Placing James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison side by side, as contemporaries who chose to write novels for the purpose of limning the depths of the American scene, is a critical enterprise that insists as much on a critical leap forward as it does a harkening back. The reasons for this, of course, have a great deal to do with the state of American literary and racial politics in the years following World War I. At that time, with the Civil Rights Movement bringing about calls for racial integration and equal protection under the law for African American citizens, there grew to be a great need for black writers to fulfill the role of articulating what would come to be understood as “the black experience,” by an audience often bewildered by the malevolence of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and the unwavering insistence by Martin Luther King Jr. that justice could only be achieved by peaceful means. How could a people deemed at one time so incapable of eloquence and critical thought suddenly be so persistent in their claims for equality, in their demands that their humanity be fully recognized? Who among them could bring clarity to their motivations?
To be sure, African American writers had, as early as Phillis Wheatley and David Walker, taken seriously the need to “speak truth to power,” aiming their messages toward a readership that was consciously thought of as white. With the publication of Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940, there emerged on the literary scene a novel meant to sound the alarm for whites that their negligence and hostility were soon to be repaid a thousandfold by blacks angry at their mistreatment. Tracing the origins of the protest novel back to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Baldwin observed in “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” published in 1949, that the purpose of the protest novel was to bring “greater freedom to the oppressed.”1 He rejected Wright’s Native Son on similar grounds, insisting that what was needed was fiction that limned the contours of African American experiences more carefully in order to articulate the complexities of those experiences. Similarly, Ellison would insist that, because he saw no distinction between “art and protest,” Invisible Man was the product of a more complete vision, one that included anger, but also irony and comedy alongside the tragedies that often marked black life.
Thus, any attempt to engage in a comparative discussion on James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison must focus on the relationship between woundedness and narrative. Invariably, their fictions treat men who are injured by their circumstances and thus are forced to find ways to give narrative shape and breadth to the damage done them. Even a cursory analysis of their respective novels leads to the conclusion that each understood suffering to be an inimical part of black life. Ellison’s and Baldwin’s characters are engaged in attempts to fashion for themselves adequate narrative space, to become agents, actors, and subjects.2 At the level of plot, their characters must contend with the fact that their injuries often leave them isolated and alone, incapable of articulating the extent and nature of their injuries or, conversely, so aware of their wounds that they ponder them to the exclusion of everything else. In some instances, they are prone to acts of forgetting, of trying to distance themselves from injury; to view it as an aberration rather than as a consequence of their embattled presence. What this means is that these protagonists have to confront the obstacles that grow up between injury and telling.
But there are profound variances in terms of how Baldwin and Ellison approach the wound. For Ellison, the wound becomes something the hero must embrace wholeheartedly, prompting the story of how he received it, as well as how he has come to understand it as the symbolic capital intrinsic to a life lived free of illusion, whereas in Baldwin the wound is the only readily available sign that pain is meaningful. Narration in his fiction, then, seeks to achieve a moral legibility that will allow his characters to understand their problems as outgrowths of toxicity and contamination. Perhaps a better way to work out the difference between Ellison’s and Baldwin’s symbolic use of injury is that the older writer, relying on African American folk materials like the blues, understood the wound as the cure, while Baldwin’s close proximity to the Civil Rights Movement led him to distrust such a conclusion; for the former, then, the wound is part of the ritual of becoming, while the latter values the wound for its diagnostic potential. Thus, the wounds both writers depict call for testimony, if only because the act of testifying is the only way their characters can make their way to sanity and wholeness.
