QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS FOR JAMES BALDWIN’S “NOTES OF A NATIVE SON”

QUESTIONS FOR A SECOND READING

1. Baldwin is often considered to be one of the great essayists writing in English in the twentieth century. Irving Howe, a distinguished writer and critic, said that Baldwin brought a "new luster" to the essay as an art form, "a form with possibilities for discursive reflection and concrete drama." And, he said, "The style of these essays is a remarkable instance of the way in which a grave and sustained eloquence . . . can be employed in an age deeply suspicious of rhetorical prowess."

How does Baldwin organize a reader's efforts to understand what this essay is about? And, at the end, for you as its reader, what is it about?

2. Question 1 focuses attention on "style." In an interview, Baldwin was once asked, "What do you think readers hope to find in autobiographies?" The interviewer had been talking to Baldwin about his work, including his essays. Baldwin answered, "Somebody said to me once that it's not so much what happens as who it happens to. The sound of the voice is the key; without that it's false."

3. Here is a characteristic passage from the first section of “Notes of a Native Son.” As you reread it, think of the punctuation as part of an expressive project, part of an attempt to order and arrange and control what must be said but cannot be said easily:

He was not a young man when we were growing up and he had already suffered many kinds of ruin; in his outrageously demanding and protective way he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced, like him; and all these things sometimes showed in his face when he tried, never to my knowledge with any success, to establish contact with any of us. When he took one of his children on his knee to play, the child always became fretful and began to cry; when he tried to help one of us with our homework the absolutely unabating tension which emanated from him caused our minds and our tongues to become paralyzed, so that he, scarcely knowing why, flew into a rage and the child, not knowing why, was punished. (para. 5)

If this is done for effect, what is the effect?

One way to work on this question is to write parallel sentences, each with the exact number of words in the same order and with the same punctuation. You can fill in any content you want. Once you get inside the sentences, see where they will lead you (or where you must go).

ASSIGNMENTS FOR WRITING

1. The title of this essay, "Notes of a Native Son," alludes to Native Son, the 1940 novel by Richard Wright. The central character of Native Son is Bigger

Max opened his mouth to say something and Bigger drowned out his voice. "I ain't trying to forgive nobody and I ain't asking for nobody to forgive me. I ain't going to cry. They wouldn't let me live and I killed. Maybe it ain't fair to kill, and I reckon I really didn't want to kill. But when I think of why all the killing was, I begin to feel what I wanted, what I am. . . ."

Bigger saw Max back away from him with compressed lips. But he felt he had to make Max understand how he saw things now.

"I didn't want to kill!" Bigger shouted. "But what I killed for, I am! It must've been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder."

One way of reading "Notes of a Native Son" is as a revision of Wright's novel, an attempt to create a counterpoint to Bigger Thomas. Bigger struggles to speak. The narrator in "Notes of a Native Son" speaks at great length and with apparent ease. His anger drives him to speak (and write). "Notes" could be said to represent a narrative where Baldwin, a writer of the next generation, provides a voice for Bigger, for his anger and rage, a voice Max could listen to and understand. It tells a story of a native son, born to poverty and discrimination, that does not end in murder and imprisonment.

2. Toward the end of his essay, after talking about the riot in Harlem in 1943, Baldwin says,

If ever, indeed, the violence which fills Harlem's churches, pool halls, and bars erupts outward in a more direct fashion, Harlem and its citizens are likely to vanish in an apocalyptic flood. That this is not likely to happen is due to a great many reasons, most hidden and powerful among them the Negro's real relation to the white American. This relation prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and satisfactory as pure hatred. (para. 44)

3. Irving Howe, a distinguished writer and critic, said that Baldwin brought a "new luster" to the essay as an art form, "a form with possibilities for discursive reflection and concrete drama." And, he said, "The style of these essays is a remarkable instance of the way in which a grave and sustained eloquence . . . can be employed in an age deeply suspicious of rhetorical prowess."

Write an essay in which you consider and present "Notes of a Native Son" as an example of the essay as a genre. You could imagine that you are writing a review; you could imagine that you are writing for an audience of writers, people like yourself who are studying the arts of nonfiction and trying to imagine its uses and possibilities. You should imagine that you are writing for a reader who may know something about James Baldwin but who doesn't have "Notes" close at hand or firmly in memory. You will need to provide a careful presentation, then, on both what the essay says and what it does (or how it says what it says). And you should be sure to use this occasion to speak for yourself as a writer and on the question of the essay as a genre that might be useful for you and for your generation.

4. "Notes of a Native Son" is a mix of narrative (or story) and argument (or commentary). This is not the kind of argument that works from thesis statement through example to conclusion. It works slowly, indirectly, by accretion and apposition, and with a careful, determined attention to detail. As way of rereading Baldwin's essay, write a Baldwin-like essay of your own.

5. Baldwin says this about the eulogy at his father's funeral:

Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity. This was perhaps the last thing human beings could give each other and it was what they demanded, after all, of the Lord. (p. 000 of the print book)

At this moment in the essay a reader is invited to think about "Notes of a Native Son." It is not a eulogy, at least not technically, since it was written long after the funeral and not read at the ceremony. The essay is, among other things, a son's public account of his father.

MAKING CONNECTIONS

1. Toward the end of his essay, after talking about the riot in Harlem in 1943, Baldwin says,

If ever, indeed, the violence which fills Harlem's churches, pool halls, and bars erupts outward in a more direct fashion, Harlem and its citizens are likely to vanish in an apocalyptic flood. That this is not likely to happen is due to a great many reasons, most hidden and powerful among them the Negro's real relation to the white American. This relation prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and satisfactory as pure hatred. (para. 33)

We are still, as a country and as a culture, trying to explain to ourselves the real relationship between white Americans and people we now refer to as "African Americans." Ways of Reading contains another document that's part of this history: "Our Time" (John Edgar Wideman, p. 420 in the print book).

2. Susan Griffin in "Our Secret" (p. 231 of the print book) and James Baldwin in "Notes of a Native Son" both use family history to think about and to represent forces beyond the family that shape human life and possibility: war, patriarchy, race. Susan Griffin explains her motives this way, "One can find traces of every life in each life."