Summary
This 1955 essay describes parallel events that occur in the summer of 1943. On July 29th, James Baldwin’s stepfather David Baldwin dies of tuberculosis-related complications in the Long Island mental hospital where he had been committed for paranoid schizophrenia. The day of his father’s (as he calls him) funeral, a race riot breaks out in Harlem. The same day is also Baldwin’s 19th birthday. “Notes of a Native Son” centers on the coincidence of these events.
In the essay, Baldwin uses the memorable metaphor of “a wilderness of smashed plate glass” to describe what Harlem looked like after the riot. With camera-like accuracy, he describes the cereal, sardines, milk, bed sheets, and other objects littering the streets. The scene is apocalyptic, like the Christian apocalypse that Baldwin’s father, a preacher, believed in but in which Baldwin never had faith.
Mediating on his father’s death, Baldwin outlines the differences between them. The first is a generational difference: David Balwin’s mother was born during slavery while David grew up in New Orleans as part of the first generation of free black men. He migrated to the North in 1919. He was a handsome man, Baldwin notes, with a power and charm stemming from his blackness and beauty. Yet David Baldwin had difficulty communicating with other people. He was both bitter and proud, a quality which James Baldwin says he shares. The secret behind his father’s bitterness was “the weight of white people in the world.” Baldwin says that this bitterness ultimately killed his father and could kill him as well. His father was literally sick, as well. Paranoia that his family was going to poison him at mealtime led them to seek psychiatric help. Realizing that his father was clinically paranoid helped Baldwin give meaning to his father’s harshness, but did not make it easy to forgive him.
Baldwin and his father had differences of opinion. When Baldwin was 9 or 10, a white school teacher took an interest in him. She gave him books and took him out to see plays. The first time she came to pick him up at home, his father was skeptical and did not understand what she wanted. Eventually, this teacher became a friend of the family, offering support in hard times, but Baldwin’s father remained suspicious. He told Baldwin that white people may act nicely sometimes, but they “would do anything to keep a Negro down.” The best thing to do, he would tell his son, is to have as little to do with them as possible. Baldwin rejected this perspective then, but the following anecdote in the essay shows how Baldwin came to understand his father’s bitterness and suspicion.
The year of his father’s death, Baldwin worked in a defense plant in New Jersey. This was during the Second World War. Most of the people working in the plant were Southerners, both black and white. Though Baldwin knew about the segregationist Jim Crow laws, he had grown up in New York and had never visited the South. Interacting with the Southerners made him realize more about what it means to be black in America: "I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one's skin caused in other people." Because there was still segregation, Baldwin’s experiences trying to go out in New Jersey reinforced this realization. When he went to a diner for a hamburger and coffee, the food never arrived. Eventually, he was told, “Negroes aren’t served here.” He went all over New Jersey and experienced the same thing. Yet the more he was kicked out, the more he tried anyway. The people in the community began to think he was crazy.
Describing that year in New Jersey, Baldwin describes himself as contracting “some dread, chronic disease” that manifested as a “blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels.” Once you have this disease, it is impossible to relax again for it will always come back. Though Baldwin does not specifically name the cause of this disease, it is a kind of rage caused by racism. He writes that “There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood.” The only choice is whether or not to surrender to it.
To illustrate the effects of this “fever,” Baldwin describes an experience when a white friend from New York took him to a movie theater and a diner in Trenton, New Jersey. At the diner, ironically called the “American Diner,” Baldwin was told, “We don’t serve Negroes here.” He ran out into the street in a rage, imagining a massive crowd of white faces pushing against him, which he had the burning desire to “crush” as they were crushing him. He ends up in front of a fashionable restaurant and goes in despite knowing that they will not serve him. He sits down and is ignored. Eventually, a white waitress appears who looks scared of Baldwin and tells him somewhat apologetically that African Americans aren’t served at this establishment. He is filled with the urge to strike her. He picks up a water-jug from the table and throws towards her, but it smashes loudly into a mirror. Customers and workers began to beat him. He narrowly makes it outside where his friend is waiting for him, telling him to run to safety while he distracts the angry crowd.
In hindsight, Baldwin says, “I could not get over two facts [about this incident], both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder." This can be read as an example of the fever rage Baldwin describes previously. It is a kind of hatred in the heart.
