Notes of a Native Son

Notes of a Native Son Review

James Baldwin was thirty-one years old when Notes of a Native Son was published in 1955. He had been living in Paris for seven years — long enough to see America clearly by seeing it from outside. The ten essays collected here were written between 1948 and 1955, and they are the work of a writer who arrived already in full possession of his powers: the intellectual rigor, the rhetorical mastery, the refusal to simplify that would characterize everything he wrote afterward.

The title essay, placed at the center of the collection, is the key to all of it. Baldwin’s father — his stepfather, the storefront preacher whose shadow falls across Go Tell It on the Mountain — died in a mental institution in 1943, on the same day that James Baldwin turned nineteen. That same night, Harlem erupted in the riot that followed the shooting of a Black soldier by a white policeman. Baldwin went to the funeral carrying both a private grief and a public one, and the essay he wrote from this experience is perhaps the most perfectly balanced piece of personal and political writing in the American canon. He does not let himself off; he does not let America off; he does not let his father off. The famous conclusion — “It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength” — is not a resolution but a holding of tension, which is what genuine moral seriousness requires.

The other essays demonstrate Baldwin’s range without diluting his focus. “Everybody’s Protest Novel” — a critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and, more controversially, Richard Wright’s Native Son — argues that the protest novel falsifies Black experience by reducing it to the problem of race, which requires Black characters to be symbols rather than people, and which inadvertently accepts the racist premise that Blackness is, in itself, the essential fact about a human being. The essay caused a rupture with Wright that never fully healed, but its argument has held up. The pieces on Black American life in Paris and Switzerland, and on the psychological experience of being among the first Black people some Europeans had ever seen, are funny and precise and illuminating.

Notes of a Native Son is the place to begin with Baldwin if you have not read him before. It establishes the terms of his argument with America — the argument that America cannot be what it claims to be while doing what it does — with a clarity and force that the fifty years since have not diminished.