Giovanni's Room

Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
read: 2020
Guardian 1000 Novels

During February, Black History Month, I usually try to read books by African-American authors. An interesting element of Giovanni's Room is that virtually all the characters are white, with Baldwin exploring sexuality, rather than race. Protagonist David struggles with his feelings for the titular Giovanni. Ultimately, it's debatable whether David is gay or bi-sexual, but the larger issue is that he's afraid of his feelings and denies himself happiness. He can't be happy with Giovanni, nor with his fiancee Hella.

Notes of a Native Son

Notes of a Native Son
by James Baldwin
read: 2017

Notes of a Native Son was published in 1955, and yet ...

No one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly. It is just as well to remember that people are always doing this. Perhaps many of those legends, including Christianity, to which the world clings began their conquest of the world with just some such concerted surrender to distortion.

... so many of Baldwin's insights still ring true today.

The rage of disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood, even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
read: 2010
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #39, Guardian 1000 Novels

Black Boy reminded me some of another coming-of-age story with a black male protagonist, James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain.  Baldwin's story is fiction but draws a considerable amount from his life and that of his family.  It is less overtly about race than Black Boy, dealing more in personal, psychological struggles than in sociological conflict.

Another interesting difference is the role of religion.  Young Richard Wright is intuitively and immediately disdainful of the church.  He does not believe in a Christian God and does not have much patience for attending church, praying, or the other rituals of organized religion.  John, Baldwin's alter-ego, is more conflicted.  He sees the church partly as an extension of his father (actually step-father), who he dislikes, but he also associates it with his friend Elisha, who stirs up sexual feelings in John.  Arguably (and ironically) this nascent homosexuality provides the emotional impetus for his ultimate religious transformation and acceptance of the church.

Baldwin's perspective in writing this story with such autobiographical elements is fascinating.  The novel ends when he is still just 14 years old, but Baldwin was 29 when Go Tell It on the Mountain was published and had distanced himself from the people and the places in that story.  He had expatriated to Paris where he felt he could be freer as a black and gay man.  Yet while the childhood portrayed in the novel is far from a happy one, Baldwin does not wholly condemn the parents who raised him (/ John), the society that surrounded him, or the church that played such a central role in those years.  One can ponder whether the physical and temporal distance resulted in enough emotional distance to treat the characters in Go Tell It on the Mountain with empathy and compassion.