Baldwin then moves into discussing his family and, from there, Harlem. Just as his father was slowly dying and his unborn baby sister was taking her time leaving her mother’s stomach, Harlem was also waiting for something in this period. In these early years of American involvement in WWII, black draftees were sent to the South for military training before being sent out overseas. Similarly, like Baldwin, many were sent to work in defense plants making military supplies. News of the terrible conditions for African Americans in defense plants and army camps in the South came back to family and friends in the North. People were angry and there were rumors of enormous growth in everyday violence in places like Harlem. Ministers, social workers, and politicians all began looking for a way to cool the anger. In Harlem, Baldwin recounts, there were police all over the place. News of violence put everyone on edge. Similarly, “small knots of people,” Harlem residents, began gathering in doorways and on corners. These unlikely groups combining elderly churchgoers and young “sleazy girls,” con-men and retirees, were not saying much of anything but were communicating, Baldwin says, without speaking.
Baldwin moves from the situation on the Harlem streets to his father’s funeral. The preacher’s eulogy makes his father sound kinder than he was, Baldwin thinks, but then he remembers times when he was young and his father was gentle with him. His father especially liked when young James sang in the church choir and began preaching as a teenager. A long passage discusses how hidden behind the harshness of black parents is a desire to teach children ways of surviving in a difficult world, which Baldwin describes as “poison.” Yet there was so little communication between Baldwin and his father that he never understood his motivations.
The night of the funeral, Baldwin celebrates his birthday with a friend in Manhattan. Elsewhere in the city, a black soldier fights with a white man over a black woman. The soldier is shot and though there were various rumors about exactly what happened, it is enough to finally set Harlem off. "The effect, in Harlem, of this particular legend was like the effect of a lit match in a tin of gasoline,” Baldwin writes, using a powerful simile. Though the riot did not actually cross beyond the ghetto line into white neighborhoods, the rioters were not going after the “white face” but rather “white power,” symbolized through white businesses in Harlem. Baldwin attempts to understand why this riot occurred, writing that “to smash something is the ghetto's chronic need.” Yet this smashing does not typically spread outside the neighborhood. The reason, Baldwin writes, is “the Negro's real relation to the white American.” This is a relationship far more complicated than simple hatred: “In order really to hate white people, one has to blot so much out of the mind—and the heart—that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose." Yet to love this white world is not easy either, it is too “ignorant” and “innocent.” The result is that one always has dueling impulses that contradict each other: “It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black. One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene." Neither is a viable option.
Baldwin ends by saying that the situation of race in America leads him to suggest two opposed ideas that one must hold in one’s mind at the same time. The first is that life and people are flawed. But does this mean one must simply accept injustice? This leads Baldwin to the second idea, that one must never be complacent about injustice but must fight it. And fighting it begins with keeping hatred and despair out of one's heart.
Analysis
This essay is the central piece of Notes of a Native Son, to which it lends its name. The piece powerfully moves between different topics and themes, from Baldwin’s father’s death to Baldwin's relationship with his father to the Harlem riots. He uses the coincidence in dates between this death, the birth of his sister, his own birthday, and the outbreak of the riots to make subtle points about how public history and personal history overlap. For example, the lack of communication between Baldwin and his father is juxtaposed with the silent communication that exists between residents of Harlem as tensions in the neighborhoods rise.
Similarly, historical events intimately shape personal life. One reason for the distance between Baldwin and his father is the distance between the periods in which they grew up. Baldwin’s father was the first in his family to be born in a time without slavery. He was part of the Great Migration, a mass movement of African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s from the South to the cities of the North. Historical events also shape Baldwin’s life. US involvement in WWII leads up to work in the New Jersey defense plant, where he encounters a specifically Southern and Jim Crow style of discrimination.
Another important theme of the essay is how racism affects one’s psychological or inner life. Baldwin contrasts his father’s bitterness and rage at the white world with his own approach, one which tries to avoid hatred but inevitably falls into it. Like the virus that Baldwin describes in relation to the night he almost killed or got killed in New Jersey, once an African American catches this sickness of the heart it is impossible to be fully cured. The essay ends with Baldwin’s attempt to find his way out between two contradictory ideas: accepting things as they are or never being complacent with injustice. This way of looking at the world overlaps with W. E. B. Du Bois's idea of black 'double-consciousness,’ which describes how African Americans see themselves with the eyes of a society that despises them. Though Baldwin ends the essay determined not to let hate destroy him, he knows that love is no simple answer either.
