In "Notes of a Native Son," Baldwin shares a deep and complex view on race relations and personal identity, blending his own life experiences to illustrate the weight of racial struggles. He reflects on his father's bitterness and the generational trauma tied to their shared blackness, highlighting how systemic racism shaped their lives and relationships. Baldwin uses personal stories, like his father's illness and the harsh realities of their home life, to show how these issues impacted not only individual identity but also the family dynamic. He seems to suggest that the fight against racism is intertwined with personal stories, making the pain of race a collective burden that haunts him and connects to a broader social commentary. It's like Baldwin is saying that understanding who you are is wrapped up in facing both your family’s history and the harsh truths of society.
On the twenty ninth of July in 1943, my father
died. On the same day, a few hours later, his
last child was born. Over a month before this,
while all our energies were concentrated in
waiting for these events, there had been, in
Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots1
of the
century. A few hours after my father's funeral,
while he lay in state in the undertaker's
chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On
the morning of the third of August, we drove
my father to the graveyard through a
wilderness of smashed plate glass.
The day of my father's funeral had also been
my nineteenth birthday. As we drove him to
the graveyard, the spoils2
of injustice,
anarchy,3
discontent, and hatred were all
around us. It seemed to me that God himself
had devised, to mark my father's end, the
most sustained and brutally dissonant4
of codas.5
And it seemed to me, too, that the violence
which rose all about us as my father left the world has been devised as a corrective for the
pride of his eldest son. I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had been central to
my father's vision; very well, life seemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass
[1]
1. Race Riot - public violence between two racial groups in a community
2. the remnants, aftermath or effects of something
3. Anarchy (noun) a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority
4. Dissonant (adjective) lacking harmony
5. Coda (noun) a concluding event, remark, or section
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for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along. I had inclined to be contemptuous6
of my
father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. When his life had ended I
began to wonder about that life and also, in a new way, to be apprehensive7
about my own.
I had not known my father very well. We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our
different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride.
When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him, When he had been dead a
long time I began to wish I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities,
real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has
no time to talk to the first. No one, including my father, seems to have known exactly how old
he was, but his mother had been born during slavery. He was of the first generation of free
men. He, along with thousands of other Negroes, came North after 1919 and I was part of that
generation which had never seen the landscape of what Negroes sometimes call the Old
Country.
He had been born in New Orleans and had been a quite young man there during the time that
Louis Armstrong,8
a boy, was running errands for the dives and honky-tonks9
of what was
always presented to me as one of the most wicked of cities — to this day, whenever I think of
New Orleans, I also helplessly think of Sodom and Gomorrah.10 My father never mentioned
Louis Armstrong, except to forbid us to play his records; but there was a picture of him on our
wall for a long time. One of my father's strong-willed female relatives had placed it there and
forbade my father to take it down. He never did, but he eventually maneuvered her out of the
house and when, some years later, she was in trouble and near death, he refused to do
anything to help her.
He was, I think, very handsome. I gather this from photographs and from my own memories of
him, dressed in his Sunday best and on his way to preach a sermon somewhere, when I was
little. Handsome, proud, and ingrown, "like a toenail," somebody said. But he looked to me, as I
grew older, like pictures I had seen of African tribal chieftains: he really should have been
naked, with warpaint on and barbaric mementos, standing among spears. He could be chilling
in the pulpit and indescribably cruel in his personal life and he was certainly the most bitter
man I have ever met; yet it must be said that there was something else in him, buried in him,
which lent him his tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm. It had something 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. He claimed to
[5]
6. Contemptuous (adjective) manifesting, feeling, or expressing deep hatred or disapproval
7. Apprehensive (adjective) anxious or fearful that something bad or unpleasant will happen
8. American trumpeter, composer, vocalist, and actor who was among the most influential
figures in jazz
9. bars that are considered cheap and dirty
10. notoriously sinful cities in the biblical book of Genesis
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be proud of his blackness but it had also been the cause of much humiliation and it had fixed
bleak boundaries to his life. He was not a young man when we were growing up and he had
already suffered many kinds of ruin; in his outrageously demanding and protective way he
loved his children, who were black like him and menaced,11 like him; and all these things
sometimes showed in his face when he tried, never to my knowledge with any success, to
establish contact with any of us. When he took one of his children on his knee to play, the child
always became fretful and began to cry; when he tried to help one of us with our homework the
absolutely unabating12 tension which emanated13 from him caused our minds and our tongues
to become paralyzed, so that he, scarcely knowing why, flew into a rage and the child, not
knowing why, was punished. If it ever entered his head to bring a surprise home for his
children, it was, almost unfailingly, the wrong surprise and even the big watermelons he often
brought home on his back in the summertime led to the most appalling scenes. I do not
remember, in all those years, that one of his children was ever glad to see him come home.
From what I was able to gather of his early life, it seemed that this inability to establish contact
with other people had always marked him and had been one of the things which had driven
him out of New Orleans. There was something in him, therefore, groping and tentative, which
was never expressed and which was buried with him. One saw it most clearly when he was
facing new people and hoping to impress them. But he never did, not for long. We went from
church to smaller and more improbable church, he found himself in less and less demand as a
minister, and by the time he died none of his friends had come to see him for a long time. He
had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to
the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this
bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness now was mine.
When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to
become aware of the meaning of all my fathers bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his
proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world.
I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with
and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.
He had been ill a long time — in the mind, as we now realized, reliving instances of his fantastic
intransigence14 in the new light of his affliction and endeavoring to feel a sorrow for him which
never, quite, came true. We had not known that he was being eaten up by paranoia, and the
discovery that his cruelty, to our bodies and our minds, had been one of the symptoms of his
illness was not, then, enough to enable us to forgive him. The younger children felt, quite
simply, relief that he would not be coming home anymore. My mother's observation that it was
he, after all, who had kept them alive all these years meant nothing because the problems of
keeping children alive are not real for children. The older children felt, with my father gone, that
11. threatened, especially in a malignant or hostile manner.
12. Unabated (adjective) without any reduction in intensity or strength
13. Emanate (verb) to give out or manifest
14. Intransigence (noun) refusal to change one's views or to agree about something.
3
Requested attribution: Notes of a Native Son. Copyright © 1949, 1950, 1951, 1953, 1954, 1955 by
James Baldwin. Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press, Boston Massachusetts.
Unless otherwise noted, this content is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license
they could invite their friends to the house without fear that their friends would be insulted or,
as had sometimes happened with me, being told that their friends were in league with the devil
and intended to rob our family of everything we owned. (I didn't fail to wonder, and it made me
hate him, what on earth we owned that anybody else would want.)
His illness was beyond all hope of healing before anyone realized that he was ill. He had always
been so strange and had lived, like a prophet, in such unimaginably close communion with the
Lord that his long silences which were punctuated by moans and hallelujahs and snatches of
old songs while he sat at the living-room window never seemed odd to us. It was not until he
refused to eat because, he said, his family was trying to poison him that my mother was forced
to accept as a fact what had, until then, been only an unwilling suspicion. When he was
committed, it was discovered that he had tuberculosis and, as it turned out, the disease of his
mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him. For the doctors could not force him to eat,
either, and though he was fed intravenously,15 it was clear from the beginning that there was
no hope for him.
In my mind's eye I could see him, sitting at the window, locked up in his terrors; hating and
fearing every living soul including his children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching toward
the world which had despised him.
In "Notes of a Native Son," what does Baldwin reveal about his perspective on race relations and personal identity, and how does he use his personal experiences to convey these themes?
write one small paragraph do NOT plagiarize, make it look human written, and do NOT use good grammar
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