Discussing Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son"
THE INTERIOR GAZE: WEEK ONE
In this first week of THE INTERIOR GAZE we are reading and discussing James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” and Phillip Lopate’s “Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character.” I also included two additional essays, both titled “Why I Write,” one by George Orwell and the other by Joan Didion.
All paying members will receive a chat thread after I post this— feel free to respond in this comment section or via the chat thread! All INTERIOR GAZE posts are open to all subscribers for this first week. They’ll be paywalled starting this coming Tuesday.
Anyone is welcome to join THE INTERIOR GAZE at any point by becoming a paying member of Navel Gazing. Next week we will read Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” and a visual piece on essay structuring.
Reading is an essential part of being a writer. When we read the work of others, we can ask ourselves: how does this piece of writing work? What choices did the writer make? What choices am I making in my own writing?
The title of Baldwin’s essay, written in 1955, pays homage to Richard Wright, who wrote the novel Native Son in 1940. Wright mentored Baldwin, but the two had a falling out after Baldwin wrote two essays about Wright’s, one of them being “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Yet Baldwin said that he was not attacking Wright— he was only “trying to figure something out for [him]self.”
Despite Baldwin’s critiques, any reader who’s read Native Son can see connections to the novel in Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” particularly in the diner scene, where Baldwin has an urge to throw a glass at the waitress. I’ll get to that in a bit.
There is a lot happening in Baldwin’s essay. This is one of his many talents— the ability to fit so many storylines into such a short work. NOANS is about Baldwin’s relationship with his father; how he experienced his father when he was younger, and who his father really was. Why he was the way he was. It’s also about race relations in the north, and Baldwin’s jarring transition from leaving Harlem, where he had learned to see himself as equal to everyone else, and moving to New Jersey, where he learned that there was a vast expanse between the way he saw himself and his inherent worth as a Black man and the way others saw him, or didn’t see him at all. From page 591:
“I knew about the south, of course, and about how southerners treated Negroes and how they expected them to behave, but it had never entered my mind that anyone would look at me and expect me to behave that way. 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. I acted in New Jersey as I had always acted, that is as though I thought a great deal of myself— I had to act that way— with results that were, simply, unbelievable. I had scarcely arrived before I earned the enmity, which was extraordinarily ingenious, of all my superiors and nearly all my co-workers. In the beginning, to make matters worse, I simply did not know what was happening. I did not know what I had done, and I shortly began to wonder what anyone could possibly do to bring about such unanimous, active, and unbearably vocal hostility. I knew about jim crow but I had never experienced it.”
Here, Baldwin is experiencing something utterly devastating: that he is no longer allowed his individuality. He is, in essence, erased as an individual and has been absorbed into the monolith of his race as others see it.
In the previous paragraph, Baldwin writes about a white teacher, a “sweet and generous woman” who helped his family. Despite her generosity, Baldwin’s father distrusted her, as he distrusted all white people. His father had grown up in the south, and his conceptions of race were shaped there. At the time, Baldwin couldn’t understand his father’s distrust. His father thought that “the best thing was to have as little to do with them as possible.” Baldwin writes: “I did not feel this way and I was certain, in my innocence, that I never would.”
We can see how the previous paragraphs, which detail the white teacher as well as the nuances of his mother’s calling her a “Christian,” (the highest compliment) and his father’s distrust, sets up the following scenes in New Jersey, where Baldwin’s “innocent” trust of white people is irrevocably shattered.
The essay is, at its heart, about the ways in which he misunderstands his father, and blames his father for being angry and closed off, and how, through his own experiences, Baldwin comes to have a deeper understanding of his father’s pain and behavior.
What is an essay?
The root of the word “essay” is the french essai, which means “trial, attempt, endeavor,” and the Latin exigere: to examine, test, and set in motion. I love thinking about the purpose of an essay— that it’s a trial, an examination, and that the essayist endeavors to set something in motion. This is why I never outline my essays, because to outline this form; to have a destination in mind, may limit one’s test of a theory or experience. An essay is an open question.