In Ellison’s writing, suffering is rendered in tragicomic terms. Believing in the liberating potential of mythopoetic chaos, Ellison’s novels embrace the idea of death and rebirth, often beginning with the Gothic construct of being buried alive and investing that construct with an irony that turns it on its head. Thus, in Invisible Man, we find that his narrator is living underground in a basement of an apartment on the edge of Harlem. But rather than making this death-in-life into a symbol of his protagonist’s demise, Ellison instead refashions it into hibernation. “I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, to the point of invisibility,” Ellison’s hero relates in the Epilogue of the novel.3 In Juneteenth (1999), Reverend Hickman preaches a sermon over the prone body of his young protégé, Bliss, who lies in a coffin. At the sermon’s climax, Bliss sits up in the coffin, as if he has risen from the dead, to signify the rebirth embodied by the end of black enslavement. Again, death functions to shift the reader’s attention away from the sense that it involves finality and toward the notion that death involves the transgression of boundaries. These boundaries must be transgressed, Ellison’s novels insist, if we are to emerge on the other side and thus enter into a new level of consciousness. Pain, therefore, is necessary to the process because it marks the ritual process the hero must endure in order to achieve insight.
Baldwin’s novels provide us with characters whose suffering can take both spiritual and physical forms. Indeed, two of his characters, Leo Proudhammer in Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968) and Arthur Montana in Just Above My Head (1979), suffer heart attacks (in the former, life-threatening; in the latter, life-ending) that signify, on the one hand, that these are men who have suffered psychic wounds that take on physical manifestations and, on the other, that they are mortal, that no matter how heroic they may be, they cannot transcend their physical limitations. Like John Henry in African American folklore, their hearts give way while they are engaged in the Herculean task of trying to remake the world.
John Grimes of Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) and Rufus Scott of Another Country (1962) endure suffering of a different sort. For them, the very air they breathe serves as a constant reminder of how their lives are beset by hatred and bitterness. Each of them falls, albeit with distinctly varied results. In John’s case, he undergoes a spiritual journey that leads him to accept a judgmental and punishing Christianity as the price of belonging. Rufus drives his lover insane, abandons his life as a jazz musician, and in a state of total emotional disrepair, opts to commit suicide.
Neither Fonny in If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) nor David of Giovanni’s Room (1956) is fated to die a physical death. But their suffering denotes the “life in death” each endures within the realm of social death. Each man is caught up in a web of criminality and guilt that threatens to destroy him: Fonny is falsely accused of rape and thus must find ways to ward off the despair and hopelessness he knows the wider society wants him to embrace; David’s life is marked by his inability to give or receive love. As he ponders marriage to a woman he does not love, his gay French lover is being executed for murder.
Though none of his novels achieve the level of accomplishment demonstrated in Invisible Man, Baldwin can nonetheless be regarded as an important commentator on American race relations. Unlike Ellison, who sought to understand the ways black and white embody their common origins, Baldwin’s novels assume a greater interest in matters of racial injustice. It would be misguided, though, to suggest that race is their primary concern, since they are ultimately distinguished by their unflinching attention to sexuality. While one might conclude that this applies only to his depiction of homoerotic encounters, a more accurate portrayal of Baldwin’s fiction would highlight the manner in which he works out the relationship between sexuality and power; thus relationships of all types get represented in his work. Indeed, Baldwin was among the first African American novelists to explore sexuality as an integral part of African American identity. His contribution to the novelistic tradition comes in the form of his ability to imagine the problem of American identity in terms of both sexuality and race. In looking at the six novels Baldwin produced, we can understand how sexuality is used to map the contours of power, as an index of his characters’ ability to love, and as a way to alter the terms upon which we base notions of racial progress. It is in this way, however, that we can begin to understand the “common ground” Ellison and Baldwin stake out as novelists. Both men wanted to expand our sense of what constituted the human potential for self-recovery. Ellison insisted that black life, even at its most downtrodden, is marked by a resilience and style that can best be understood through the blues. Baldwin, while seeking to understand American racial injustice, wrote fiction that argues for the ways morality is rendered legible through the ability to love.
