TELLING IT ON THE MOUNTAIN

IN ESSAYS AND EARLY FICTION, JAMES BALDWIN CHARTED THE TERRAIN OF RACISM, IDENTITY, AND DISPOSSESSION

Author: By Nellie Y. McKay

Date: SUNDAY, March 1, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

James Arthur Baldwin was born in New York in 1924. Between the late 1940s and the 1980s he produced 22 books, essays of all kinds, a children's book, a screenplay, and a chapbook. His successes are most impressive in light of how easily they might not have happened. Early in his life, dispossession marked him for its own. He never knew his father's last name; he was bruisingly ill-treated by his stepfather; and sexual ambivalence haunted most of his life.

David Baldwin, an itinerant preacher from Louisiana who never succeeded in New York, married Jimmy's mother when her son was 3. Baldwin adopted the boy but constantly derided him with demeaning names. Jimmy carried the scars of his childhood traumas for his whole life. Yet before he reached his mid-20s, James Baldwin was making his mark on the world with jeremiads against America's racism. The poor black ghetto boy, for whom loving his mother and reading voraciously were the only youthful solace, had learned to use words with eloquence, fire, and passion.

True, he felt compelled to leave his country to ``save his life,'' but for all of his wanderings, he insisted that he loved America. Even though he divided his time between the United States and Europe, he never lost an opportunity to castigate America's weaknesses and refusals to change.

James Baldwin was born at a time when the Harlem Renaissance was gaining strength but the black community was experiencing the pressures of poverty and overcrowding. Conditions worsened during his teenage years, which coincided with the Depression and World War II. Only his love of reading -- fostered by discerning teachers in his early years, over the objections of his stepfather -- saved him from the mean streets. In high school, he published plays, poems, and short stories, some reflecting his religious concerns in a period when he embraced the black church and became a lay Pentecostal preacher.

At 17, as his stepfather was dying, Baldwin completed high school and left home and the church almost simultaneously. By then he knew he wanted to be a writer. In 1945, he met Richard Wright, who read his work, encouraged his efforts, and recommended him to Wright's editor, a gesture that landed him a fellowship. He broke into the writing scene in 1947 with reviews for literary periodicals and published his first essay, ``The Harlem Ghetto,'' in Commentary in 1948.

Although the modern civil rights movement was just beginning to take shape (and though Baldwin remained close to that struggle for the rest of his life), he left the country for the first time in 1948, at age 24, with a small fellowship supplying the necessities of food and shelter. He headed for Europe, seeking time, space, and respite from the demons of race and sexuality that made it impossible for him to concentrate on writing. From time to time he returned -- from France, Turkey, Scandinavia, or Africa -- and during the late '50s and '60s, he spoke out and participated in sit-ins, voter-registration drives, the march from Selma to Montgomery, the March on Washington, and other movement events.

Three of Baldwin's first six novels -- ``Go Tell It on the Mountain'' (1953), ``Giovanni's Room'' (1956), and ``Another Country'' (1962) -- along with his only volume of short stories, ``Going to Meet the Man'' (1965), make up ``Early Novels and Stories.'' ``Go Tell It on the Mountain'' is his most acclaimed and best-known work. Here he unambiguously embraced the community and culture of the black America in which he grew up. This lyrical work is often read as a rite of exorcism against his father, and the journey of the young artist in search of himself. Much like his author, the main character, 14-year-old John Grimes, struggles with his adopted father, Gabriel, a turn-of-the-century Southern migrant to the city, in his attempt to understand the older man and to come to terms with family, religion, and his ambivalence about his sexuality.

He would return to these themes, especially those directly related to race and sexuality, in almost everything he wrote. Even when his plots seem to move beyond black life and culture -- as in ``Giovanni's Room,'' with its white homosexual/bisexual characters and a Paris setting -- these differences further complicate our understanding of black life and culture. One of the first black writers to address homosexuality openly, Baldwin here engages the search for identity in the midst of social alienation rooted in race and sex.

Baldwin called ``Another Country'' ``shapeless'' and ``a reflection of the `incoherence' of life in America.'' Some readers considered it pornographic, and in the 1960s it was banned from some schools. In spite of mixed reviews, by the early 1990s it had sold more than 4 million copies. As in the earlier novels, a chief concern in ``Another Country'' is love, but this plot weaves itself around various permutations of interracial relations and sexuality. The characters search unsuccessfully for the security of love that eludes them as Baldwin explores the destruction which racism and sexuality create in human relationships.

Of the stories in ``Going to Meet the Man,'' the best known is ``Sonny's Blues,'' which readers and critics consistently evaluate as one of the best African-American short stories. Like much in Baldwin's fiction, ``Sonny's Blues'' explores relationships between individuals and community and the effects of racism on the African-American community. Grounded in the ethic of love and brotherhood, the plot revolves around the relationship between two brothers, the younger a jazz musician fighting heroin addiction, and the older the narrator/schoolteacher who follows a ``straight'' path in his life.

``Collected Essays'' contains ``Notes of a Native Son'' (1955), ``Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son'' (1961), ``The Fire Next Time'' (1963), ``No Name in the Street'' (1972), ``The Devil Finds Work'' (1976), and 36 articles of many kinds written and/or published between 1948 and 1985. ``Notes of a Native Son'' (as do all his essay collections) continues Baldwin's autobiographical approaches to the social and political issues that concerned him. Divided into three sections, the collection explores black identity, black life in America, and expatriate black life.

These extremely powerful pieces from his early career established Baldwin's claim to mastery of the essay form. In ``Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son,'' Baldwin again confronts white America on its negative relationship to black America. In ``The Fire Next Time'' he speaks to Americans, warning of dire consequences for the nation if whites continue their oppression of blacks. Perhaps his most militant work, ``No Name in the Street'' reflects Baldwin's attempt to respond to the ferocity of the black power movement, and in ``The Devil Finds Work'' he returns to his early interest in film to engage a discussion of his own life, the American psyche, and the social and political situation of the country.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison was, without doubt, the best choice to edit Baldwin's work for The Library of America. Morrison, who spent many years as an editor shepherding the work of African-American writers into publication, did an excellent job of searching through his work, making informed judgments. Scholars and instructors familiar with Baldwin's writings will have little to disagree with in her selections.

If the issues that were of greatest concern to James Baldwin did not shift dramatically from one text to another, his multiple approaches to the problems made each work fresh and challenged us to reexamine old assumptions and perspectives that yielded simple answers to complex problems. For readers less familiar with his work, I can suggest no better way to begin to appreciate his genius than these two fine books.