Questions: What is “Notes of a Native Son” about? What was Baldwin endeavoring to untangle or understand about himself and the world?
Almost every good essay has some sort of arc— some more experimental essays (we’ll read at least one) have hidden arcs that a reader may have to spend time parsing out. Not all essays are linear, but most essays are transformative; that is, the writer’s understanding of something is transformed through the course of the essay. The reader’s, too. One must enter the world of the essay with an open mind, not looking to like or dislike, not aiming to cast judgement, as this can limit the reader’s understanding of both the content and meaning of the essay itself.
The best essays, in my opinion, have some sort of pivotal moment (or several, with one being primary) in which the writer and reader experience a moment of transformation in understanding. In Baldwin’s, this moment occurs in a diner.
Baldwin, in New Jersey, visits diners— this is something he’d done without conflict in Harlem, but in New Jersey the diners (along with many other establishments) will not serve him.
“I went to the same self-service restaurant three times…it was always an extraordinarily long time before anything was set before me; but it was not until my fourth visit that I learned that, in fact, nothing had ever been set before me: I had simply picked something up. Negroes were not served there, I was told, and they had been waiting for to realize that I was always the only Negro present. Once I was told this, I determined to go there all the time. But now they were ready for me and, though some dreadful scenes were subsequently enacted in that restaurant, I never ate there again.
Baldwin then writes, “I was always being forced to leave, silently, or with mutual imprecations.” He “became notorious.” Children giggled and “elders whispered or shouted— they really believed that I was mad.”
This perceived madness is an important element of the essay, and it begins to haunt Baldwin. He is drawn to places he doesn’t belong and, even in the world of the essay, with his reflective narrative voice, doesn’t appear to understand why he is drawn to those places. It’s my interpretation that he only wants to finally be seen as a human, worthy of being served like any other human, and this wanting draws him to these places. Because of this he’s fired from jobs; his reputation precedes him wherever he goes.
The white people he encounters cannot fathom that he is an individual desiring only to be seen and respected— and it’s the ignorance of white people that baffles and pains him. But he also absorbs their ignorance— to me this is the most heartbreaking thing— that his self-respect is slowly being dismantled. That no matter what, he cannot escape the racism that surrounds and defines him.
“That year in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the year during which, having an unsuspected predilection for it, I first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfeeling symptom of which, is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels. Once this disease is contracted, one can never be really carefree again, for the fever, without an instant’s warning, can recur at any moment. It can wreck more important things than race relations. There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood— one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.”
Notice how the punctuation of the last sentence mimics the nature of the fever, simply by leaving out the comma that could occur after “will.” There is no pause there; no hesitation. Baldwin, at this point in the essay, has contracted the same fever that plagued his father, and he knows, even from the narrative vantage point of reflection, that it will always be a part of him.
“Notes of a Native Son” integrates deeply internal reflection with potent scene work. Baldwin’s writing is always like this; its mechanics so deft they’re almost invisible unless one looks very closely, moving through space and time and integrating the wider cultural happenings with his own personal experience.
Baldwin and Bigger Thomas
In Richard Wright’s Native Son, Bigger Thomas murders a white woman out of fear that he will be caught with her. A phenomenon that occurs in this book is this: the murder, in a sense, makes Bigger feel free, because he has fulfilled the prophecy set upon him by white supremacy, which already saw him as someone capable of murder, if not a murderer.
On page 593, on his last night in New Jersey, during a brownout, Baldwin visits “The American Diner” with his friend and they refuse to serve him. When he exits the diner into the crowded streets he writes that “Something happened to me which had the force of an optical illusion, or a nightmare…people were moving in every direction but it seemed to me, in that instant, that all of the people I could see, and many more than that, were moving toward me, against me, and that everyone was white. I remember how their faces gleamed. And I felt, like a physical sensation, a click at the nape of my neck as though some interior string connecting my head to my body had been cut.” He enters another diner and, upon sitting, realizes that the waitress is scared of him.