Ralph Ellison’s first novel was the product of over eight years of labor, begun as World War I was drawing to a close and completed while America was in the midst of the Korean War. Though he had some brief flirtations with the radical left, Ellison had come to consider himself an outsider in the realm of secular politics, preferring instead to understand America as a ritual site where the mythic and symbolic revealed the deep structure of the national project. This is reflected in the structure of Invisible Man, which begins with a Prologue and ends with an Epilogue. These sections constitute the novel’s “narrative present.” The twenty-five chapters occurring between them are related as an extended flashback that chronicles twenty years in the protagonist’s life. This structural delineation is important because it allows us to account for the novel’s radical tonal shifts. In the Prologue and Epilogue, Ellison employs a rhetorical playfulness similar in tone to that found in Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Underground. Chapters 1 through 25 adopt a more varied tone, one moment reflecting a surrealism that renders all rhetorical surfaces suspect, enacting the maneuvers necessary to convey a tone more rollicking, able to contain circumstances both absurd and tragic, the next moment, a tone beset by pathos and anger.
The novel begins with the protagonist relating the moment of his grandfather’s death, where he provides the narrator with cryptic advice that, due to its ironic nature, will take the entire novel to decipher. After he tells the narrator’s father that he has been “a spy in the enemy’s country,” and that his obsequiousness has been a mask he has assumed in order to plot his oppressors’ demise, the grandfather states, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open” (Invisible Man 16). What follows from this is the narrator’s maddening struggle to first understand, and then apply, his grandfather’s injunction. Thus, after being expelled from college, nearly being lobotomized, recruited as an organizer for the Brotherhood, and pursued by a black nationalist named Ras the Destroyer, the narrator comes to realize that, to the people he seeks to influence, he is “transparent as air” (575).
In the novel’s penultimate scene, the hero discovers that the Brotherhood plans to incite a riot in Harlem, not as a way to bring about change, but to use the moment for rhetorical capital. As he moves through Harlem, amidst scenes of looting and violence, the hero realizes that he has been a pawn of the Brotherhood all along. But just as he reaches this conclusion, he is pursued by Ras the Destroyer and his men who see him as the scapegoat and seek violent retribution. Eluding them, the hero ends up in a dark basement where, in order to have light, he has to burn all the important documents in his briefcase. Symbolically, he undergoes a ritual death that leaves him reborn in the role of writer. As the novel draws to a close, the hero ruminates on his grandfather’s advice and observes:
Could he have meant – hell, he must have meant, the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence. Did he mean say “yes” because he knew that the principle was greater than the men, greater than the numbers and the vicious power and all the methods used to corrupt its name?
(Invisible Man 574)
Writing his memoirs, the “invisible” narrator achieves a new level of self-consciousness – and conscientiousness – when he proposes, “The fact is that you carry part of your sickness within you, at least I do as an invisible man. I carried my sickness and though for a long time I tried to place it in the outside world, the attempt to write it down shows me that at least half of it lay within me” (Invisible Man 575). Having reached such a conclusion, Ellison’s hero engages in a commentary on African American citizenship, as well as the state of black writing. The passage above stands as an implicit critique of Wright’s social realism, which tries, “to place it in the outside world,” insisting that the blues offered a way to understand that self-recovery lies in the act of metaphorizing trouble; to do so is, in Ellison’s mind, an act of self-realization that has the power to transform a nation.
