Going to Meet the Man: Stories

by James Baldwin

In them was perpetually and perfectly poised the power of revelation against the power of nature; and the saints, considering them with a baleful kind of love, struggled to bring their souls to safety in order, as it were, to steal a march on the flesh while the flesh still slept.

It’s a room to sleep in, he said, or maybe to die in but God knows it wasn’t meant to live in.

When she smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, still-struggling woman beneath the battered face of the semi-whore.

Yet, as the cab moved uptown through streets which seemed, with a rush, to darken with dark people, and as I covertly studied Sonny’s face, it came to me that what we both were seeking through our separate cab windows was that part of ourselves which had been left behind.

It’s always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing—he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.

I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It’s made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there’s only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.

And the face I saw on Sonny I’d never seen before. Everything had been burned out of it, and, at the same time, things usually hidden were being burned in, by the fire and fury of the battle which was occurring in him up there.

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.

Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever.

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.

And yet everyone’s life is always shaped by races, churches, and armies; races, churches, armies menace, and have taken, many lives.

the limbo of vanished possibilities.

Whenever one of them is not playing straight man to the other’s accent, they become involved in long speculations as to how a language reveals the history and the attitudes of a people.

“Language is experience and language is power,”

But was there not, in that pity, however painfully and unwillingly, also some contempt?

How can one be prepared for the spittle in the face, all the tireless ingenuity which goes into the spite and fear of small, unutterably miserable people, whose greatest terror is the singular identity, whose joy, whose safety, is entirely dependent on the humiliation and anguish of others?

They knew how to keep the white folks happy, and it was easy—you just had to keep them feeling like they were God’s favor to the universe.

In America, that’s usually what it means to have a white friend. You pity the poor bastard because he was born believing the world’s a great place to be, and you know it’s not, and you can see that he’s going to have a terrible time getting used to this idea, if he ever gets used to it.”

“Maybe it’s better to have the terrible times first. I don’t know. Maybe, then, you can have, if you live, a better life, a real life, because you had to fight so hard to get it away—you know?—from the mad dog who held it in his teeth. But then your life has all those tooth marks, too, all those tatters, and all that blood.”

He is like a man who has learned to live on what is left of an enormous fortune.

I had to get back here, get to a place where people were too busy with their own lives, their private lives, to make fantasies about mine, to set up walls around mine.”

“Perhaps it is history’s fault. I suppose it must be history which always arranges to bill a civilization at the very instant it is least prepared to pay.”

“You are a good boy—Chico,” he says. I laugh. “You believe in love. You do not know all the things love cannot do, but”—he smiles—“love will teach you that.”

It is marvelous to watch the face of the waiter as he approaches, all smiles and deference and grace, not so much honored by our presence as achieving his reality from it; excellence, he seems to be saying, gravitates naturally toward excellence.

He is lonely. I do not think that he expects ever to love one woman again, and so he distracts himself with many.

I don’t, now, know what I expected of fame, but I suppose it never occurred to me that the light could be just as dangerous, just as killing, as the dark.

“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.”

“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.”

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 repossess them in our minds.

perhaps, in your eyes, we are simply luckier gangsters in a world which is run by gangsters.

its plantation of thickly curling black hair,

It was economically tense and hard and testified only to the agility of the poor, who are always dancing one step ahead of the devil.

Then she hated herself; thinking into what an iron maiden of love and hatred he had placed her, she hated him even more. She could not help feeling that he treated her this way because of her color, because she was a colored girl.

She worked for a life insurance company that had only recently become sufficiently progressive to hire Negroes. This meant that she worked in an atmosphere so positively electric with interracial good will that no one ever dreamed of telling the truth about anything.

She remembered their house, so poor and plain, standing by itself, apart from other houses, as nude and fragile on the stony ground as an upturned cardboard box.