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Example research essay topic: James Baldwin Dead Father - 3,020 words

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James Baldwin: Going to Meet the Man & Go Tell it on the Mountain James Arthur Baldwin was born Aug. 2, 1924 in Harlem, New York City, and died in France on Nov. 30, 1987. He gave an important literary voice during the era of civil rights activism in the 1950 s and ' 60 s. His first education was that of a preacher, but then he exchanged it for literature. Critics, however, note the impassioned cadences of Black churches are still evident in his writing. Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), his first novel, is a partially autobiographical account of his youth.

From 1948, Baldwin made the south of France his primarily permanent residence, but he often returned to the USA to teach of give lectures. In 1957, he began spending half of each year in New York City. Among his novels are Giovanni's Room (1956), about a white American expatriate who must come to terms with his homosexuality, and Another Country (1962), about racial and gay sexual tensions among New York intellectuals. His inclusion of gay themes resulted in a lot of savage criticism from the Black community. However, as an openly gay man, he became increasingly outspoken in condemning discrimination against lesbian and gay people. Because Baldwin was an experimental writer who resisted labels, the struggle to understand his work and to assess his literary reputation will probably continue indefinitely.

As a fiction writer Baldwin is best known for his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), his second novel Giovanni's Room (1956), and his short stories Sonny's Blues (1957) and Going to Meet the Man (1965). For as long as he took nothing for granted, Baldwin made a substantial contribution to the literature and the cultural dialogue of his time. His first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain while still young. But this however, seems not to be the reason for his making it autobiographical at large, since he does that in a number of his other works. Anyone familiar with the fiction and nonfiction of James Baldwin is aware that the formative influence upon his life and career was his stepfather. Baldwin was an illegitimate child; when he was three years old his mother married David Baldwin, a Southerner who had come to New York as part of the large stream of black migration north after the First World War.

The elder Baldwin labored in a Long Island factory during the week and preached in Harlem storefront churches on Sundays. As a preacher, he was passionate but hardly successful: his increasingly bitter harangues were off-putting to his congregations, and he descended, over the years, to ever smaller, grimier, and more insignificant houses of worship. Young Jimmy was never told that David Baldwin was not his real father, a fact that he discovered quite by accident when he was a teenager. He was in effect the eldest Baldwin child in what was to become a large family. David Baldwin was a powerful, brooding presence who cast a pall over the entire family. "He looked to me, as I grew older, " James Baldwin wrote, "like pictures I had seen of African tribal chieftains: he really should have been naked, with warpaint on and barbaric mementos, standing among spears. " He was "the most bitter man I have ever met, " who emanated "absolutely un abating tension... I do not remember, in all those years, that one of his children was ever glad to see him come home. " (New Criterion, 1998).

Baldwin portrayed his stepfather in all his rage, violence, and religious hypocrisy as the preacher Gabriel Grimes in his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and in that novel he also described his own temporary religious conversion, his experience, as a teenager, of being "saved. " He acknowledged that his decision, at the age of fourteen, to become a child preacher was a way in which he could confront his stepfather on his own terms and his own turf, and beat him there. This task turned out to be almost pathetically easy, for David Baldwin's simmering rage and hatred, never far below the surface, made him an unpopular preacher, while Jimmy, endowed with the charm of youth and with the verbal glibness that was later to mar so much of his writing, made an immediate hit. It was only a few short years before the younger Baldwin came to recognize his father's brand of religion and by extension his own for what it was: a justification of, and consolation for, the cruelties and injustices that black Americans felt powerless to change, and the sublimation of the debilitating anger that threatened at every minute to overpower them: a "dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels. Once this disease is contracted, one can never be really carefree again... There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood -- one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. " (New Criterion, 1998). David Baldwin had surrendered to it long since, a process his stepson vividly re imagined in Go Tell It on the Mountain. "Hating and fearing every living soul including his children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching towards the world which had despised him, " the elder Baldwin went, over the years, from being merely an angry man to one who was literally mad.

Laid off from his job, he took to sitting all day at the kitchen table, gazing out of the window and shouting Old Testament curses; eventually he refused to eat, claiming that his family was trying to poison him, and wandered in the streets until he was committed to a state mental institution. Raving and paranoid to the end, he died of tuberculosis just before his stepson's nineteenth birthday. To James Baldwin, his stepfather remained, throughout his life, a fearsome example of what the same "dread, chronic disease" might work on him or on any of his black friends. The picture of his stepfather was never far from his mind, and when, as a young essayist and fledgling novelist, he decided in 1948 to leave New York for Paris, he looked on the move as flight, a necessary measure to keep him from going the same way. "By this time... I was mad, as mad as my dead father. If I had not gone mad, I could not have left. "I knew the tension in me between love and power, between pain and rage, and the curious, the grinding way I remained extended between these poles -- perpetually attempting to choose the better rather than the worse. " (New Criterion, 1998).

The story of James Baldwin's career is in essence the story of that attempt. The question is whether or not he succeeded in it. I believe that the attempt was real was, in fact, profoundly earnest but that over the long run he failed; that, although he knew enough to choose "the better" initially, he lacked the stamina and the courage for the long-term effort. The ultimate power of a serious novel, as opposed to that of a comic one, lies in its level of sincerity, the intensity with which it is felt.

A great novel, though it does many other things as well, always communicates a potent emotional force. Go Tell It on the Mountain, published when Baldwin was twenty-nine, is a very good novel, possibly a great one; it reaches a level of fine emotional honesty that none of his other fiction, not even the popular Giovanni's Room, would find. It is his most autobiographical piece of work and at the same time his most imaginative; it is the only one, I believe, that lives up to his dictum that "all artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up. All of it, the literal and the fanciful. " Go Tell It on the Mountain tells the story of the Baldwin family as James Baldwin knew it, and its history as he imagined it.

Most of it takes place during a cathartic session of shouting, singing, and testifying in a Baptist church in Harlem, during which the collective history of the Grimes family is related in an interwoven series of flashbacks. Young John Grimes -- James Baldwin at the age of about fourteen is the central consciousness, as he observes the goings-on in church with the sensible cynicism of extreme youth. His stepfather, Gabriel, dislikes him and justifies the dislike by identifying the boy with Sin, in this case the sexual sin of his mother. John, like Baldwin, finds himself "saved" at the end of the novel, but as in Baldwin's case the experience is spurious, a dishonest fashion of incorporating emotional crisis, or of finding a way to bear that which cannot be borne. The religion of the adults, of course, is equally false, and in a series of three stunningly executed flashbacks we learn much about Gabriel Grimes, his wife Elizabeth, and his sister Florence: what they are, and what has brought them to this moment on their knees before a false God.

Exposed are Gabriel's own sin and grief, Elizabeth's lost chance for love, and Florence's anger, ambition, and blighted hopes. The language is pithy; the descriptive passages, brief and always to the point. There are a few false notes: Richard, John's dead father, is too obviously the father the author would dearly love to have had rather than a real human being like Gabriel or like John himself, and the long sections of singing and prayer go on too long, and make their statement too obviously. But as a whole the novel is wonderfully true. What makes Go Tell It on the Mountain so remarkably skillful is the way in which it exposes the falsity of this sort of "religious" impulse while at the same time using the metaphors of Christian doctrine to expose real truths.

Elisha, a kind and frightened young man who has taken refuge from the world's challenges by becoming a deacon and giving his life to the church, is telling the truth -- though it is not quite the truth he understands -- when he says "The Devil, he don't ask for nothing less than your life. And he take it, too, and it's lost forever... You in darkness while you living and you in darkness when you dead... [The Devil] got as many faces... as you going to see between now and the time you lay your burden down. " Go Tell It on the Mountain is a story of the world Baldwin was born into. The world that he penetrated, and of which he became a central figure, was very different indeed, and his subsequent fiction is accordingly different from that one early novel. (The Harlem of his childhood, during the 1920 s and 1930 s, retained a certain "small town" aura: most of the inhabitants came from the South (known as the "Old Country"), with a strong family, church, and neighborhood tradition.

At the age of eighteen, Baldwin left this insular community forever and took up residence in bohemia, where he would spend the rest of his life: first Greenwich Village, later Paris, Istanbul, and St. Paul-Vence. Most of his subsequent novels deal with international bohemia, and it is significant that they never captured their world with anything like the immediacy and the unselfconsciousness of Baldwin's Harlem novel. (Miller, 2002) James Baldwin, chronicled in many of his essays the difficulties he had in trying to arrive at manhood without getting killed in Harlem, for white policemen there assumed that black males existed for their sadistic pleasure. When Baldwin tried to escape Harlem by going to work for a short time in New Jersey, he experienced even more acutely the denial of his manhood that the whites with whom he worked, especially the Southerners, considered his due by virtue of his black skin.

