Notes of a Native Son

"Notes of a Native Son," the title essay in this small superlatively written and phenomenally intelligent collection by the young Negro James Baldwin, begins like this: “On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.”

Mr. Baldwin has been enraged into a style; the harshness of his lot, his racial sensitivity, and the sense of alienation and displacement that is frequently the fate of intellectuals in this country has moved him to portray in lyrical, passionate, sometimes violent prose the complex, oblique, endless outrages by which a man, particularly a black man, can be made to feel outside the established social order.

Lacking identity with Negro culture, and finding it impossible to establish any genuine rapport with white intellectuals, the Negro intellectual is singularly isolated. The dissident Jew, with related problems, has an indigenous intellectual tradition that goes back several millennia, but the Negro comes from a preliterate culture in Africa and in the American South; to borrow the language of theology, the Jewish intellectual is merely a schismatic, the Negro intellectual, a heretic, and hence in perpetual exile. Their numbers—and this heightens the lack of belonging to an in-group—are understandably, few.

Whether James Baldwin is discussing anti-Negro manifestations, as in his criticism of Hollywood’s “Carmen Jones.” Or the disgraceful opportunism of political groups, like the progressive Party in Harlem (“Journey to Atlanta”), or Negro anti-semitism, he never fails to be evocative...