As David Yaffe observes, in the time between the publication of Invisible Man in 1952 and Juneteenth in 1999, “Ellison’s inability to produce a follow-up to Invisible Man, was the bane of his existence.”4 After Ellison’s death in 1994, his literary executor, John Callahan, undertook to assemble a coherent piece of fiction from the numerous drafts and sections he left behind. Following Fanny Ellison’s injunction that the novel have “a beginning, middle, and end,” Callahan culled enough material to publish “a single, self-contained volume.” As a result, Juneteenth revisits the territory covered in Invisible Man, making use of “African American folktales, the blues, the dozens, the swing and velocity of jazz.” It is a novel that has a great deal to say about the responsibilities that come with freedom as well as the posturing that accompanies a life in politics. However, it could just as easily be argued that Juneteenth is a novel that ruminates on the vagaries of race in American culture, including a serious treatment of what it means to “pass” from black to white in light of the fact that blacks and whites share a past neither wishes to claim. Finally, it is a novel that explores the struggle on the part of the son to break free of the influence of the father. As the novel begins, Senator Sunraider is making a speech before Congress, extolling the virtues of American citizenship. Significantly, Sunraider’s speech partakes of the rhetorical flourishes to be found in the black sermonic tradition even as he renders a speech characterized by race-baiting and mean-spiritedness. In a strange turn, he calls for Americans to spurn memory in favor of more forward-looking policies. “Thus again,” he asserts, “we must forget the past by way of freeing ourselves so that we can reassemble its untidy elements in the interest of a more human order.”5
However, the moment is cut short when an assassin shoots Sunraider and leaves him near death. In the hospital, in a state of delirium, Sunraider calls for the Reverend A. Z. Hickman. The remainder of the novel demonstrates Ellison’s strategic depiction of the wound as the force prompting the voicing of memory. We find out that once upon a time, Senator Sunraider was a young boy named, significantly, Bliss. The name comes from Hickman, who is present at the time of his birth and who chooses the name because “that’s what ignorance is.” Raised by Hickman among blacks, young Bliss acquires a reputation for being a great preacher, much like Hickman, who refers to himself as “God’s Trombone.” Ellison contrasts the improvised, collaborative format of the sermon against the seductive, illusory world of cinema. While watching a silent film, Bliss sees a woman he takes to be the mother who abandoned him at birth. Undertaking to find her, Bliss passes out of the black world, opting to “become” white and eventually being elected to the US Senate. The novel’s ending, which leaves Sunraider/Bliss’s condition in doubt, signals Ellison’s belief that for all its racialist contradictions, its reliance on the cult of personality, and its subsequent elisions of human complexity, America is an unfinished project, one we will have to imagine and improvise into being.
If Ellison’s novels move away from social realism to embrace surrealism and the expansive, open-ended possibilities of myth, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) fuses the Bildungsroman and the spiritual conversion narrative in order to traverse the concatenations of Baldwin’s life. It seems fitting, then, that Go Tell It on the Mountain should involve life in the Pentecostal church, in which Baldwin served for three years as a child preacher. Thinking about the men and women who people the Temple of the Fire Baptized and the fact that many of them were probably Southern migrants whose lives were characterized by the move from segregated, sometimes dehumanizing, conditions to Northern cities in which their living conditions were no less segregated and their prospects no less bright, a child preacher would be reason to celebrate. Setting maturation and aspiration against salvation, the novel’s protagonist, John Grimes, is a young boy entering puberty at the same time that he feels pressured to become Saved, a predicament which crystallizes in the novel’s first words: “Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father.”6 The problem, the reader quickly discovers, is that John’s biological father is dead and thus the “father” to which people refer is his stepfather, Gabriel Grimes, a deacon in the Temple of the Fire Baptized, who looks at John and sees “the face of Satan” (27).
Go Tell It on the Mountain is distinguished in its use of the “limited” narrator, whose omniscience we must depend upon to understand the characters’ motivations apart from their declarations of religious devotion. For example, though John assures his mother that he will “try to love the Lord,” one of the novel’s most poignant scenes has John watching a film whose main character is a woman dying of tuberculosis amidst a life of debauchery. John views the film and concludes that he wants “to be like her, only more powerful, more thorough, and more cruel; to make those around him, all who hurt him, suffer . . . and laugh in their faces when they asked pity for their pain” (39). Baldwin describes this woman in hyperbolic terms:
She walked the cold, foggy streets, a little woman and not pretty, with a lewd, brutal swagger, saying to the whole world: “You can kiss my ass.” Nothing tamed or broke her, nothing touched her, neither kindness, nor scorn, nor hatred, nor love. She had never thought of prayer. It was unimaginable that she would ever bend her knees and come crawling along a dusty floor to anybody’s altar, weeping for forgiveness.
