Notes of a Native Son

by James Baldwin

Moreover, irrespective of personal integrity, his position—neatly and often painfully paradoxical—is utterly dependent on the continuing debasement of fourteen million Negroes; should the national ideals be put into practice tomorrow, countless prominent Negroes would lose their raison d’être.

since no Negro dares seriously assume that any politician is concerned with the fate of Negroes, or would do much about it if he had the power, the vote must be bartered for what it will get, for whatever short-term goals can be managed.

These goals are mainly economic and frequently personal, sometimes pathetic: bread or a new roof or five dollars, or, continuing up the scale, schools, houses or more Negroes in hitherto Caucasian jobs.

they know that white people, whatever their love for justice, have no love for them.

This is the crux of the matter; and the Progressive Party, with its extravagant claims, has, therefore, imposed on itself the considerable burden of proof.

“she said it would be an honor,” my correspondent notes, failing, however, to say for whom.

Negro policemen are feared even more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.

the five policemen were faint prophecies of that equality which is the Progressive Party’s goal.

It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

We had not known that he was being eaten up by paranoia, and the discovery that his cruelty, to our bodies and our minds, had been one of the symptoms of his illness was not, then, enough to enable us to forgive him.

My mother’s observation that it was he, after all, who had kept them alive all these years meant nothing because the problems of keeping children alive are not real for children.

it was discovered that he had tuberculosis and, as it turned out, the disease of his mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him.

hating and fearing every living soul including his children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching towards the world which had despised him.

Also, since it was a schoolteacher, I imagine that my mother countered the idea of sin with the idea of “education,” which word, even with my father, carried a kind of bitter weight.

my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.

Death, however, sat as purposefully at my father’s bedside as life stirred within my mother’s womb and it was harder to understand why he so lingered in that long shadow.

feeling that the most dangerous part of a dangerous journey had been passed and that now, even if death should come, it would come with honor and without the complicity of their countrymen.

It was awful to realize that she no longer caused me to feel affection.

automatically appear at times of bereavement armed with lotions, proverbs, and patience, and an ability to cook.

by which I do not mean to suggest that her mourning was insincere or that she had not loved him. I suppose that she was one of the few people in the world who had, and their incessant quarreling proved precisely the strength of the tie that bound them.

He presented to us in his sermon a man whom none of us had ever seen—a man thoughtful, patient, and forbearing, a Christian inspiration to all who knew him, and a model for his children.

This was not the man they had known, but they had scarcely expected to be confronted with him; this was, in a sense deeper than questions of fact, the man they had not known, and the man they had not known may have been the real one.

Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity.

This was perhaps the last thing human beings could give each other and it was what they demanded, after all, of the Lord.

raising, which was worse, the question of whether or not an antidote was desirable; perhaps poison should be fought with poison.

Thou knowest this man’s fall; but thou knowest not his wrassling.

I was astonished at his question—because it was a real question.

smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need.

In order really to hate white people, one has to blot so much out of the mind—and the heart—that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose.

But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that.

One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene.

Amputation is swift but time may prove that the amputation was not necessary—or one may delay the amputation too long. Gangrene is slow, but it is impossible to be sure that one is reading one’s symptoms right.

The idea of going through life as a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally unbearable is the risk of swelling...

All of my father’s texts and songs, which I had decided were meaningless, were arranged before me at his death like empty bottles, waiting to hold the meaning which life would give them for me.

The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace.

But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power:

The American Negro in Paris is forced at last to exercise an undemocratic discrimination rarely practiced by Americans, that of judging his people, duck by duck, and distinguishing them one from another.

He is accustomed to regard him either as a needy and deserving martyr or as the soul of rhythm, but he is more than a little intimidated to find this stranger so many miles from home.