Understanding James Baldwin by Marc Dudley

Author:Marc Dudley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Telling a True Story, Differently

Baldwin’s Short Fiction and Drama

“‘All stories are true’—It was a useful means to point out that you don’t have a majority and a minority culture, you don’t have a black and a white culture…. you have human beings who are all engaged in a kind of never-ending struggle to make sense of their world.”

“Interview: John Edgar Wideman—The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review, 2002

The Stories

John Edgar Wideman could have been thinking of James Baldwin when he chose a West African proverbial phrase—“All stories are true”—to be his perennial standard-bearing catchall. Baldwin was that most democratic of artists, giving voice to all people, and his means to getting there was as varied and inclusive as the social umbrella he held. While the essay and Baldwin were virtually inseparable during the civil rights moment in American history, he spent those same years cultivating his art and trying his hand at both short stories and drama. He published The Amen Corner, Blues for Mr. Charlie, and Going to Meet the Man in 1954, 1964, and 1965, respectively.

Going to Meet the Man was published at the height of the civil rights movement. Though it received mixed reviews, several stories have proven themselves over time and are now anthology mainstays.1 Two of the collection’s eight stories speak to the civil rights moment; all speak to Baldwin’s familiar themes of alienation and salvation. Written specifically for this compendium, “The Rockpile” is about familial discord and spiritual divide, about love and humanity’s need for it. Baldwin’s confession here is less overt, more one of remembrance, as he spins a tale with his life’s imprint all over it. It also reaches back to those lives crafted in Go Tell It on the Mountain, revising Gabriel, Elizabeth, Aunt Florence, brothers Roy and John, and the perennial divider of souls: sin. Despite being entirely removed from church environs, this story is about secrets, resulting alienation, and confession and salvation. It begins with an introduction to an actual rock pile, sitting at the heart of a community and at the heart of this story. The pile literally divides neighbor from neighbor and becomes the perfect metaphor for spiritual alienation.

Baldwin’s story is tight and focused and begins very close to an anticipated conflict. The communal mound is a perpetual draw for neighborhood children and a daily abhorrence for parents. Like the streets in Go Tell It on the Mountain, the rock pile here becomes the object of desire for a young John and Roy as they look on, perched on their apartment’s fire escape. Baldwin imbues the pile with all the temptation of the outside world, making a clash with it an inevitable occurrence: “Each Saturday morning John and Roy sat on the fire escape and watched the forbidden street below…. The sun fell across them and across the fire escape with a high, benevolent indifference; below them, men and women, and boys and girls, sinners all, loitered…. The passage of one of the redeemed made them consider,

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