Going to Meet the Man

by James Baldwin

'Few, it seems to me, have driven their words with such passion' Guardian

How our earliest experiences can shape our destiny is the theme that runs like a thread of revelation through these extraordinary stories. They explore the roots of love, of murder and of racial conflict, from the child in 'The Rockpile' who can never be forgiven by his God-fearing father for his illegitimacy to the loneliness of a young black girl in love with a white man who, she knows, will leave her in 'Come Out of the Wilderness' and the horrifying story of the initiation of a racist as a man remembers his parents taking him to see the mutilation and murder of a black man in 'Going to Meet the Man'. In them Baldwin unlocks the concepts of history and prejudice and probes beneath the skin to the soul.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Race, African American, Literary Fiction, Literature

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Librarian 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.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

No Surrender

Whenever I’m in danger of feeling smugly self-satisfied or, on alternate days, resentfully dissatisfied about my place in the world, James Baldwin is always on hand as a corrective. His prose is hypnotic as it allows entry into the lives of people one does not know. His minimalist descriptions are perfect in their evocation of a timeless space. The relationships he characterizes are simply true; one can feel oneself part of them. And the real condition of being alive in the world is revealed for what it is: suffering, of which I have experienced slightly more than some but vastly less than most of the world.

In Baldwin, everyone suffers. They suffer because the are poor, because they are displaced, because of young mistakes, because of ambitions denied, but mostly because there is no hope. The world never gets any better from the moment his stories commence. Life is like the Manhattan schist boulder in the lot across the street from his starting location - eternally the same, immovable, dangerous for children and for the people who literally as well as figuratively work beneath it. A mountainous rock of despair.

The best possible outcome for everyone is a sort of tedious, grinding equilibrium that avoids imminent disaster or death. But the life that remains is one of constant fear, conflict, injustice and uncertainty. Only the will to survive sustains it - not family, not the community, not the ‘authorities’, certainly not the larger society that barely recognizes such a life. One lives in the midst of an undefined threat, an incessant hum of racial hatred ready to turn into a thunder-clap of annihilation at the slightest misstep. Yet those who suffer do not despair.

What is the secret? How do they persist? How much inherent strength does it take to reject both suicide and murder in response to the mountain of despair? One strategy seems to be a sort of immanent metaphysics expressed in the pentecostalist church and its customs. Pentecostalism is Christian in vocabulary, but it is gnostic in belief. It is a refuge for the thinking oppressed. The world is evil and must be resisted. Home is elsewhere and can be glimpsed only in ecstatic transport. While waiting for its indefinite arrival, preservation of the spark of special wisdom must be encouraged. The world must be destroyed entirely in order for it to be saved.

Gnosticism provides a solid explanation for the world and the suffering one experiences and sees in others. But it also fosters a fundamental suspicion of oneself - not just of one’s motives, but of one’s entire being. If all which is visible is evil, then the self, the most personally visible thing of all, is untrustworthy. Gnosticism demands the surrender of one’s body to the malicious, malignant Demi-god who created this world of exile; and the surrender of one’s intellect to the corruption of the original sin, committed so long ago no one remembers what it was, but which is passed on genetically and stops us from thinking right thoughts ever since.

Gnostic expression is stilted: ‘Praise the Lord’, ‘Shout Amen’, ‘Feel the arms of Jesus’. It is formulaic in order to purify speech from its inherent flaws. It clears the mind of thought and reason which have no means to realize themselves even if they weren’t already part of the evil that surrounds us. To be able to transport oneself into gnostic bliss is enough rational comfort. It is resistance without appearing to resist; it is escape while still behind the bars; it is the promised land without leaving home; it is intoxication without the hangover.

But Gnosticism is not good enough for Baldwin. He won’t have it. And he won’t take the other available ways to dull the pain of reality: booze, drugs, violence, sexual domination. Instead he writes. And what he writes shares the pain. It doesn’t rationalize or reduce the pain, but it spreads it so we all can know about it. In order that, perhaps, something different may grow out of it.

[Lydia]

James Baldwin. James fucking Baldwin.
Love of my life. Master of prose. Destroyer of my heart.
Perfectly incredible selection of short stories that ripped me to pieces. Devastating and wonderful.
Goddammit, my love for Baldwin has only increased. What a perfect way to start 2015's reading.

[el · Rating 5 out of 5]

so utterly one of a kind. cried during nearly every one of these. james baldwin continues to remind me of the possibilities of art-making before the milquetoast commercialization of the american novel. pockets like this exist and must be read and coveted: writing as an imperative, a space of taboo and transgression, of deep transformative thought. now editors + publishers are scared of any kind of “all white people should die” sociopolitical messaging. like c’mon 🙄🙄🙄

i love love love the vast and vivid emotional color of baldwin’s work. in this collection, resentment, despair, and imagined/aspirational vengeance are focal. they’re focal without ever becoming hollow, gratuitous, or taxing on the narrative. every bit of acrimony is absolutely essential. there’s a lot of violence in this, but also a lot of subterranean tension that operates on levels less visible/tactile to the human body.

baldwin understands better than most that literature can’t shy away from the fluctuations of affective bias—what we feel, and why we feel it in the first place. his characters are deeply feeling and that’s what makes his heavier subject matter so compelling.

(also, his ability to make place/setting feel alive continues to astound me. i am obsessed with his live music sequences. he writes about reverence without totally acquiescing to western religion in a way that is phenomenal.)

increasingly, fiction and author are conflated, which means sifting for and depriving literature of anything politically and culturally incendiary. reading something like this is such a breath of fresh air.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a whole, this collection of eight stories is well-crafted and insightful. Some of the stories are too wordy in parts; the one with a female protagonist (‘Come Out the Wilderness’) rather unmemorable.