(39)
There are two aspects of this description that make it worthy of comment. First, Baldwin makes a radical break from both racial and sexual convention when he has his main character, a black male, be inspired by a white female, and indeed, a white female who manifests what might be described as a masculine posture. The significance of this needs to be understood as Baldwin’s effort to subvert, once more, the impulse so deeply entrenched in African American fiction by male writers, that black men should look within the race for models of behavior. By having John identify spectatorially with a white female who embodies transgressive behavior, Baldwin insinuates John’s sexual difference and articulates the manner in which Baldwin advocates an alternative strategy for the formation of a black male subjectivity that eschews the notion that masculinity and femininity are mutually exclusive sites in favor of a consciousness that seeks to manifest the best characteristics of both. In many ways, the conflict is a metaphor for what may have been Baldwin’s own ambivalence: the novel as the announcement of his dissatisfaction with Christianity with its final scene of “salvation” suggesting nonetheless that the novel came into being through spiritual struggle.
Go Tell It on the Mountain marks the passage of his protagonist from sin to salvation or from guilt to redemption, but Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, offers a protagonist, David, whose “innocence” is nonetheless destructive to those who try to care for him. As the novel ends, set to return to his home in the United States, David tears up a letter announcing the day his former lover, Giovanni, is to be executed. Symbolically, the wind blows pieces of the letter back onto him, as if to convey the persistence of memory and the tangibility of his guilt. The novel has depicted David’s homosexual relationship with Giovanni in order to suggest the ways that socially constructed categories like “gay,” “straight,” “man,” or “woman,” ultimately undermine human beings’ ability to reach outside themselves. If the first novel was about the desire to escape, Baldwin’s second novel informs us that without the capacity to love there is little chance of escape, which means fragments of the past stay with us in spite of our best effort to eschew them.
Set in and around Paris, Giovanni’s Room (1956) is distinctive in the history of the African American novel because all of its characters are white. Though Baldwin would not have viewed this as an avoidance of racial themes, it does provide the reader with a reason to understand the novel as a rumination on what Baldwin sees as the kind of self-delusion that leads whites to scapegoat blacks. As Kemp Williams has observed, “Baldwin utilizes [in Giovanni’s Room] a metaphor pervasive in western cultures: the body as container for the emotions.”7 Thus, the reader sees the things that happen in David as opposed to him. Because of this, he is a catalyst for disaster; his self-absorption leads him to hurt people because he is lacking in anything resembling empathy for the suffering of others. When he decides to abandon Giovanni, he can only think of his own discomfort and shame. Baldwin’s plot provides him with a way to dramatize the ways that the instantiation of guilt can completely undermine our personality. In this sense, the novel can be read as both sexual and racial allegory.
Published to mixed reviews, Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country (1962), revisits the intersection between race and sex portrayed in Giovanni’s Room.8 What makes this novel a departure from the earlier novels, perhaps, is its deeper and more resonant investment in social protest. Unlike his first two novels, which featured characters who exist removed from the wider world, Another Country revels in its portrayal of characters who come together across lines of race, class, and sexual preference. In this, the novel demonstrates that it is possible for individuals to love and care for one another, irrespective of their background. But, of course, Baldwin’s intention is to suggest that love happens in the world, and thus it is jeopardized by the fragility of the human spirit and the human propensity for disloyalty.
Baldwin begins the novel with Rufus Scott, a jazz drummer, who, as the novel begins, can be found wandering the streets of New York, “so tired . . . that he scarcely [has] the energy to be angry; nothing of his belonged to him anymore.”9 The novel’s first section deals with Rufus’s demise. In a moment meant to suggest the depth to which he has fallen, Baldwin shows us Rufus’s life on the night he meets Leona, a good-hearted white woman from the South who falls in love with him, only to be driven insane by his distrust and self-loathing. We see Rufus up on the bandstand, playing drums in “the last set of his last gig,” only seven months before. Baldwin includes a metaphorical gesture that states directly the novel’s thematic tension. As Rufus accompanies him on drums, a young saxophone player launches into a solo that begs insistently, “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?” (Another Country 9). This is an important question, not only because it forms the question that will render Rufus’s impending suicide so tragic, but also because it hangs over every relationship in the novel. There is Rufus’s best friend, Vivaldo Moore, a struggling writer who becomes romantically involved with Rufus’s sister, Ida. There are Richard and Cass Silenski, whose marriage suffers after Cass has an affair with Eric, an Alabama-born actor who is bisexual and involved with Yves, his French lover.
