Going to Meet the Man: Stories

by James Baldwin

What might be accepted as just good old American independence in someone else would be insufferable arrogance in me.

nothing’s going to change, baby, people are too empty-headed, too empty-hearted—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—”

“All that hatred down there,” he said, “all that hatred and misery and love. It’s a wonder it doesn’t blow the avenue apart.”

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.

All the white people she has ever met needed, in one way or another, to be reassured, consoled, to have their consciences pricked but not blasted; could not, could not afford to hear a truth which would shatter, irrevocably, their image of themselves. It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

It had not occurred to me before that Americans, who had never treated me with any respect, had no respect for each other.

It was only I who was being floated into danger. I turned my head, looking for Europe, but all that stretched behind me was the sky, thick with gulls. I moved away from the rail. 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. “There’s no place like home,” said a voice close by, and I thought, There damn sure isn’t. I decided to go back to my cabin and have a drink.

I’ve never understood why, if I have to pay for the history written in the color of my skin, you should get off scot-free!”

“But I beg you not to confuse me with the happy people of your country, who scarcely know that there is such a thing as history and so, naturally, imagine that they can escape, as you put it, scot-free.

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?

“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.” And silence falls at the table and the four young faces stare at him.

perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love.