Anyone who has read Go Tell It on the Mountain will recognize the characters in the first two stories. ‘The Rockpile’ is tense in its conciseness as the family waits for the father to arrive home; ‘The Outing’ felt a bit lengthy with its church service aboard a ferryboat, but was intriguing with the teenage character of David who isn’t in Go Tell it on the Mountain.

‘The Man Child’ illustrates to great effect how entitlement is bred and I didn’t foresee at all its surprising ending. The 1948 ‘Previous Condition’, which in many ways is a story that could be of today, reminded me of Another Country. In ‘This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,’ Baldwin has a character speak these prescient lines: "I cannot help saying that I think it is a scandal--and we may all pay very dearly for it--that a civilized nation should elect to represent it a man who is so simple that he thinks the world is simple.”

The title story is chilling in its historical accuracy, bringing to mind the events I read of in John Lewis’ Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, as well as my visit to The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, with its documentation of a certain lynching. It’s a story that wasn’t previously published, so either it was too graphic for any of the magazines or Baldwin wrote it specifically for this collection (or, as my friend Howard said, both are probably true).

‘Sonny’s Blues’ is the masterpiece of the bunch with its great writing and illuminating insights into how insidiously racism acts upon the individual (also see ‘Previous Condition’ in particular for the latter). Its final section is pure brilliance.

*

Entering this title on Goodreads, I see that William Makepeace Thackeray wrote a short piece called Going to see a man hanged. That can’t be a coincidence.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I ended 2020 with this book, a glass of Uncle Nearest, jazz and reggae music. Like the midnight sky, the darkness and absurdity of this world filled the air around me, but with Baldwin in conversation, I had good distraction. During that appalling first week in January, I revisited scenes and sentences from this collection and from Nobody Knows My Name. I realized something: there is so much depth to Baldwin's fiction writing, such nuance and subtlety, that some think they only find in his pointed nonfiction those things they simply don't grasp in his fiction. But it's all there. In fact I'll venture to say his fiction says more.

The emotional intensity is a waltz I admire and enjoy. Before this book, it had been a while since I was able to truly disappear into a book, truly interact with characters. This collection was the bedtime tuck I needed, the emotional validation expressed in words so black, white, and true they cut to the core. And then there is style, character development, practiced pace, and these pronounced themes of displacement and loneliness and resilience so aptly explicated. "Sonny's Blues" (omg!) has a song of its own, but so does "Come out the Wilderness" and "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon." After having read Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone and Another Country, I soon realized I'd seen these characters before and I could relax and enjoy familiar encounters.

What I've read from Baldwin so far:

The Fire Next Time
Giovanni's Room
Go Tell It on the Mountain
If Beale Street Could Talk
Another Country
Notes of a Native Son
Going to Meet The Man
Nobody Knows My Name
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
Just Above My Head

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t really think that the short story is a good form for the type of writer James Baldwin is. His style is a little too reflective and inconclusive to work well in something short. His novels and essays are the best way to absorb and appreciate his genius. That being said, Going to Meet the Man is one of the best short stories ever written.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the main reasons I read is to be placed in the shoes of someone different from myself, and I can’t think of a writer who is better at putting me there than James Baldwin. His deep understanding of human nature, his skill at finding just the right detail to convey an emotion or experience, and his ever-present empathy makes every Baldwin reading a deep growth experience. In this collection, he gives us eight stories, and eight very different points of view.

In The Rockpile, using characters from his autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, he conveys a relatively simple childhood experience, but which reveals complex family issues that are likely to have lasting impacts.

The Outing is another story from a young boy’s viewpoint. The feelings that come up on a church outing are so delicately and subtly expressed: powerlessness in the awareness of attraction and jealousy; longing in the idea of salvation; dread in the reality of sin. Such beautiful, human stuff.

The Man Child involves Eric, an eight year-old boy whose overly-confident father has his life all planned out for him. He is the prince, the heir, as his father’s friend Jamie says. Unlike the unlucky Jamie, Eric doesn’t have to do anything to get all of his father’s land, and be able to earn a living. Eric’s mother, a tragic figure here, mostly in the shadows, deserves her own story, which Baldwin surely could have written. Very disturbing. I can’t get this one out of my mind.

Previous Condition is about a young Black man who has come to New York from the South, and the racism he experiences. It’s about assimilation, but also the comfort only available from your own people.

Sonny’s Blues is a gorgeous story about brothers and racism and music and love--a work of art that I reviewed separately here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I was thrilled to read This Morning, This Evening, So Soon, which I’ve heard about for years. It comes from the viewpoint of an American who has moved to Europe as Baldwin did, and his mixed feelings about his original and adopted homes. He’s a successful actor and singer, a Black man with a Swedish wife and mixed race child. So many profound ideas in this one. One example I found particularly timely was when he and his latest film’s (French) director are out enjoying Paris nightlife, they meet a group of young Black American tourists, and the director says to the tourists, “'… the only people from your country with whom I have ever made contact are black people--like my good friend, my discovery here,’ and he slaps me on the shoulder. ‘Perhaps it is because we, in Europe, whatever else we do not know, or have forgotten, know about suffering. We have suffered here. You have suffered, too. But most Americans do not yet know what anguish is. It is too bad, because the life of the West is in their hands.’”

Come Out of the Wilderness was another insightful story. This time it is a woman who has moved north from Alabama, with some similar themes to Previous Condition.

In Going to Meet the Man, a white, racist sheriff reflects back on a pivotal experience of his childhood. As I said above, Baldwin can put you thoroughly in someone else’s shoes, and these are shoes you do not want to be in. Horrific, and difficult to read.

I watched a documentary about Baldwin recently, in which he emphasized more than once the things that frighten him. His ability first to clearly see and admit this fear, and then to use his immense talents to describe it, could be what makes his writing feel so universal.

