A review by halfextinguishedthoughts
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

First published in 1955, James Baldwin began writing these essays as early as the 1940s spanning years into the beginning of the 1950s. 

I began reading these last month and at the pace of about a day, I finished last week. As a companion, this book does not disappoint. Tough at times, frankly honest, and funny as hell at other times, this book is all of these and more.

What a diverse set of essays. It has essays analyzing books (I’ve come to appreciate even more how funny Baldwin is while reading his comments) and movies. There are essays about Harlem, Atlanta, and Baldwin’s life growing up. And the last section takes a broader look at Baldwin’s time in Paris. It goes into his experiences in Paris as an African American man and how that ties into what it means to be black and what it means to be black in America. 

As the novel goes on we see different places and people through Baldwin’s eyes. We see his home of Harlem, the South through stories told by his brother, we venture to Paris and see their government and the common people, and in the last story, we travel with Baldwin to a “tiny Swiss village” and get a taste of what it’s like there. 

Baldwin exposes himself with great strength and skill to show us his experience as an African American and what that means in his personal context and the greater context beyond that. He lends his own journey to us and there is a sort of solidness that comes, a decidedness of who Baldwin is throughout. In an interview with a Chicago radio station, he said, “You have to impose--in fact, this may sound very strange--you have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you and not this idea of”

The novel encapsulates this. It’s a sort of coming to grips with what it means to be Black and how our (American and world) history is entwined with Blackness and Whiteness. It’s grappling with who Baldwin is in the face of what other people want him to be. 

There’s a big pull between Baldwin and home that runs through the essays.

In an interview with Maya Angelou, she asks “What kind of response do you have inside yourself? (to coming home from abroad)” Baldwin states this: 

"I miss that. When you say my home, it's not exactly my home. It's a kind of asylum. It's, um it's a place where I can work. I have a lot of work to do. And if you are in the situation whe- where you're always resisting and resenting, it's very hard to-“ 

[Maya Angelou]: "It takes too much energy."

 [Baldwin]: "Well you can't write a book." 

[Angelou]: "No."

 [Baldwin]: "You can't write a sentence." 

[Angelou]: "No." 

You can feel his energy pointing home even as he writes about other countries. The passages about his family, his siblings, father, and mother all stay with him decades and miles away. It’s in these more personal essays that I connected the most. The emotions are complicated and scathing, yet the rage brings clarity and strength to the story. 

It is these more personal essays that made the most impact for me. While the essay critiquing protest novels, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, has some hilarious and poignant lines, I wished I had read them for more context. 

This book benefits from a slow, deliberate read. At times they are dense and rely on historical events and pop culture moments so I found it good to stop and look up what I needed to. Essays that stuck out to me were (and I’m sure the next time I flip through others will catch my eye): Everybody’s Protest Novel, Journey to Atlanta, Notes of a Native Son, Equal in Paris, and Stranger in the Village

I’m forever a fan of James Baldwin.

While published in 1955, the truth to them still rings today. I said before that this should be required reading, and that so many of my courses in high school and college would have benefited from reading some of these essays. 

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