At the novel’s core lies the issue of integrity and the struggle to maintain it in the face of the constant assaults directed at those who dare to love. The novel suggests that who we are as individuals, our ability to construct a unified sense of self, is reliant on the ability to love unconditionally, which makes it possible to place what we have on the line. What each character, save Eric, fails to understand is that there is no safe haven; love cannot provide a refuge from a hostile world. Indeed, it is Eric alone who is capable of giving and receiving love without any hint of self-recrimination or loss of integrity. It is not that Eric is lacking in self-consciousness, but his bisexuality symbolizes his ability to accept love from whomever comes his way, be they male or female. Unlike David, who believes that homosexuality is an evil to be shunned and a reason to feel shame, Eric understands that love is inalienable, irrespective of where it comes from or in what quantity. Thus, he can bring himself to romantic encounters with Cass, Vivaldo, Yves, and Rufus and be present in the moment, a trait that Baldwin admires and believes that humans should emulate fully. It is perhaps for this reason that we can regard Another Country as a novel that best reflects Baldwin’s admiration for the nineteenth-century novelist Henry James. For in a manner that is reminiscent of James, Another Country provides us with characters whose talents lie in their presentations of legible surfaces that the novel’s limited omniscient narrator reveals to be manifested on false premises and self-delusion. In a novel that is much longer than either Go Tell It on the Mountain or Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin’s ambitious undertaking often goes awry in Another Country. The reason, as Albert Murray would later lament, is that Baldwin’s Rufus Scott seemed to reflect such one-dimensionality that one could not believe that a jazz musician would be so bereft of personal resources. Moreover, Murray insisted, the Harlem Baldwin creates is one which reflects more in the way of sociological analysis than it does in terms of its complexity. In that sense, then, Another Country failed to achieve its artistic ends.
While Murray’s remarks, which appear in his book The Omni-Americans, do possess merit, one has to consider, nonetheless, that his analysis considers Baldwin’s fiction solely in terms of its role as racial discourse. We must contend with the novel’s tenacious approach to the question of what it means to search for love. Ultimately, the novel reflects Baldwin’s sense that love is doomed when it adheres to the categorical boundaries imposed by American society. Thus, when we look at Rufus’s relationship with Leona, we can see that Baldwin’s decision to imprison her in an insane asylum is indicative of his belief that the invalid categories that grow out of race and sexuality are the sign of the nation’s inability to come to grips with its history. Another Country is meant to dramatize the destructive potential denial and dishonesty can unleash.
Baldwin published his fourth novel, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), six years after the publication of Another Country. What distinguishes this work is Baldwin’s use of a bisexual black man as the protagonist/narrator. In this instance, Leo Proudhammer, a black actor who has gained some measure of success, must attempt to conceptualize a role for himself in the black resistance movement. In a novel written at the end of the 1960s, published in the year of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, the novel is perhaps an effort on Baldwin’s part to ruminate upon his own celebrity. Though critical reception of the novel was less than enthusiastic, it is worthwhile to consider John Roberts’s assessment of the novel as an ambitious effort that fails because its reach exceeds its grasp.10
An appropriate connection can be made between Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, written in Baldwin’s “middle period,” and his last novel, Just Above My Head (1979), because Baldwin portrays two men: Leo Proudhammer and Arthur Montana, artists who have achieved great public stature but whose status does not spare them the inner turmoil shared by all black men. Further, both novels use the parable of the Prodigal Son as a structuring principle for their plots. Leo and Arthur are similar in that both men have intense relationships with their older brothers. In Leo’s case, he begins his life admiring his brother Caleb, whose life takes a variety of turns, ranging from time in prison to a life as a minister. For Arthur, it falls to his brother, Hall, to narrate his story. Both texts reflect the irreconcilability to be found in the parable; the older brother comes to be the arbiter of the younger brother’s tale. For Leo and Caleb, they fall into a state of conflict when the latter embraces Christianity and thus comes to be in judgment of Leo’s lifestyle. For Hall, his act of narrating Arthur’s life, speaking for him when he cannot speak for himself, is a way for him to seek healing and understanding of his own life.
