I highly recommend these stories but be prepared to become deeply uncomfortable because Baldwin had a powerful case to make about American hypocrisy and he makes it.

A fabulous collection of short stories that have not really aged in spite of the forty years gone since they were first published.Sonny's Blues is a real gem because it shows three ways out of deprevation, out of the mental ghetto that grows in a real ghetto, like Harlem, out of desperation and dereliction. One can go upward in society, become a teacher, through hard studies, get married, raise a family. In one way, accept the American Dream and forget about the tragedy, or the nightmare. « God Save the American Republic ! »One can get into music and into a completely different world of imagination, art, harmony, research, rhythm, melody, all that the world does not provide. That is the Blues, Jazz, the fairyland of OZ. Unluckily you have to go there and come back. « God pity us, the terrified republic ! »And one can get into heroin, the fabulous horse of American history, the mythical horse of the Great Plains, the mystical horse of the Railroads, the heavenlike horse of Indians and Blacks. Forget all that and shoot your veins. « He who sees his veins can see his pains ! »James Baldwin is a master in the field of transforming human pain into heavenly light by sharing it with our souls. It does not erase the pain. It just makes it luminous, the light of a new way to some hazardous future. « But where danger is, rescue is ready too », as Hölderlin used to say.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Each of the stories contained in this book deal frankly and honestly with the fear and agony associated with love, hate, prejudice and the suffering humans endure at the hands of their fellow man. All the stories are intense, haunting and in the case of the title story, "Going to Meet the Man", just plain chilling. Other notable stories are "The Man Child", "Sonny's Blues" and "Previous Condition". This is a good place to start if you're just discovering James Baldwin. Also recommended are his novels, "Giovanni's Room", "Another Country" and "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone".

Baldwin's ability to weave through various times throughout a story is exemplified best in "Sonny's Blues," where he alludes to Isiah with the cup of trembling, and moves through different periods of Harlem, the childhoods and young lives of the narrator and his brother, the constants, in the church and the community and the music, which tells that same story, which must be retold, again and again. The way Baldwin writes about music is virtually unparallelled. In these short stories, he manages to stay clear of the sometimes excessive sentimentality that comes out in novels like Another Country. We sympathize with everyone, we see everyone's need for love, the intense loneliness of human experience, and the individual alienation and experience that results from societal divisions of race and sexuality. The first two stories contain the same characters from his famous first novel Go Tell it on The Mountain. The biblical imagery in these stories is not always pronounced as it may be in Go Tell..., but Baldwin's command of the bible show us the fear and the decadence that it exalts even when the allusions are abstract. The cup of trembling, the sight of the father's foot in the first story. Baldwin is a writer whom people have expected something out of and have been disappointed with because he does not fit into the desired mold of the black writer or the gay writer or even the american writer. He can be an objective political essayist or a sentimental dramatist, and here, he offers cold, somewhat detatched portraits of american lives which are among the best portraits of these people ever written. He puts the lives of marginal americans, from poor white rural southerners, to expatriates, and black urban displaced men and women, into the dramatic realm that hints of myth. His descriptions are riveting, his sexual honesty can be rude, exposing the reader to the America that exposed him.

A memorable book. It has been some years since I read this book but I still remember the impact it had on me, particularly the story about the deputy who remembers the day his parents took him to see a black man being publicly hanged. Powerful stuff and highly recommended.