"People’s just people as far as I'm concerned."
In spite of the fact that Leona is from the South and her family proves to be full of racist ideas and bigotry, Leona’s mind is not poisoned with it. When Rufus asks her whether her family has warned her “about the darkies”, she tells him that she doesn’t care about such things as skin color. “People’s just people as far as I’m concerned" is her answer. However, Rufus, who can’t believe that white people can be against racism, doesn’t think so. Is he too quick to write her off, or is he right? This is complicated, because while it is a good thing that Leona is not racist and sees people as the same, that isn't actually a good thing when one considers the naivete of colorblindness. Black people live color every day, and pretending it doesn't exist or matter helps no one. Rufus thus has no easy answer to his dilemma about whether or not to pursue things with Leona.
"Sometimes I wonder if I’m still the same person who did those things."
Just like any other man, Vivaldo has secrets, and some of them are too dark to share with others (though the occasion of Rufus's funeral prompts him to tell Cass). He and his friends raped a young queer man, beat him and left him “lying on that cement floor, and, you know, it was winter.” Sometimes he wonders if he is “still the same person who did those things." It is not a secret that people are perfectly capable of cruelty, but what we don’t know is how far we can go. Vivaldo has already tested his limits and now he is scared of himself. Baldwin raises the question—but does not answer—if our past actions are irredeemable, and if they are, then is there any point in trying to be better? On the other hand, how does one fully confront their secret parts instead of just letting themselves off the hook?
He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him. They were all named, more or less, all more or less destined, the pattern he wished them to describe was clear to him. But it did not seem clear to them. He could move them about but they themselves did not move.
Vivaldo struggles more and more with his novel as his relationship with Ida deepens. He cannot seem to control his art; it's not as if it controls him, it's just that it lies there, moribund. He is too consumed with worry and jealousy to break through to a frame of mind where he can truly create. Baldwin isn't suggesting that art must come from a place of peace and equanimity—suffering is certainly fodder for art!—but he does suggest that self-knowledge is key to creation. If Vivaldo can't figure himself out, how is he supposed to populate a novel?
It was the way the world treated girls with bad reputations and every colored girl had been born with one.
Ida articulates the falsehoods and stereotypes perpetuated about Black women since the days of slavery. Black women were painted as harlots, as inherently more sexual and immoral; this allowed white Christian slaveowners to plead a lack of guilt when they raped them. The image of Black women being more licentious carried into the post-emancipation era as well, which Ida notes here. Black girls are sexualized from an early age, given a reputation they didn't earn, and forced to deal with white men's predatory natures. It is no wonder she seeks to punish Vivaldo when they first meet, and why she finds it so troubling when she begins to fall for him.
... he felt that he was traveling up a savage, jungle river, looking for the source which remained hidden just beyond the black, dripping foliage.
Vivaldo is certainly a liberal and an ally to people of color, but it is passages like this that indicate that he has a long way to go. Particularly when it comes to Black women, Vivaldo embraces exoticized and racialized fantasies. He seeks out Black prostitutes in Harlem when he is troubled, losing themselves in the "dangerous," titillating sexual encounter that smacks of the forbidden. Here with Ida, a woman he actually cares for, he is doing the same thing, equating having sex with her to navigating a "savage" jungle. He is not viewing any of the Black women he sleeps with as people; rather, they are only fantasies, conduits to his own pleasure. This might not be an overt type of racism, but it is unequivocally still that very thing.
Rufus had made him suffer, but Rufus had dared to know him.
Eric answers a question the reader may have: why does he mourn Rufus? Here he states that it is because Rufus truly knew him while other people do not. The way the statement is phrased is important, for it puts the action in Rufus's hands—he dared to know Eric. This suggests that Rufus, for all of his identity handwringing, was vulnerable and real with Eric and let Eric be that way with him. He let Eric face him and be his true self, and did not judge or condemn him for that. Yes, Rufus eventually recoiled and hurt Eric, but clearly Eric learned enough from this to be able to be with Yves in a healthy relationship.
"How's one going to get through it all? How can you live if you can't love? And how can you live if you do?"
This anguished cry of Vivaldo's, directed towards Eric, encapsulates where he is at with Ida: as cliche as it sounds, he finds he can no longer live with her or without her. Baldwin doesn't have an easy answer for Vivaldo; in fact, there isn't one. But Eric's arc through suffering provides a template, and it seems that Vivaldo and Ida may be able to follow that by the end of the novel. Their radical honesty and vulnerability, willingness to apologize, and faith in each other and their relationship may be enough—though Baldwin suggests that there will still be suffering involved, as that is the nature of living.
"And what would have happened if Richard hadn't come?"
"I don't know. But this is silly. He did come. I did leave."
Ida tells Cass she shouldn't be so proud of her anti-racist credentials because she didn't make the leap to leave her traditional, more conservative background on her own—she married Richard, who brought her into the Village. Cass's perspective is that the way she got here doesn't matter, because she is here, but Ida is trying to get her to see the disingenuousness of claiming allyship in the way she wants to. Though Cass does seem to truly want to be anti-racist, she still has room to grow, evidenced by her offended response to Ida's statement.
"Kept you here, and stunted you and starved you, and made you watch your mother and father and sister and brother and son and daughter die or go mad or go under, before your very eyes? And not in a hurry, like from one day to the next, but, every day, every day, for years, for generations? Shit. They keep you here because you're black, the filthy, white cock suckers, while they go around jerking themselves off with all that jazz about the land of the free and the home of the brave."
Ida's raging to Cass in the taxi is a powerful evocation of the way Black people feel and why they feel that way, and an implication of white people and a condemnation of the hypocrisies of American democracy. She articulates the way Black people have been kept second-class citizens generation after generation, and how painful it is to watch and to experience. She lambasts white people who pilfer elements of Black culture when they see fit, but don't care about the people who make that culture. And she mocks their hypocrisy in touting the principles of the founding of this country, "land of the free and the home of the brave," when they instituted and promulgated slavery and Jim Crow. It is a searing, unforgettable indictment.
"There didn't," said Eric, "seem to be any other reason. They'd never seen the boys before."
"I imagine, said Ida, "that it was in some kind of retaliation—for something other boys had done to them."
This exchange comes after Ida and Vivaldo learn from Eric that Cass and Richard's boys were beaten up. It shows the complexity of race relations, for 1) perhaps the Black boys were just being cruel and targeted the white boys for no reason, but is it possible to weave into that story the straitened circumstances that many Black children were growing up under, leading them to behave in problematic ways? 2) does that line of thinking work even if the boys come from an affluent Black household? If not, do we just chalk this up to "kids will be kids"? 3) did Paul and Michael really do something at an earlier point to explain this attack, even if they don't remember or can't put their fingers on what that might be? 4) is Baldwin implicating the white reader whose first thought may have been that the Black boys were wild and "savage" and that the white boys were 100% victims? Questions linger, a testament to Baldwin's willingness to expose racial issues with no easy explanation or answer.