[Lisa (NY) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories in this collection are roughly in order of when Baldwin wrote them. This makes sense to me as the first three stories feel raw and not fully formed - almost like practice for the stunning This Morning, This Evening, Soon about the trepidation a black musician feels about returning to the US after living in Paris. And Sonny's Blues about the relationship between two brothers and power of the blues. All of the stories explore the devastating effects of racism.

"The tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

These men were his models, they had been friends to his father, and they had taught him what it meant to be a man.

His father's face was full of sweat, his eyes were very peaceful. At that moment Jesse loved his father more than he had ever loved him. He felt that his father had carried him through a mighty test, had revealed to him a great secret which would be the key to his life forever.

This is an extraordinary collection of short fiction from James Baldwin. The quotations above are from the title story, one of the most horrific I have read about a detailed lynching of a Black man. But what Baldwin does is to focalise the narrative through Jesse, now a law-man whose hatred for Black people was ignited through his childhood experience of being a witness to this event which is wound up with his feelings about masculinity, his relationship with his father and a sense of male power which becomes perversely sexualised. It's a tour de force of writing that made me feel physically nauseous even while I was in total awe of Baldwin's ability to control the story and make me appreciate the astonishing way in which he gets inside the head of Jesse with psychological nuance and complexity.

The other high point is 'Sonny's Blues', a soaring paean to music as a response to suffering and which also lays bare a troubled fraternal relationship in all its complications and love. But, to be honest, there isn't a bad piece in this collection: only after reading it did I realise that two of the stories feature characters from Go Tell It on the Mountain, putting that book straight onto my TBR pile.

The range of Baldwin's narrative perspectives are a tribute to his remarkable way of getting inside the souls of his characters, whether a Black girl in an affair with a white man, the husband and father of a mixed race family in Europe, or Jesse noted above who is so much more complicated than a caricature of a vile racist.

Key to these stories are male-male relationships: fathers and sons, boyhood friendships (at least one of which shades into unexpressed desire), brotherly bonds, connections to god - all adding up to a variety of ways in which it means to be a man - often, but not only, a Black man - in the world.

This is a book steeped in suffering and anguish. There is despair here, hovering over the pages like the rockpile of the opening tale. And it is art - music in the story of Sonny, literature in Baldwin's case - which is the only way to channel this torment, to express and articulate it and turn it into something miraculous and beautiful without erasing the affliction itself.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eight satisfying stories in a startling collection.

I'm happy to have re-discovered Baldwin in the past few years. As a teen, I'd only known him for his novel 'Giovanni's Room'. Though it's a powerful novel, it wasn't (at least for a teenager), the best work to know him for: it's depressing, not particularly filled with much light. (I read it again, as part of the re-acquaintance.)

After seeing the remarkable documentary 'I Am Not Your Negro' a year or two ago, I had to explore deeper. I went into the avenues of novels, essays and plays but was unaware that Baldwin also wrote short stories. ~which, as it turns out, are a stunning thing set apart; his voice is varied and intricate.

The writing here reveals a justified anger tempered by compassion and sensitivity. Baldwin seems to have a unique ability at putting himself in the other guy's shoes - whether the other guy is an older black preacher, a young black or white woman, a young boy (again, white or black), an older white bigot, an addict, a creative artist, someone mentally unenlightened or someone mentally challenged, etc.

There's a lot of longing, frustration and genuine pain in these stories. There's a prominent, unquenched desire in the descriptions of attempts at making peace with a world that seems to thwart such attempts. There's a pronounced fear of 'the other' - that underdog that Baldwin never tires of being a spokesman for. As a writer, he exhibits unerring observational skill - he remains (somewhat) cool and objective when (esp. in the face of injustice) it's likely those are the last states he'd prefer to be in.

Though the narrative flow is often a matter of plain-speaking, there are times - particularly in a story like 'Come Out the Wilderness' - when the writing consistently soars. That story is especially incisive in its depiction of more personal race relations.

There are stories here that shock in their intensity ('The Man Child', 'Going to Meet the Man') and, luckily, there's one ('This Morning, This Evening, So Soon') that contains some very welcome tenderness and open, loving communication - even if both are cloaked in the periphery of human struggle.

All told - a potent and memorable volume.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Perhaps this was what the singing had meant all along. They had not been singing black folks into heaven, they had been singing white folks into hell."

The fingers of historical racial injustice spread wide and touch the downtrodden in every aspect of their lives. This was evident in these stories written over a fifteen year span and published in 1965. Each story gave me a jolt of repulsion with an aftershock of heartbreak. How little things have changed. The racial hierarchy may be more concealed, but it is simmering below the surface.

Baldwin had a troubled relationship with his stepfather, a rigid and unhappy revivalist pastor. This and his evangelical upbringing are prevalent themes in many stories. "The Outing", one of the less gut-wrenching, describes a church group's boat ride up the Hudson River; a picnic and revival meeting so well described I could hear and feel the exuberance of the participants "bringing their souls to safety". The souls of the teenage David and Johnnie may not have been saved, but their homosexual feelings were awakened. "The Rockpile" is another story depicting a domineering religious stepfather who unfairly treats the eldest son. "Sonny's Blues" examines the misunderstandings between two black brothers and the devastation caused by addiction. Even with the affluent as in "This Morning, This Evening So Soon", there is fear of discrimination as the main character prepares to return to the U.S. after living for 12 years in Paris. Will he still be discriminated against? What about his mixed-race son? His white wife? (Baldwin also found Paris to be a refuge from racial bias.) "Going to Meet The Man" is the most disturbing and haunting . Written in 1965 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement a lynching becomes a pageantry and picnic for the depraved white citizens of the town.

