‘Another Country’ by James Baldwin    (1962) – 436 pages

“My own experience proves to me that the connection between American whites and blacks is far deeper and more passionate than any of us like to think.” – James Baldwin

‘Another Country’ is a novel in which James Baldwin confronts his own demons of white racism and social intolerance to his gayness.

The first long section centers on Rufus Scott, who is black and living in Greenwich Village, “the place of liberation”, in New York City near Harlem. He is a jazz musician who plays at the Harlem nightclubs. He meets and hooks up with a white woman Leona at one of these music clubs. Their relationship is rocky from the start. Rufus takes out his frustrations on her, beats her. Leona, after a stint in the Bellevue mental hospital, heads back down South where she came from.

Although unstated, we know that Rufus is wrestling with his guilt. His woman friend Cass tries to console him:

“I hope,” Cass said, “that you won’t sit around blaming yourself too much. Or too long. That won’t undo anything. When you’re older you’ll see, I think, that we all commit our crimes. The thing is not to lie about them – to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it. That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That’s very important. If you don’t forgive yourself you’ll never be able to forgive anybody else and you’ll go on committing the same crimes forever.”

However, at the end of the first section, Rufus leaps from the George Washington Bridge committing suicide.

In the other two sections the friends of Rufus as well as his sister Ida take center stage. We have Eric who had been a previous white male lover of Rufus. Eric is now living in Paris with his new lover Yves. There is Vivaldo, another white friend of Rufus and the white couple of Richard and Cass and their two children.

One theme is how much easier it is for two male lovers like Eric and Yves in Paris than it would be in the United States. Eric does return to New York to pursue his acting career, where he becomes involved in a heavy affair with Cass who is disappointed in her writer husband. Meanwhile Rufus’s sister Ida takes up with Vivaldo.

I wasn’t totally satisfied with ‘Another Country’. I felt the character Eric was just a little too precious to be realistic, and the affair between Cass and Eric seemed unlikely. Also the connections between the first harrowing section about the troubling Rufus Scott with the other two sections seemed tenuous and disjointed.

Still ‘Another Country’ is a major attempt by James Baldwin to confront his world in all its disruptions.

Grade:    B+

‘Going to Meet the Man’, stories by James Baldwin (1965) – 249 pages

I wanted to read more James Baldwin, and I had read a lot of good things about his collection of stories, ‘Going to Meet the Man’. It did not disappoint.

These are deep stories with an acute and often angry understanding of the predicaments of his characters. One theme in each of these powerful stories is our refusal to really know other humans and to accept our differences.

The subjects of these eight stories are wide-ranging, and whatever the subject that James Baldwin takes on, he approaches it with an insightful humane intelligence.

“It’s always been like that, people always try to destroy what they don’t understand – and they hate almost everything because they understand so little.”

The early story ‘The Outing’ is about a church outing when the members of the church and a few others take a boat trip up to Bear Mountain where they would spend the day. Since it is a church outing the pastor Father James preaches to those who came along.  Johnnie, the son of the Deacon of the church, is attracted to his male friend David. David is more interested in the girl Sylvia who is an upstanding member of the church than in Johnnie. Neither Johnnie nor David has committed to the church, thus they are both unsaved. Can this almighty God forgive Johnnie’s “sin”?

I found this story to be powerful and caused me to eagerly read the following stories.

These lines from the story “Previous Condition” resonated with me:

“Acting’s a rough life, even if you’re white. I’m not tall and I’m not good looking and I can’t sing or dance, and I’m not white; so even at the best of times I wasn’t in much demand.”

Many of the stories confront the racial prejudice which the characters must contend with, being a black person in the United States. There is justifiable anger in the shabby and sometimes much worse treatment these characters face every day. However in the story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon”, our main protagonist escapes to Paris where racial attitudes are different.

In “Sonny’s Blues”, one man finds his escape through music:

“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.”

‘Going to Meet the Man’ finishes with the devastating title story depicting the lynching of a black man in a small southern US town, told from the harsh view of the white deputy sheriff who is overseeing the proceedings.

There has been a James Baldwin revival lately, and the compelling stories in ‘Going To Meet the Man’ are strong examples of his eloquent insight into daily life.

Grade:    A

‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ by James Baldwin (1974) – 197 pages

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” – James Baldwin

In ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’, James Baldwin has created a precarious love story and family drama that has now been made into a movie by Barry Jenkins (he of Oscar Best Picture winner ‘Moonlight’) which will very soon be coming out in theaters. I have not seen the movie and will discuss only the novel by James Baldwin instead.

‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ is the story of a young couple, Fonny aged 22 and Tish aged 19, living in Harlem in New York City in the 1970’s. It is told from the point of view of Tish. She visits Fonny in jail, framed for a rape he did not commit. Later we learn that Fonny was set up by a white racist policeman. Tish goes to the jail and visits him there every day.

“I was sitting on a bench in front of a board, and he was sitting on a bench in front of a board and we were facing each other through a wall of glass between us…I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.”

On one of her jail visits, Tish tells Fonny that she is pregnant.

“I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.” 

Their two families meet and discuss what to do about this predicament. Despite differences between the two families, they agree that they must get Fonny out of jail. Tish’s mother goes to Puerto Rico in an effort to locate the woman who accused Fonny of rape and talk her into dropping the charges.

Tish has the bright optimism of youth but must deal with a dire situation made more dire by prevailing casual white racist attitudes.

‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ is a realistic intense black American love story and family drama of people trying to survive in an inherently unfair world. Baldwin captures the poignancy of both of these two young people and their families as they are caught in this unjust situation. As in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, the world, in this case the white world, is conspiring to keep this loving young couple apart. As Stacia L Brown wrote in Gawker, Beale Street  “belongs to a collection of literature that seeks to humanize black men, through their relationships with parents, lovers, siblings, and children. It swan-dives from optimism to bleakness and rises from the ash of dashed hopes.”

Why Baldwin titled the book ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ remains a mystery, as there are no references to Beale Street in the novel.

Besides being a novelist, poet, essay writer, and civil rights activist, James Baldwin also came up with some great quotes. I will leave you with one more.

“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.” – James Baldwin

Grade:    A