Notes of a Native Son

Notes of a Native Son

James Baldwin

James Baldwin touches the hearts of his audience in his short three part production Notes of a Native Son. Not only does he capture the emotion and realness of the race riots in Harlem during the summer of 1943, he hands over the essence of what it meant to be a "Negro" during the times of great social distress. He gave the reader a peak into the hearts and souls of some of the most ordinary of black folk from the ghetto of Harlem to the uniforms of the armed services. As well he grabbed the reader with sympathy in the portrayal of his father and the death that he was to witness.

     Baldwins uses stainless imagery when describing the scene of the streets of Harlem during a riot that broke out over the rumor of a white police officer shooting a black soldier in the back while protecting a negro woman. You get a look at the flow of the event when Baldwin penned...

From the Hotel Braddock the mob fanned out, east and west along 125th Street, and for the entire length of Lenox, Seventh, and Eighth avenues. Along each of these avenues, and along each major side street- 116th, 125th, 135th, and so on- bars, stores, pawnshops, restaurants, and even little luncheonettes had been smashed open and entered and looted- looted, it might be added, with more haste than efficiency.

 And then the sight of all the mob's hard work...

The shelves really looked as though a bomb had struck them. cans of beans and soup and dog food, along with toilet paper, corn flakes, sardines, and milk tumbled every which way, and abandoned cash registers and cases of beer leaned crazily out of the splintered windows and were strewn along the avenues.

         These two scenes, in succession, within the third part of his text slaps the reader in the face with the all too real sight such a devastating event such as the race riot would have been. Earlier in the text Baldwin provides a glimpse of the inner turbulence felt by the peoples of the ghetto Harlem. 

All of Harlem, indeed, seemed to be infected by waiting. I had never before known it to be so violently still. 

And again...

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 unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels. 

         This inner turbulence obviously had its impact on the people of Harlem- not just the blacks- and on Baldwin as later in the text he describes a scene after a slew of racial inequality pointed in his direction; he tried to harm a waitress in a restaurant who pushed him past his breaking point by refusing him service; he almost knocked her out with a pitcher of water hurled across the room. 

        These scenes gives the reader an emotional tithe with Baldwin as everybody knows how it feels to reach the point in which you might actually lash out. Through the text is the developing story of Baldwins father and his passing and all of these scenes and the very short dialogue really get the reader emotionally attached. Baldwin lost his father after never knowing him, and only ever even talking to him once for real. In the end, what Baldwins father had for him to have on earth was forever to be unknown. This is in common on what racism had for humanity. Was it nothing but a detriment to society, or was something formed out of all this? The reader is left to interpret this right alongside Baldwin.