I have read widely about racism both in fiction and nonfiction. Never have I felt to my core the anxiety and trepidation Blacks must feel. Sometimes fiction can do what nonfiction can't.

""For, while the tale of how we suffer and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all the darkness."

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a magnificent and harrowing collection. This is an updated review from 2015.

“The Man Child is an indictment of the vicious cycle that sharecroppers often faced when trying to find the cash to buy their land, but end up in debt, with tragic results ending with the murder of an innocent boy”.

“Going to Meet the Man” is a horrifying account of a racist sheriff, about to have sex with his wife, reminisces when his parents took him to see a live lynching of a black man, his testicles ripped off of him.

“Come out in the Wilderness” is a sad, bluesy riff on a young black woman, Ruth, living with a white painter, Paul; who experiences shame with living with a white partner when her black boss, Mr Davis takes her out to lunch.

And of course, “Sonny's Blues” is the unquestioned masterpiece in the collection, and rightly so. Haunting, ethereal and ghostlike, Sonny's vice like grip on his brother's memories and their love and hate for each other is probably the best thing Mr Baldwin has ever written and crafted. It was my first exposure to Baldwin’s work, and I’ve read everything by him since in the last 20 years.

Postscript: I recently read Nicholas Boggs’ biography on Baldwin, and was fascinated that Sonny was modeled after one of his loves, a mercurial young man named Arnold.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was slightly disappointed with the first novel I read by the late great James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room. Although I found it difficult to empathize with the main character (who I found to be a little whiny and spoiled), I was really taken by how beautiful Baldwin's writing was. It was enough to keep me interested in reading more of his work and I'm glad I chose this book as the next one. This solid collection of 8 short stories is a great primer to his writing style and the themes that permeate most of his work, such as race, identity, sex, life in Harlem, and the influence of art, religion, and family.

Baldwin's writing is consistently sincere, although some stories kept my attention more than others. There are two stories that are the big standouts in this collection. The soulful "Sonny's Blues" is about a man struggling to understand and reconnect with his estranged, heroin-addicted, musician brother, and also happens to be a look at the liberating power of the blues. The following quote is one the best descriptions of what great music, especially "the blues" is supposed to do, and what it means to be a musician:

"He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."

The title story, "Going to Meet the Man", floored me and haunted me, and might be one of my favorite short stories. It actually kept me up at night thinking about it afterward. It's a story written with pitch-perfect confidence by Baldwin, about a middle-aged, racist, deputy sheriff of a Southern town in the U.S. recalling the event in his childhood that might have made him the bigot he is. The story challenges you to see how an innocent 8-year-old boy, who's best friend is black, can somehow turn into something else. It also explores the uncomfortable relationship between prejudice and sexuality, and how one can profoundly affect the other. A great piece.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The American Dream

“A big, sandy-haired man held his daughter on his shoulders, showing her the Statue of Liberty. I would never know what this statue meant to others, she had always been an ugly joke for me. And the American flag was flying from the top of the ship, above my head. I had seen the French flag drive the French into the most unspeakable frenzies, I had seen the flag which was nominally mine used to dignify the vilest purposes: now I would never, as long as I lived, know what others saw when they saw a flag.”

Faith, Country, and the color of your skin

“…everyone’s life begins on a level where races, armies, and churches stop. And yet everyone’s life is always shaped by races, churches and armies; races, churches, armies menace, and have taken many lives.”

In reading Baldwin, I am reminded of an old photo I once saw. A snapshot of a small crowd posing on an old bridge. There are men and women. There are summer frocks and straw hats and a few smiles. Beneath the bridge there are two people, a man and a woman, suspended by ropes. The people standing on the bridge are all white, the people hanging beneath the bridge are not.

This, my introduction to the works of James Baldwin, has left me somewhat speechless. His prose is minimal and simple and yet so powerful that you can almost smell the sweat and taste the blood. There is no trace of sensationalism in his words, just a stark, matter-of-fact narrative that hollows out your insides.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Baldwin's Stories

I read Baldwin's 1965 collection of short stories, "Going to Meet the Man" after reading his first novel, "Go Tell it on the Mountain". Baldwin (1924 -- 1987) wrote in searing terms about the African American experience and about racial injustice. These stories and the early novel have a feel of individuality, passion and personal experience that to me are more basic than their depictions of American racism.

The book includes eight early stories which explore and attempt to surmount suffering and anger. Baldwin's stories find sexuality, art and religion as sources of suffering and redemption. The writing is dense and detailed in its description of places and people. The stories are set in Harlem, France, and the rural South.

Baldwin's story, "Sonny's Blues" tells the story of a blues pianist who has become addicted to heroin and of his relationship to his brother who has led a more conventional life as a teacher. The story develops slowly and carefully as it illustrates the necessity of living with purpose and of how music may bring meaning to life, both for the performers and for those listeners able to hear. I thought it the best story in the collection, and it has become deservedly famous.

The title story focuses on the life of a racist white sheriff in the rural South. Baldwin explores the racial and sexual attitudes of his protagonist and their relationship to a brutal lynching and burning the sheriff witnessed with his parents as a boy. Another story in the collection, "The Man Child". also is set in the rural South and is the only work in the volume without an explicit racial theme. It offers instead a portrayal of smoldering sexual and domestic tension, loneliness, and violence.

The life of creative performers and artists is a theme of several stories in addition to "Sonny's Blues" . "This morning, this evening, so soon" deals with an African American expatriate in Paris who has married a Swedish woman. He is about to return to the United States after a lengthy absence and fears for his young son and for the racial hostility he knows he will encounter in America. The primary character of "Come Out of the Wilderness" is a young African American woman involved in a failing relationship with a white artist. She is about to become involved in a relationship with her boss, an African American man at a large insurance company, and feels a sense of purposelessness and uncertainty. In the story, "Previous Condition" the main character also shows a sense of drift. The young African American actor at the center of the story struggles in his relationship with a Jewish friend and with a white lady friend in his failing efforts to find meaning in his life.