“…the moment she appeared all of my fury flowed towards her. I hated her for her white face, and for her great, astounded frightened eyes. I felt that if she found a black man so frightening I would make her fright worthwhile.
She did not ask me what I wanted, but repeated, as though she had learned it somewhere, “We don’t serve Negroes here.” She did not say it with the blunt, derisive hostility to which I had grown so accustomed, but, rather, with a note of apology in her voice, and fear. This made me colder and more murderous than ever. I felt I had to do something with my hands. I wanted her to come close enough for me to get her neck between my hands.
So I pretended not to have heard her, hoping to draw her closer. And she did step a very short step closer, with her pencil poised incongruously over her pad, and repeated the formula: “…don’t serve Negroes here.”
Somehow, with the repetition of that phrase, which was already ringing in my head like the thousand bells of a nightmare, I realized that she would never come any closer, and that I would have to strike from a distance. There was nothing on the table but an ordinary water mug half full of water, and I picked this up and hurled it with all my strength at her. She ducked and it missed her and shattered against the mirror behind the bar. And, with this sound, my frozen blood abruptly thawed. I returned from wherever I had been. I saw, for the first time, the restaurant, the people with their mouths open, already, as it seemed to me, rising as one man, and I realized what I had done, and where I was, and I was frightened.”
Baldwin escapes the diner with the help of his friend. The passage ends with this:
“I could not get over two facts, 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. I saw nothing very clearly but could see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do, but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.”
The “real life” in the above passage always hits me, because it separates his real life from the life that has been imposed upon him. The real life is his innocence, his sense of autonomy and self. Here, he can see very clearly that he is at risk of fulfilling the fate set out for him by the racist white conception of Blackness— that he could lose himself completely, and become who they think he is. Baldwin uses italics sparingly in the essay; they gesture to something deep, almost unnameable. His use of punctuation is careful. As writers, we can learn a lot from him about what punctuation can do in any piece of writing.
I will leave us with the last moment of this essay (as it’s impossible for me to analyze every bit of this essay in one pass). Baldwin has gone to his father’s funeral, and in the funeral’s aftermath violence has erupted in Harlem because of a Black couple’s violent encounter with a white policeman— this passage very much mirrors Baldwin’s singular experience in the diner, and he subtly note4s these parallels. The essay’s last paragraph:
“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. This fight begins, however, in the heart and now it had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free from hatred and despair. This intimation made my heart heavy, and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he could have been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.”
In Lopate’s essay he urges us to think of ourselves, in the essay, as a character.
What he is really proposing is that we know ourselves deeply, as Baldwin had to know himself in order to write “Notes of a Native Son.” To write of his dissociation, his fear, and his own realized potential for violence, Baldwin needed distance, and he needed release any fear of the reader’s judgements. The essay is a gift to the reader— I think this is true for all good essays— that the writer is giving the reader a gift by laying themselves bare, both to themself and to the reader. Lopate writes that one must “cut away all inessentials…highlight the intense contradictions and ambivalence.”
Ambivalence— holding contradictory ideas together without veering to one pole or the other, is at the heart of essay writing. Because we humans are full of contradictions. We are all capable of the worst, and most of us aspire to be better than we are. According to Lopate, a writer needs to be “honest, and open to exposure.”
Throughout Lopate’s essay he offers us many ways to take self-inventory— to dive into the wreck of one’s personality. Curiosity is essential— not judgement.
If this feels daunting (which of course it does) it’s helpful to do the self-inventory Lopate lays out in his essay. Doing so may even inspire your next essay.
What did you learn from these essays? What inspired you? What did you see in or learn from “Notes of a Native Son?” I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Please consider sharing this with anyone who may be interested in joining or reading this newsletter!