But what also distinguishes these books is that they allow the reader to consider the role of the black artist in contemporary society. Though the 1960s marked a time when black artists achieved a level of visibility among whites previously unheard of, Baldwin’s experiences in the public sphere led him to question his effectiveness as a writer. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, as John Roberts suggests, reflects “Baldwin’s internal struggle with his role as an artist/celebrity and civil rights spokesman during the 1960s. The black celebrity has two choices: he can become a ‘fatcat,’ as Leo is labeled at one point, and withdraw into the protective shell of his success, or he can use his status as a symbol for the black community.”11
In response to such anxieties, Baldwin attempted to explore the pressures a racist society places on black men and women trying to love one another. In If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Fonny Hunt, a sculptor, is in love with Clementine (Tish) Rivers, who is pregnant with his child. After a confrontation with a racist policeman, Fonny is accused of raping a Puerto Rican woman, who promptly disappears from New York, making it next to impossible for Fonny to prove his innocence. Though she is young and undereducated, Baldwin’s decision to narrate the story from Tish’s point of view strains credibility to near the breaking point. For example, Baldwin requires Tish to comment on the American legal system, but it seems clear that he cannot raise the novel above the level of melodrama. Indeed, to characterize Baldwin’s later fiction in this way is appropriate, given his propensity to incorporate social commentary into his work. But Baldwin’s use of melodrama also reflects the time period in which he is writing. At a time when Baldwin may have felt ambivalent about how he was being received in the black community, a novel in which a black man is imprisoned despite his innocence allowed him to manifest moral legibility through the juxtaposition of characters in situations where there is a clear delineation between good and evil.
As Keneth Kinnamon has suggested, the antagonist in If Beale Street Could Talk is the American legal system.12 Hence, Tish must bear the narrative responsibility for commenting on matters that she is either too young to know about or lacking in the educational experiences necessary to form an opinion about. The novel ends with Tish entering labor and Fonny being released from jail after posting bond. Inexplicably, however, his father, despondent over his plight, has committed suicide. It represents a pyrrhic victory because the woman who accused Fonny of raping her has gone insane. Baldwin has given us a glimpse through flashback of what Fonny and Tish’s lives will be like: Fonny will be an artist, and Tish will have the baby and care for the household. Thus, the novel’s progressive gesture of giving a woman voice is undone by Baldwin’s inability to push the plot beyond the confines of melodrama. Moreover, the novel lacks the weightiness of Another Country or Giovanni’s Room because nothing happens inside the characters. Rather, things happen to them and they react. Baldwin’s abandonment of the modality found in the Jamesian novel of manners leads him away from the nuanced characterizations to be found in his earliest fiction, particularly Go Tell It on the Mountain and short stories such as “The Manchild,” “Sonny’s Blues” and “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon.” More than Another Country perhaps, If Beale Street Could Talk incorporates elements of protest that, as Murray insisted, are evocative of the sociological problems to be found in the black community and Baldwin’s constant assertion that love is the only weapon that can withstand the assault. The problem is that his ability to produce believable characters is compromised by his capitulation to popular trends.
Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head, published in 1979, revisits many of the themes which readers of his fiction would, then, have found familiar. He takes the opportunity once again to portray Christianity as morally bankrupt and perverse. Indeed, his characters are only able to assume moral coherence when they abandon it. We have two brothers: Hall and Arthur Montana. Hall is narrating the story in the wake of Arthur’s death of a heart attack. As Darryl Pinckney wrote concerning the novel’s limitations, Hall’s narration “becomes more urgent and elliptical, as if he were uneasily aware that the story he wished to tell were too large.”13 Pinckney points to several moments in the novel where Baldwin glosses over crucial information, as if the story’s epic sweep were more important than nuance or detail. One aspect of the book that Pinckney and others recognize is that the homosexual, in this case Arthur, is no longer the figure outside.
The effect of this, when Baldwin allows it, is that Hall is an articulate spokesman for what Warren Carson describes as “a definitive statement of black masculinity.”14 And indeed, we see that sexual practices do not, in any way, compromise Baldwin’s sense that masculinity issues form a different space in the cultural imagination. Rather than suggesting that racial identity is the foundation of masculinity, Baldwin instead reveals sexuality as the means for black men to discover the true substance of their humanity. In such a scheme, the men and women in Just Above My Head can collaborate rather than contend with one another. Though there are certainly figures in the novel who are victims – Crunch, for example, ends up institutionalized; Peanut is abducted and murdered by white supremacists; Red becomes a heroin addict – ultimately, Baldwin suggests that male bonding is the way to liberation. What makes Baldwin’s emphasis on masculine power different, as Carson insists, is his constant (since 1954) call for men to acknowledge their mutual need, to escape what he referred to as the “Male Prison.”
In looking at the respective careers of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, it is clear that each has made lasting contributions to American letters and in the process forced us to reimagine what it means to be human. However, this common ground is by no means easily traversed when we consider the fact that Baldwin’s stature as a novelist is overshadowed by his public life and Ellison’s public life was thrust upon him by the success of his idiosyncratic approach to the American character in Invisible Man. Certainly, Baldwin’s novels work to diagnose America’s ills by dramatizing what happens when love is compromised. It could be that the most effective way to link Baldwin and Ellison is to propose that their respective fictions are peopled by prodigals and pilgrims. What they share is the sense that black life, though often a “lowdown, dirty shame,” is nonetheless worthwhile.
1. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (1955; rpt. New York: Dial Press, 1961), p. 18.
2. Michel-Rolph Trouillot asserts that “history involves peoples in three distinct capacities: 1) as agents, or occupants of social positions, 2) as actors, in constant interface with a context, and 3) as subjects . . . as voices aware of their vocality.” See Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 23.
3. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1982). All subsequent references are to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text.
4. David Yaffe, “Ellison Unbound,” The Nation, March 4, 2002: 34–36.
5. Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth (New York: Vintage Books, 1999). All further references to the text will appear parenthetically in the remainder of the essay.
6. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952; rpt. New York: Dell Publishing, 1981), p. 11. All further references to this novel will be acknowledged parenthetically in the text.
7. Kemp Williams, “The Metaphorical Construction of Sexuality in Giovanni’s Room,” Literature and Homosexuality, ed. Michael J. Meyer (Amsterdam: Rodolpi: 2000), p. 27.
8. In his treatment of Baldwin’s novels, John W. Roberts notes that reviews in The New York Times alone reflect the mixed response. As Roberts observes, the Times Book Review refers to the novel as “strained,” while the daily book column “hailed [the novel] as ‘brilliantly and fiercely told,’” Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. xxxiii (Farmington, MI: Gale Group Publishing, 1989), p. 11.
9. James Baldwin. Another Country (1962; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 3. All further references to this novel will appear parenthetically in the text.
10. Roberts, Dictionary, p. 13.
12. Keneth Kinnamon, “James Baldwin,” American Writers, ed. Leonard Unger (New York: Scribner, 1974), pp. 47–71.
13. Darryl Pinckney, “Blues for Mr. Baldwin,” Critical Essays on James Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Standley and Nancy V. Burt (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), pp. 161–166.
14. Warren J. Carson, “Manhood, Masculinity, and Male Bonding in Just Above My Head,” Re-viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen, ed. Quentin Miller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), pp. 215–232.