The first two stories in the collection, "The Rockpile" and "The Outing" explore characters and some materials that Baldwin used in "Go Tell it on the Mountain." The second of these stories, which examines a summer boating excursion along the Hudson River by the congregants of the Temple of Fire Baptized is effective in its own right and adds to the characterization of the church and its parishioners presented in the novel.

This collection offers insight into American racial tensions and into Baldwin's understanding of racial injustice. I loved the stories more for their focus on lonely troubled individuals seeking for self-understanding and for Baldwin's understanding of ambiguity, sexuality, and the power of art.

Robin Friedman

[Daniel Chaikin · Rating 5 out of 5]

From my Litsy post: There‘s a long path of Baldwin‘s life in this short story collection, capped, easily, by the magnificent Sonny‘s Blues. Baldwin does some lovely, beautiful gently-created characters and tears them up. The last story, the title story on going to see a lynching, hovers over everything else. These stories are about racism even when they‘re not.

-----------------------------------------------

40. Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
published: 1965
format: 193 pages inside Early Novels & Stories: Go Tell It on the Mountain / Giovanni’s Room / Another Country / Going to Meet the Man
acquired: December
read: Aug 16-28
time reading: 7 hr 15 min, 2.3 min/page
rating: 4½

[Theo Logos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baldwin brought to this collection of short stories the same beautiful prose, the same sad and insightful introspection as characterized his novels. Racism, family, personal identity, sadness, horror, loss, loneliness and love are the themes he so artfully examined.

The Rock Pile: An incident from the family featured in his debut novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain. Younger brother Roy disobeys his mother and is hurt, and brutal father Gabriel tries to take it out on his step son, John.
3 1/2 ⭐️

The Outing: another slice of life story related to Go Tell It On the Mountain family.
3 ⭐️

The Man-Child Disturbing tale of rural, white family dynamics. An absolutely chilling ending.
4 1/2 ⭐️

Previous Condition: A young actor begins to buckle under the allostatic load of racism after he is evicted from his room because he’s Black.
3 ⭐️

Sonny’s Blues: ”And I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us longer than the sky.” Wow! This long tale is what Baldwin does so well — telling a tale of family, loss, racism, and love, all through the eyes of a conventional older brother musing about his relationship to his troubled younger brother, a jazz musician with a heroin habit. Sad, insightful, and stunningly beautiful.
5 ⭐️

This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: ”There’s no place like home!” said a voice close by, and I thought, “There damn sure isn’t.” A Black, American singer living in Paris for twelve years prepares to go home to America with his Swedish wife and four year old son. He contemplates what this will mean to them and how it will affect his family, as he already begins to miss Paris. This long tale, beautifully told, examines the complexities of the meaning of personal identity and racism on an international level.
”After departure, only invisible things are left. Perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory, and loss, and love. So many things, so many people depart, and we can only reposes them in our minds.”
5 ⭐️

Come Out the Wilderness: Another story told beautifully, largely through internal dialogue. A young women who left the South for NYC, struggles with identity, guilt and shame as her interracial relationship with a white artist unravels, and she begins to form a friendship with her boss at the insurance agency where she is a secretary — the only other person of color in the office.
4 ⭐️

Going To Meet The Man: The darkest and most terrible of these tales. Baldwin puts us inside the head of a Civil Rights era, Southern deputy sheriff, and shows us how monsters are born.
4 ⭐️

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you look through my notes below, you might decide that it is better to stay safe and not read this scary, sad piece of life. Well the choice is yours of course, whether to choose to see, to taste a bit, to let the stories touch you and make you feel, to think, or you can stay safely away.

"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers." — James A. Baldwin

The Rockpile The contrast between staying safe, innocent upstairs and living, hurting, laughing, sinning on the street and then upstairs is no longer so safe. So what to choose safety or life?

The Outing The conflict between accepting what is and wishing for different, for more. The result – anger, violence, despondency, despair.

The Man Child Chilling, the results of living a lie are scary - fullstop

Previous Condition Sad, tired, lost, angry and scared. Turing like a hurt dog and biting the hands that try to console.

Sonny's Blues Duty versus Self, who do we owe allegiance to? We all seek different methods to ease our suffering, to be able to continue, to take the next breath, next step. Sonny communicates beautifully with his blues. God let me see not only the words people say but all the other ways they communicate.

This Morning, This Evening, So Soon This was so this:

The City

You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, a better one than this.
Every effort of mine is a condemnation of fate;
and my heart is -- like a corpse -- buried.
How long will my mind remain in this wasteland.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years destroying and wasting."

You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighbourhoods;
and you will grow gray in these same houses.
Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other --
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have destroyed your life here
in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.

Constantine P. Cavafy

Come Out of the Wilderness No choice – Unrequited loves leaves you despairing, life without love leaves you despairing also. Oh why can’t we choose whom to love?

Going to Meet the Man Tough, ugly, chilling to read. How can people live through that and not be marked by it and reap it's effect through generations? And through all that hate, blood, violence, they are still linked, intertwined as if they can't live without each other.

