seeceeread 's review for:

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

---

On the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations.

Brothers cowering before their sneering father. Wives sighing as their spouses enact horror. Men struggling to express their anguish in music, on film, in stuttered truths to the few who listen. White boys initiated into manhood through atrocities; Black fathers trying and failing to shield their children from the same. An office worker expected – wrongly – by all her contemporaries to be merely a canvas for their daydreams.

Baldwin makes cultural critique here a blues-infused lament, there a bebop. As he documents his grave disappointment in the United States, he also gestures towards the call-me-home and respond-with-feeling expansiveness of gospel and jazz, art that adores contradiction and yet leaves ample room for expression.

This time through, I noticed the richness of Baldwin's adverbs, his varied sentence structures, and his sometimes jarring jumps in chronology. So much to quote and study.