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Going To Meet The Man: The Rockpile; The Outing; The Man Child; Previous Condition; Sonny's Blues; This Morning, This Evening, So Soon;Come Out The Wilderness
"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.
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Published January 1, 1991
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About the author
James Baldwin
387 books17k followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Works of American writer James Arthur Baldwin, outspoken critic of racism, include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel, and Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of essays.
James Arthur Baldwin authored plays and poems in society.
He came as the eldest of nine children; his stepfather served as a minister. At 14 years of age in 1938, Baldwin preached at the small fireside Pentecostal church in Harlem. From religion in the early 1940s, he transferred his faith to literature with the still evident impassioned cadences of black churches. From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of France but often returned to the United States of America to lecture or to teach.
In his Giovanni's Room, a white American expatriate must come to terms with his homosexuality. In 1957, he began spending half of each year in city of New York.
James Baldwin offered a vital literary voice during the era of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s.
He first partially autobiographically accounted his youth. His influential Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time informed a large white audience. Another Country talks about gay sexual tensions among intellectuals of New York. Segments of the black nationalist community savaged his gay themes. Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers stated the Baldwin displayed an "agonizing, total hatred of blacks." People produced Blues for Mister Charlie , play of Baldwin, in 1964. Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, defended Baldwin.
Going to Meet the Man and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone provided powerful descriptions. He as an openly gay man increasingly in condemned discrimination against lesbian persons.
From stomach cancer, Baldwin died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. People buried his body at the Ferncliff cemetery in Hartsdale near city of New York.
Works of American writer James Arthur Baldwin, outspoken critic of racism, include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel, and Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of essays.
James Arthur Baldwin authored plays and poems in society.
He came as the eldest of nine children; his stepfather served as a minister. At 14 years of age in 1938, Baldwin preached at the small fireside Pentecostal church in Harlem. From religion in the early 1940s, he transferred his faith to literature with the still evident impassioned cadences of black churches. From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of France but often returned to the United States of America to lecture or to teach.
In his Giovanni's Room, a white American expatriate must come to terms with his homosexuality. In 1957, he began spending half of each year in city of New York.
James Baldwin offered a vital literary voice during the era of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s.
He first partially autobiographically accounted his youth. His influential Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time informed a large white audience. Another Country talks about gay sexual tensions among intellectuals of New York. Segments of the black nationalist community savaged his gay themes. Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers stated the Baldwin displayed an "agonizing, total hatred of blacks." People produced Blues for Mister Charlie , play of Baldwin, in 1964. Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, defended Baldwin.
Going to Meet the Man and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone provided powerful descriptions. He as an openly gay man increasingly in condemned discrimination against lesbian persons.
From stomach cancer, Baldwin died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. People buried his body at the Ferncliff cemetery in Hartsdale near city of New York.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 13, 2025
again Sonny's blues is probably one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking tales I've ever read and the one that cries James Baldwin the most.
November 2, 2025
And I love Paris, I will always love it, it is the city which saved my life. It saved my life by allowing me to find out who I am.
Never, in all my life, until that moment, had I been alone with anyone. The world had always been with us, between us, defeating the quarrel we could not achieve, and making love impossible. During all the years of my life, until that moment, I had carried the menacing, the hostile, killing world with me everywhere. No matter what I was doing or saying or feeling, one eye had always been on the world – that world which I had learned to distrust almost as soon as I learned my name, that world on which I knew one could never turn one’s back, the white man’s world. And for the first time in my life I was free of it; it had not existed for me; I had been quarrelling with my girl. It was our quarrel, it was entirely between us, it had nothing to do with anyone else in the world. For the first time in my life I had not been afraid of the patriotism of the mindless, in uniform or out, who would beat me up and treat the woman who was with me as though she were the lowest of untouchables. For the first time in my life I felt that no force jeopardized my right, my power, to possess and to protect a woman; for the first time, the first time, felt that the woman was not, in her own eyes or in the eyes of the world, degraded by my presence.
