The terror was not rooted in a fear for his safety or a fear of dying at the hands of racist bigots. Instead, what shook Baldwin at his core was a “realization of the nature of the heathen.” The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world. Lie that the black people around him were inferior. Lie about what he was doing under the cover of night. Lie that he was Christian. For Baldwin, the accumulation of lies suffocated the white southerner. So much so that Baldwin reached for Dante’s Inferno to express his feelings about it all: “I would not have believed
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