Read with Maya - my steadfast companion in the Baldwin Journey

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.

from 'Sonny's Blues'

I've been having that feeling of "I wish this guy was seeing what I see and we could compare notes" about James Baldwin. I'd read The Fire Next Time and Giovanni's Room already but it was an excerpt (until just now I thought it was a short story. Damn your eyes, Edmund White!) from "Just Above My Head" in "The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction" (I haven't finished it still because White's own story bored me out of interest in reading for months) that did it to me. I would see something and it was James Baldwin I thought of. Maybe it is because of the kinds of things that get me going to the wondering about other people places. I saw this rough looking woman anxious to please this older lady with her (probably her mother or grandmother). She was doing it by laughing too hard when nothing funny had happened. I had this feeling like she felt that if the older lady laughed then she wouldn't be in trouble anymore. She was probably dependent on the woman and that is what that was all about. Maybe it was just buttering her up. Still, I had the thought that if Baldwin were there he'd know more about it than I did. Something elusive about safety in other people, the danger in past present butterfly effect of doing it all wrong. This has happened a few times, my "What would James Baldwin think". It's a weird place that bothers me all the damned time. When people want other people to have "private pain". If it always depends on someone else to invest all of the quiet there can be in the world then you would have to all be at the mercy of what the mirror ordained you. That makes me feel more hopelessly lonely than just about anything.

Sonny's brother reads about his incarceration in the papers. He was dyslexic in the walls writing sense a long time. Heroin shuffles to him now, again. His brother's friend from the old days, another corner zombie. When they need from you and then back into the turtle shell where the genie roommate takes everything. Not before he tells him that prison will dry him out for a time. It happens to enough of everyone else, so why not Sonny too? He hears his brother's laugh in the high school students he teaches. This was when Baldwin would be with me knowing what could be. It was disenchanted, and in this, also, lay the authority of their curses. Perhaps I was listening to them because I was thinking about my brother and in them I heard my brother. And myself. The windows of the soul come out then. When his brother is who he used to be in a grin. He writes to his brother, finally, when his little girl dies. Sonny gets out of prison. All the while it is still happening, the past. I guess he'll always be in prison too, the little girl will not stop dying either. That it is impossible to know if he is right about Sonny is perfect to me. Sonny is a musician, a pianist. His brother suspects the instrument as a lack to be bent. He watches him playing for the first time since prison and was he truly leaving the shores, this time (it can only be momentary), for not just taking the pain. Sonny said no one just takes the pain, they find any way out. Living death (or the people who were born the right time and place who don't have to. I think these lucky people trick others into thinking the other kind, like them, don't exist). It is my favorite when it is back then, again, and a (the?) little boy is listening to the adults talking about the darkness outside. It is my favorite kind of mirror giving. What they have gone through, what there is to go through. The child hopes they will always be there to talk like this. And maybe there's a kid in someone's lap, and maybe a hand to stroke his forehead. In 'The Man Child' it happens just like that. The child pretends to be asleep and he hopes without belief that it will go on with the comforting mother's hand.

I'm not sure about 'The Man Child'. A little boy (eight years old) is investigating his land. His always been there is the color, when there was a time he could remember a not always been there suspicious shapes. His mother didn't always look dead inside. There had been a little sister who died. There had been a time when another baby was on the way and it might be okay again. His father, an old man at thirty-two and his always been there friend, Jamie, who is thirty-four. The kid returns to this thirty-fourth birthday party a lot. Dad and Jamie were always getting drunk and Jamie always had that dog of his. There had been a moment when he had looked into Jamie's old eyes, bloated with age or premature drink age. He was kicking his constant companion and the Dad is nailing him to the ground with I have won and you have lost. The kid doesn't see it this way but if I had been there that was what I would see. I guess it is like kids in my middle school class who changed who they "sided" with during various history courses. Whomever was "closest" to them every time. So the dad wins this fight. Jamie lost his farm to his friend. They had been in the war together, war buddies and drinking buddies. That's supposed to mean something in superficial terms but doesn't here, thankfully. I don't know what made him lay into him that day, smugness about his wife pregnant when Jamie lost his wife and never had a kid? There is something that bugs the shit out of me about James Baldwin, though. This women are things to lose, or things to protect. Jamie couldn't "keep" a woman. A man in another story feels protecting a wife is his right. It was like that in Giovanni's Room, too. The female lover was an obstacle, an expectation demanding and taking. I wish I could see the mother in 'The Man Child' without a husband or kids (dead or alive). It is narratively said that she didn't know when he captured her. I still don't think it is true that you have to be without a human relationship to be unchained. I have this idea that Baldwin at least kind of thought they did. The boy Johnnie in 'The Rockpile' and 'The Outing' is ensnared in those I'm in love headlights that obliterate everything else. He waits for his friend, his lover David. His mother married the father of his siblings, a tyrant in the name of religion. Private pain ruins everything in his path. People seem to know everything when they demonstrate being saved. The young men pit sexual awakening to the tirade of the path. David is moving away to where Johnnie will likely wait for him forever. Another lover, the girl Sylvia. Her worldly be good gnats watch her. I can imagine her wanting David to feel sexy time excitement, but beseeching his "better nature" to please the "be good" pulpits of their community when they succeed in wearing her down. I know it works that way but I don't know that it has to be that way. I didn't like 'The Man Child' as much as the other stories because the violence of Jamie to the son of his smug friend with so much (for now) wasn't inevitable. I think Baldwin is better than the little kid who thinks people in their thirties are old. Child blindness doesn't have to work that way, can hit other than the general. What Jamie does to take away, when he drunkenly cries that he loves his friend.... I don't know about this one. The kid was following his father's footsteps. He showed him his land. The kid's dying words are to Jamie that he will give him his land. One of Jamie's crimes was wandering the forests alone. I wonder what he looked like by himself. Better than the kid looking into his eyes, what would he see if he looked into is own eyes. The kid was doing this himself, this forest wandering. He wasn't thinking about it like looking into his own eyes but the thoughtless version of it was there, in moving away from what memory says had always been there. Without anything to connect to Jamie's old look other than his own now death it didn't mean much to me.