There's a palpable anticipatory knowledge in the uses of light in Baldwin's writing that makes some of the scenes almost hallucinatory. Light as warmth, light as terror, light as nightmare. We see that in the Rockpile, 'The sun was high and fell everywhere with a copper light'; in Sonny's Blues 'I didn’t want to believe that I’d ever see my brother going down, coming to nothing, all that light in his face gone out'; in Coming out the Wilderness 'To tell everything is a very effective means of keeping secrets. Secrets hidden at the heart of midnight are simply waiting to be dragged to the light, as, on some unlucky high noon, they always are. But secrets shrouded in the glare of candour are bound to defeat even the most determined and agile inspector for the light is always changing and proves that the eye cannot be trusted'.
Baldwin's writing is one of intense truth, of hightened sorrows, of awakenings and human realisations. Of terror, hatred, isolation and complete belonging. He is able in terse language to put his truth in front of you in a way that it becomes yours, the reader's, in a way that profoundly affects the psyche. In a way that once you've turned that page something inside you is changed forever. I have never been to touched, so terrified, so sickened as when reading these pieces, and yet so in love, so grateful and so amazed at the power of such human brush strokes, painted into words to define the best and the worst in the human condition. Stories living forever in our collective narrative of black and white; race as a weapon, race as a divider, race as a comforter, race as yet a shield and a weapon. When will it ever end? Because the words written on these pages are as real today as there were decades ago.
Never, in all my life, until that moment, had I been alone with anyone. The world had always been with us, between us, defeating the quarrel we could not achieve, and making love impossible. During all the years of my life, until that moment, I had carried the menacing, the hostile, killing world with me everywhere. No matter what I was doing or saying or feeling, one eye had always been on the world – that world which I had learned to distrust almost as soon as I learned my name, that world on which I knew one could never turn one’s back, the white man’s world. And for the first time in my life I was free of it; it had not existed for me; I had been quarrelling with my girl. It was our quarrel, it was entirely between us, it had nothing to do with anyone else in the world. For the first time in my life I had not been afraid of the patriotism of the mindless, in uniform or out, who would beat me up and treat the woman who was with me as though she were the lowest of untouchables. For the first time in my life I felt that no force jeopardized my right, my power, to possess and to protect a woman; for the first time, the first time, felt that the woman was not, in her own eyes or in the eyes of the world, degraded by my presence.
There's a palpable anticipatory knowledge in the uses of light in Baldwin's writing that makes some of the scenes almost hallucinatory. Light as warmth, light as terror, light as nightmare. We see that in the Rockpile, 'The sun was high and fell everywhere with a copper light'; in Sonny's Blues 'I didn’t want to believe that I’d ever see my brother going down, coming to nothing, all that light in his face gone out'; in Coming out the Wilderness 'To tell everything is a very effective means of keeping secrets. Secrets hidden at the heart of midnight are simply waiting to be dragged to the light, as, on some unlucky high noon, they always are. But secrets shrouded in the glare of candour are bound to defeat even the most determined and agile inspector for the light is always changing and proves that the eye cannot be trusted'.
Baldwin's writing is one of intense truth, of hightened sorrows, of awakenings and human realisations. Of terror, hatred, isolation and complete belonging. He is able in terse language to put his truth in front of you in a way that it becomes yours, the reader's, in a way that profoundly affects the psyche. In a way that once you've turned that page something inside you is changed forever. I have never been to touched, so terrified, so sickened as when reading these pieces, and yet so in love, so grateful and so amazed at the power of such human brush strokes, painted into words to define the best and the worst in the human condition. Stories living forever in our collective narrative of black and white; race as a weapon, race as a divider, race as a comforter, race as yet a shield and a weapon. When will it ever end? Because the words written on these pages are as real today as there were decades ago.
July 17, 2025
One of my, perhaps the most, favourite writers. Some of these short stories are disturbing, particularly 'Going To Meet The Man'. James Baldwin has a great skill in carrying a powerful message in simple but very punchy narrative. Excellent. Most of the stories have a Black experience theme but not all; some are beyond race.
April 11, 2025
A fantastic collection of eight novellas by James Baldwin. Truly remarkable: The man child; This morning, this evening, so soon; Going to meet the man. Expect a rollercoaster of emotions, can highly recommend.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews