I never related to the society I grew up in, and I finally walked away from so-called "civilization" -- at least as much as I could with the skillset I had -- in November of 1980 at the age of 23, although I had been practicing such a departure off and on since puberty. I remained on the fringes of society until I walked into Recovery in April of 1988 after numerous brushes with our mortality from multiple directions. I had tried to find some other way to be on the Earth -- through nature, through self-medication, through hiding in workaholism, through all three at once. Anyway, one fine day I came across James Baldwin and wrote an essay in response to a prompt in an American short story class. That is what follows.
I love what James Baldwin had to say even though he grew up in Harlem during the twenties and thirties and I grew up in a small town in western Kansas in the sixties and seventies. His voice has a resonance for me. He devoted a great deal of energy to letting his wounds -- acquired by growing up in yet another paternalistic, authoritarian household -- get some air so that they could begin to heal. This sets a powerful example for the rest of us.
James Baldwin had a willingness and a drive to expose the deepest wounds in our culture. As Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, the psychiatrist whose studies were used in the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board decision, stated, "He demands of anybody who comes in contact with him a look at some aspect of truth . . . Jimmy confronts you, not just racially, but with the human predicament (italics mine). (Eckman 26)
The human predicament, particularly in our society, is primarily caused by the fact that we are afraid of facing these wounds and thus we avoid ourselves and the reality of who we are capable of becoming. Our society is literally packed full of ways to avoid the legitimate suffering of growth and consequently, we suffer the endless misery of spiritual stagnation. You can smell it. It smells like hell.
James Baldwin could smell it, and more importantly, he could relate it to others. He said that it is really frightening to comprehend the effort people make to avoid the truth. The worst things happen when one tries to convince oneself of the truth of a falsehood. In his own words: I'm suggesting that one try to listen to one's heart, and tell the truth." (quoted in Eckman, 26)
This can be quite a tall order when one has been trained to ignore anything that happens within oneself. This is taught in childhood. Many people don't seem to realize the power they have to influence their children. If they did, maybe they would take the job of raising them more seriously. One of the things that Baldwin said was that we carry with us all of our parents' unresolved pain. James Baldwin's step-father, David, was a Baptist fire-breather who did his best to try and make a "common darkie" out of his step-son, Jimmy. He frowned on Jimmy's going to school. He expected him to do as he was told and be a fry-cook or a dock worker like good "boy." David Baldwin indicted the white world for oppressing the black, but he himself became an unwitting believer in the theory of racial superiority. This rage was passed on to Jimmy, who became the unwitting "guardian of David Baldwin's anger." (Eckman 26)
If is a matter of record that the African American population of this country has been saddled with hundreds of years of pain and oppression, to say nothing of torture and murder. But no one has a monopoly on pain. When one looks at the drunken bloodbath that is European history, it becomes much easier for me, as an American of English and Scots-Irish descent, to see that my father, (a decorated WWII veteran), and I have also been victims of the spiritual wasteland of Western Society. It is also makes it easier to see why my father considered his children to be potential cannon fodder and fresh sinew for the meat-grinder of the Accumulation Machine. Not only did he seem afraid of becoming too attached to us, but he did not know how to become attached to us if he had wanted to. This negativity was profoundly supplemented by the fact that he was treated in this same manner by his father, and he by his, etc. The oppressors are not without their own private hells. The American white man, though historically guilty of incredible atrocities, particularly against Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans (and we could put women, gays, trans, etc. in this category, as well), is his own worst enemy. As James Baldwin understood, oppressing people is as damaging to the human psyche as is being the oppressed, because sooner or later, you have to repress yourself and worse yet, your children, in order to oppress someone else.
The fact that the young child soaks up his parent's emotional pain has been widely acknowledged, although it's largely subsumed under the massive dysfunction of a system that has facilitated this collective Ozymandias. In "Sonny's Blues," Baldwin acknowledges this when he describes a living room scene in which the children are just lying around, being comfortable and quiet. The grownups are talking; the children don't know what about, but they hope that this comfortable, relaxed feeling will never end. The conversation ambles around what they've seen and where they've come from. Then, the adults remember the children and "they won't talk anymore that day . . . The child knows that they won't talk anymore because if he knows too much about what's happened to them, he'll know too much too soon, about what's going to happen to him." (Baldwin 72-73)
Many are also realizing that unless there is someone in the child's life who essentially rescues him from this hereditary oppression, the child is doomed to repeat the life of his parents or worse. "Children can survive without money or security or things, but they are lost if they cannot find a loving example, for only this example can give them a touchstone for their lives." (Eckman 36-37) Mrs. Baldwin taught her children to follow her own policy of submission to David. And yet, "She functioned as a kind of underground," James remembered. As happens within nations, the family became united against the step-father's tyranny, allying with each other as shelter from the oppressor. (40)
When James was allowed to be himself around his mother and younger siblings, his natural compassion was nurtured. He had little difficulty forgiving David after he died for the oppressive and violent childhood he had experienced. "When he died, I realized what I really wanted was for him to love me. For me to be able to prove myself to him." (Eckman 37) This normal desire is mocked by many parents, forcing children to turn their rage inward. As Baldwin said, "It's horrible to be a child! Because you know more as a child than you do as a grown-up and you can't . . . cope with it." (34)
Through his mother, James had received some degree of support for being himself, but it was in school where he began to get a chance to express himself. He began to realize that he had thought his pain was unprecedented, but he now learned "that his lacerations were the stigmata of mankind." And, equally as profound, Jimmy Baldwin found out in school that he was smart. (Eckman 42) He had a black principal in school who liked and supported him. A young substitute teacher who had come to New York from the midwest "rejoiced in the talent she discerned in her young, diffident pupil." It was her influence that helped him to see a way out. He later said, "The world she showed me seemed very far away, but it was real. It was there." (43)
Baldwin had to go to Paris to get away from people telling him what to be in order to get some idea of who he really was. In Paris, he wasn't constantly reminded of his blackness. Certain areas were not off limits to him because of his color. He was simply a poor person, a starving artist if you will, lost in a cosmopolitan crowd that cared little about the color of one's skin. In this atmosphere, he began to become reconciled with the universe, a process that is extremely difficult in the atmosphere of oppression and repression so common in America. I could write, I could think, I could feel, I could walk, I could eat, I could breathe. There were no penalties attached to these simple human endeavors. Y'know? Even when I was starving, it was me starving. It was not a black man starving." (Eckman 118) And understandably, as a friend confides, "He thought seriously of never being a Negro again -- certainly never a Negro in America." (119)
An interesting parallel comes in to play here. One that, if embraced and institutionalized, could emancipate the "western," and especially the white American psyche from its blindly self-imposed prison sentence. Baldwin makes a statement (one of many) that can serve as a mirror for White America:
"What was most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro [the American White] has had to hide from himself
as the price of his public progress: that I hated and feared white people [black people]. This did not mean that I loved black [white] people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce a Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world."
(Eckman 119)
Many American whites have expressed fear and hatred of black people, generated by the guilt we have obtained, not necessarily from our own actions, but from the atrociities committed by our ancestors that we are taught from Day One not to question, but to revere? I believe that the white American male has had to hide from himself as the price for his public progress. Baldwin was angry and afraid, he speculated, in part because blacks hadn't produced a Rembrandt (a highly arguable assertion). Aren't a large percentage of whites angry and afraid because we have destroyed so many? Furthermore, aren't we all told, in many cases from a very early age, not what we can do, but what we can't do? Aren't we forced to be like everyone else if we are going to be accepted into the workplace? Isn't this the equivalent of condemning the miraculous and championing the mediocre? Don't those of us of European ancestry do to ourselves the very same thing that James Baldwin lamented that African Americans do to themselves? Isn't what we all do to ourselves called "self-denial?" As Joseph Campbell liked to say, "Demons are just angels who have been denied."
Journalist Jake Lamar described this revisited "white man's burden" in a way that Badwin would likely appreciate:
"The desperate yearning to be considered normal, part of some standard Disneyfied American citizenry, runs deep in white consciousness. I've witnessed the poignant efforts of young whites striving to conform to the vague tenets of the mainstream, taking crushingly dull jobs, settling down with the least challenging of spouses, dreaming of the perfect family, groping
for an illusory sense of security. The quest for conformity can be fraught with doubt, doubt is anathema to the mainstream. To reaffirm your conventionality, you must constantly tell yourself what you are not. (Lamar 83)
I submit that all the material riches that are available in Western society are a monument to mediocrity, and now a sort of banal nihilism. The real challenge of life has nothing to do with material wealth and security. What the hell is security when you live in a world in which you have to die? James Baldwin was aware of this. In "Sonny's Blues," there is a moment where the narrator, Sonny's older brother, is talking to him about his future. Sonny wants to play the piano. He's making the point that it's the only thing he wants to do. His brother responds, "Well, Sonny, you know people can't always do exactly what they want to do." To which Sonny answers, "No, I don't know that, I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?" (Baldwin 76)
There are consequences to doing what you want, namely the legitimate suffering of following your own path, (which is the main cause of personal growth), made more difficult by the established notion that this should not, and indeed cannot, be done. James Baldwin: "There is something very impressive about being able to get through the world and still be able to be hurt. Because most people seem to give up so soon." He goes on to say that if you make a real connection with yourself, it is always a connection with everyone [and everything] else. (Eckman 30)
Baldwin said that when you have to confront someone on a one-on-one basis, like in a relationship, the truth comes out because the masks cannot survive the experience for very long. "But everyone's afraid of that, afraid of being seen as he or she is. But that's the price, you know." The price of being alive. We are not taught how to be alive, we are taught how to fit in, and if we do it well, without creating any problems, we get to have a manicured prison in suburbia and 2.3 children. Acceptance into this ship of fools only comes with acceptance of this lie that authenticity is a faux pas and God forbid your children should take up the cause of authenticity and saying what they really see and think and feel. Baldwin again:
"You have to come down front and be whoever you are. And you don't know who you are, you discover that . . . through somebody else. And everybody's afraid of this revelation. You know it isn't done in a day. Once you've done it, it isn't so terrifying. Once you've made some crucial turning point . . . you can handle it. Because you know you can. (Eckman 29)
And you find your niche in the world, not because of the acceptance of the status quo, but because you have made a commitment to the part of you that is the Universe, not a collection of fear-based defenses, and the conforming masses don't have the power to stop you, short of killing you, which some would be glad to do.
What does all of this amount to in the end? In "Sonny's Blues," near the end of the story, Sonny is onstage jamming with his musician friends. Creole is the name of the bass player:
"Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell. It's the only light we've got in all this darkness." (Baldwin 86)