I like it less connected to the story 'Going to Meet the Man'. The racist sheriff will take his son to a Ku Klux Klan meeting. They will tenderize their vicious traditions over the bloody corpse. I know it happens that this shit is passed down to progeny who share the dull thinking of well, I've been lucky to be born what I am in this time and place so I must deserve it. I can't connect the racist sheriff's fetish for coercing the colored girls he loathes into what gets his dick hard to anything but that there are people like this.

In the drinking hour people wait for the better nature of other's to win the war. Albatross bar stools, coyote devouring ugly on starved stomachs. Bedrooms in bottles littering the s.o.s shores beginning where horizons end. Empty arms are 'Come out of the Wilderness' Ruth's push, her pull not anywhere. It's low down before you fall anyway. Behind her a brother and father possessed her body with dirty judgement. Filthy whore, muddying tears. They still have their say in New York City. A white man lives off her clickety clack cha ching. She types in an office, he drinks and he sleeps. After work she drinks and sleeps to wait. Where is Paul, tears, waiting. He's almost out the door in the band aid or needle that takes all of the skin with it fast or slow. Maybe he will stay a little longer now she's making a little bit more than her little. Ruth lives in a doom cloud. Can't live with or without him skies. Maybe a lot of people live under this but I was wondering if there were any women in any of Baldwin's stories who ever breathed outside of it (if not crying over men then their children). Passing bar-stool orbits look like her old lover, another white boy. Everyone passes although no one really moves. This one wasn't like Paul because she has hopes that this time in Paul's arms it will be different. I don't know why it would be different in Paul's arms and not the other white boy. "The sons of the masters were roaming the world, looking for arms to hold them. And the arms that might have held them- could not forgive." Was it too late if it was too late before any of you ever got drunk every day and waited for the other one to come home? Whatever Ruth felt was the point I don't feel it was the point when she raged at the not-hope white boy that she wasn't the plantation girl the son of the master could do as he pleased. Turtle shell inhabitants meaning you aren't alone has to be it. Bringing back your own ghosts to kill you. Men remind her of her brother, men remind her of Paul. The band aid pulling won't do anything if it is like that.

I had this feeling a lot in many of these stories that it was too late for them because it had ever happened to another colored person. Streets where they would have been slaves. Famous in France, married in France to a Swedish woman. 'This Morning, This Evening, So Soon' he is afraid to return to New York City. He has reason to dread it. It is enough that the racist bullies will not be stopped. When it isn't socially acceptable they hide behind police brutality, statistical cheats. It feels closer to the truth to me that some people are just rotten and will do it because they can. Police will shoot dogs just because they can. It can't be true that all people in France accept him and all in America expect to be condescended to. It isn't important the acknowledgement that his French director lost his family in the holocaust, or the Algerian friend the American tourists have it better than. It annoyed the shit out of me, really, because if Europe was peaceful then it was because the people they would hate had already been killed or forced out during world war II. They weren't accepting of those different than them, not at all. It fit with something I felt about another story, 'Previous Condition'. This man is in too late purgatory. His father was broken and humiliated. He hates Harlem, it is his dirt. His doom cloud is related to Ruth's shame. It will always be too late if EVERYONE has to not be or ever have been a soul sucking dick. Anyway, his white girlfriend tells him some speech about the world, the kind that doesn't help. They say just go back to Harlem, go back to your kind. I don't believe that every white person is taken over by a pod life-form, guilt puppeting the checked out flesh. No fucking way was that true about everyone. But the ones that are are enough, and the rest won't always do anything when it is someone else, and how do you know which it is this time. That would go for people, though. I loved it when it wasn't the point when that girlfriend makes her I don't want to hear this speech about other people suffering too.

I was aware of my body under the bathrobe; and it was as though I had done something wrong, something monstrous, years ago, which no one had forgotten and for which I would be killed.

from 'Previous Condition'

[Seyed Mohammad Reza Mahdavi · Rating 3 out of 5]

ملاقات
جیمز بالدوین
ترجمه ی ستاره نعمت اللهی
نشر مرکز
تعداد صفحات : 262

[Gabril · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Non aveva importanza quel che facevo o dicevo o sentivo: un occhio lo tenevo sempre rivolto al mondo… quel mondo di cui avevo imparato a diffidare quasi ancor prima di imparare come mi chiamassi, quel mondo a cui, sapevo bene, non era possibile volgere le spalle, il mondo dei bianchi.”

Otto superlativi racconti di James Baldwin:


1. Il macigno

Il macigno si ergeva dall' altro lato della strada, davanti alla loro casa. Era il posto dove i ragazzini facevano la lotta, imparavano a misurarsi con le future aggressioni della vita. Quando Roy, lo scapestrato, sfugge al controllo di mamma per gettarsi - e ferirsi - nella mischia, il fratello John si sentirà responsabile. Sarà forse l' occasione per saggiare la tenuta della sua famiglia .

2. La scampagnata

La tradizionale scampagnata del 4 luglio è organizzata dalla chiesa locale e precisamente dalla comunità dei "santi". Fra i ragazzini che vi partecipano ci sono i "salvati", come Roy, e quelli non ancora salvati, come Johnny. Il culmine della gita è la cerimonia in cui si cantano le lodi a Dio, suonando ballando pregando e piangendo ardentemente . Tutto è centrato sul dono di sé a Dio per fuggire le tentazioni della carne. Ma altre passioni, altri sentimenti si agitano nel cuore di Johnny.

3. L’uomo bambino

Eric, otto anni, vive in fattoria con suo padre, virile proprietario di molte terre, e con la madre, una donna precocemente invecchiata, ormai incapace di avere altri figli. Jamie è l'amico d'infanzia di suo padre: ha perso le sue terre, non ha una famiglia, soltanto un cane che spesso maltratta. Un giorno Eric intercetta un suo sguardo strano. Una sorta di minacciosa aria di follia che sarà destinato a incontrare faccia a faccia.

