The English Department has recently introduced a large collection of student-picked books to its library, including James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. The following is an introduction to the collection’s beginnings and Baldwin’s focuses throughout, written by English & Creative Writing student Izzy Simoes.  

                Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin begins with a section titled “Autobiographical Notes,” a section easily skipped by those hungry for the meat of a text and none of its prefixes (introductions, forwards, dedication pages). However, in reading the collection of essays, I found it essential to consider what Baldwin had to say about himself in 1955, when he was thirty-one years old.

                In this section, aside from some quick backstory on Baldwin’s childhood need for writing, he discusses the force which brings the artist to himself[1] and his work. He must repeatedly tear apart and lay out the conundrums of his life in order to make anything out of it. Specifically, Baldwin refers to his race as a problem to begin parsing through as a way to understand it: “I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality. (Truce, by the way, is the best one can hope for)” (Baldwin 5).

                He goes on to claim that being a black writer is difficult because the “Negro problem” has been written about badly and frequently. As a writer, he is interested not in social dynamics but instead what is “beneath the surface,” or the source of this immense pain. All of the “Negro writing” he comes across is poorly rendered because “…neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back,” (Baldwin 6). Considering himself a bastard of the American world, his intense fear of the world itself kept him in an artistic limbo. Because an artist can only write from his own experiences, he could not write anything about the experience of being a black writer, since the artistic endeavor has high social and emotional demands. He sites this generational, expanding pain as the reason for why he considers works on the “Negro experience” to be poorly written.

                It is this problem, however, that Baldwin grapples with anyway, as “the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else” (8). He claims that any discussion of the African American experience is fraught without an examination of the past and our individual stakes within it. Instead of searching for these initial grounds, Baldwin says that Americans are all too eager to pretend that the racial dynamics of the country are not part of its fabric, that no one wants to claim their steps in the parade toward racism and injustice.

                Almost comically, Baldwin closes his notes section on his interests: laughing, eating, arguing with likeminded people. More importantly, though, he introduces this thought: “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually,” (Baldwin 9). It follows, then, that he ends this part of the book with, “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.” If there was no honesty, love, or goodness in his writing, then he would feel no need to criticize America at all. There is a canon already laid out for him, one with no interest in examining the root of America’s beginnings, the emotional undertaking ignored for the sake of good feelings and simplicity. Baldwin proves to act on his greatest wants through the rest of his collection, focusing on Black artistry, life, and the reality of his place in the world as a Black writer, surrounded by racial myths, both in America and abroad. James Baldwin assures us that he is a Black, American writer, regardless of where he might be, in pursuit of said honesty and goodness.

[1] Baldwin throughout the book refers to himself in the third person, as seen here in his discussion of the artist.