4. «Previous condition»

Il 15° emendamento della Costituzione degli Stati Uniti prevede che nessun cittadino sia discriminato per il colore della pelle, ma il giovane Peter continuerà a esserlo come a ricordargli in ogni momento quella "precedente condizione di schiavitù" abolita dalla legge ma non dalla vita quotidiana in USA.

5. Blues per Sonny

Il narratore è il fratello maggiore di Sonny, giovane irrequieto con il daimon della musica. Esprimersi attraverso il jazz, fuggire da Harlem, emanciparsi…desideri ardenti che fatalmente incontrano l’abbrivio delle droghe e dell'autodistruzione. Quando Sonny esce di galera suo fratello non ha il coraggio di vederlo subito. Ma poi lo farà, Sonny riuscirà a parlargli, e lui ad ascoltarlo, e infine a sentirlo suonare… finché la sua musica gli accarezzerà l'anima.

6. Stamattina stasera troppo presto

Il narratore, cantante e attore nero statunitense, ha trovato fama fortuna e famiglia a Parigi. Ora sta per affrontare un viaggio negli Stati Uniti con il figlioletto Paul, e molte paure lo assalgono. I fantasmi delle umiliazioni passate si ergono a ostacolarne la serenità. La moglie Harriet e il regista Vidal raccolgono le sue confidenze e cercano di placare le sue ansie.


7. Come out the wilderness

Ruth è una giovane donna nera tormentata dal suo amore per Paul, un artista bianco, con il quale convive. Lei sa che con lui non ha speranza di realizzare i suoi sogni, che la sua è una relazione precaria nella quale lei è sempre subalterna. Tutto il passato storico grava nella vita presente dei neri e dei bianchi, nonostante l'emancipazione del XX secolo e New York non è altro che il vivace teatro di questa insensata rappresentazione.


8. Uomo bianco

La ferocia, l’insensatezza, la bieca ignoranza, l’orrore. L’essere umano (qui bianco e perciò paradigmatico) nel suo aspetto più incomprensibilmente, banalmente disumano. E dunque imperdonabile.

[Gyalten Lekden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elegiac, transformative prose exploring the contradictions that lie at the heart of humanity. These short stories cover a range of themes, or ideas, but they are all shot through with a slight loneliness, a sense of displacement. Sometimes that might be a place of growth and joy, sometimes a strangling obstacle. These stories aren’t all sad or morose, there is happiness here, a sense of contentment, pride, authenticity. But it isn’t easy, and it is preceded by a wistfulness, as well as a righteous outrage that might easily become its own kind of cage. Whether it is exploring race relationships or the dynamics of a marriage bed or what it means to be a father or a son Baldwin brings a lyrical eye to humanity, unvarnished, and it is impossible, when putting this collection down, to be the same person you were when you picked it up.

[Bobby Bermea · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Then it was over. Creole and Sonny let out their breath, both soaking wet, and grinning. There was a lot of applause and some of it was real. In the dark, the girl came by and I asked her to take drinks to the bandstand. There was a long pause, while they talked up there in the indigo light and after a while I saw the girl put a scotch and milk on top of the piano for Sonny. He didn't seem to notice it, but just before they started playing again, he sipped from it and looked toward me, and nodded. Then he put it back on top of the piano. For me, then, as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brother's head, like the very cup of trembling."

--from "Sonny's Blues"

The brother can WRITE!

[Jason Koivu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh man, that titular story is stomach-churning, blood-boilingly tough to read. Going to Meet the Man is a short story collection mostly about mid-century race relations in America. As an erudite gay Black preacher's son, Baldwin brings a different perspective to the topic. These mostly brilliantly rendered stories provide a bevy of POVs and angles from which to look at such issues.

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

This week one of my African-American students, 19 years old, told the class he is a racist. When I asked him to explain he only said, "Well, everyone's racist." I first started reading James Baldwin many years ago, before I understood and acknowledged the truth of what my student said. I loved his writing but didn't know what to do with his rage. Today, with my consciousness somewhat raised, I find Baldwin just as compelling and even more troubling. All of these stories were painful to read and I could almost not get through the final, title story. But Baldwin's artistry and, more importantly, his humanity, makes it possible for people like me to confront the myriad awful truths of American racism.

[Ilana (illi69) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Completed September 2014, my first book by James Baldwin, but not my last!

[Gianni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Basterebbe da solo l'ultimo racconto della raccolta, Uomo bianco, a giustificare la lettura di questo libro, per potenza, intensità, durezza.

[Ify · Rating 4 out of 5]

quick thoughts: story collections are typically tough to rate. some stories move you more than others; and a couple stay with you long after the last page is turned. in this collection, all the stories have a tone that is somber and reflective. I found some of them to be more fleshed out than others, and a few stories came to an abrupt and mystifying conclusion. My favorite, though, was Sonny's Blues, a story of a man's fragile relationship with his younger brother who is a musician and a recovering addict. Even though it's couched in the middle of the collection, I am still thinking about it (3.5)

[philosophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know everybody's in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don't understand it and don't want to and spend all my time trying to forget it?

Οι πρωταγωνιστές κι οι πρωταγωνίστριες των 8 μικρών ιστοριών προσπαθούν με πολυμήχανους κι απελπισμένους τρόπους να κρατηθούν στην επιφάνεια, αποτυγχάνουν κι όμως αγωνίζονται.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic writing. Such extraordinary range and rage. Wonderful to see a story about race in an international context. Wonderful to see a story about jazz and the cost of art. The brutally honest story about a lynching is particularly brave. I can’t ever seem to get enough of either Baldwin’s fiction or his nonfiction.