The powerlessness he felt, which produced so much rage in him and contributed to his decision to leave the United States, was equally as restricting as the space in which black sharecroppers were forced to operate and that in which many black migrants from the South had discovered as their lots in Northern ghettos. The accused black man who is brought before the crowd for "knocking down old Miss Standish" in Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man is as much the physical plaything of the crowd of whites as Baldwin was to the policemen in his neighborhood and to the whites who would not allow him just to be on that job in New Jersey "The Child Who Favored Daughter. " (Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals, 1984). Whether the violence is rape or murder, black women writers seem to be less inclined to dwell upon it. Baldwin, in a climactic presentation of the ritual, vividly portrays the psychological and sexual dimensions of such transfers in "Going to Meet the Man. " In each literary work, white women are taboo; the pedestal of their purity must not be violated; the myth must be kept intact. Thus, the lynching is a ritual in support of the preservation of values, and, for Jesse in Going to Meet the Man, it is a rite of passage, an indication that he is being prepared to take his place in a society whose values are sanctioned. The lynching / roast occurred when he was a tiny boy riding on his father's shoulders and has served the purpose of initiation for Jesse.

He had sensed that at the time and "had loved his father more than he ever loved him. He felt that his father had carried him through a mighty test, had revealed to him a great secret which would be the key to his life forever." Jesse's perception was correct, for he has been initiated into all the ugliness of power and control over Blacks that the mobsters would have thought his just due. The frame story, set in the present, shows Jesse exhibiting all the values he was so graphically initiated into accepting. Jesse has adopted, it seems his whole view of life from his father. He beats the black youth and jails his fellows because they have stepped out of their place. Though Jesse may have forgotten his little black friend Otis, whom he had known at the time of the burning, how he treats Blacks in the present parallels what his father had hinted should be Otis's fate.

The two boys, still innocent in their childhood, had been frequent playmates until Jesse noticed one day that he had not seen Otis for a couple of days. This is after the "crime" for which the black man will be roasted has been committed and before the man is caught. When Jesse's father maintains that Otis is absent because he is probably afraid, the boy retorts: "But Otis didn't do nothing!" , to which his father responds: "Otis can't do nothing... he's too little... We just want to make sure Otis don't do nothing." Thus the killing functions both as an example to other Blacks and as an initiation for Jesse into his future role in relation to Blacks. They should be confined and kept in their places, and vivid lessons should always be taught to them if they dare to refuse the order under which they must live.

Jesse's reference to doing his wife "like a nigger" reflects the place of subservience, sexual abandon, and general disrespect to which he has relegated all black men and women. Ironically, and subconsciously, it also reflects his envy of the sexual and spiritual manhood he attributes to black men. However, on the conscious level, his society has taught him well in terms of his position in relation to Blacks. He is the person of power and authority; Blacks exist for his control and exploitation, and at the mercy of his whims. The ritual has been crucial in inculcating this. Baldwin uses the lynching scene in his story for structural as well as thematic considerations.

It serves to develop the plot of the story by exposing the earlier antagonism between Jesse and the black leader and by showing the black youth's dissatisfaction with the position he has been assigned. The scene characterizes Jesse and provides necessary information about his acceptance of a role defined by his group, an acceptance which has been exhibited by his treatment of the marching Blacks. In spite of these traditional, customary attitudes of whites towards Blacks, however, Baldwin suggests that a part of the structure may be crumbling. The disintegration is not due to a change of attitude on Jesse's part, but on the part of the black leader who sets out to overturn traditional white ways of viewing Blacks. Although the ritual still works for Jesse, the potential for its destruction, Baldwin suggests in the story, is already in the making; even as Jesse is doing his wife "like a nigger, " the sound of cars bringing black demonstrators to town echoes on the gravel road outside Jesse's house, and the dogs which have barked incessantly throughout the story continue to indicate that all is not as well as Jesse now assumes it to be. Freeing themselves from the shackles of restricting definitions is a major part of the struggle in which all of these characters are engaged.

To move from dehumanization to the claiming of manhood or womanhood often proves too great an effort for them, yet they do make the attempt. It is that slight effort at resistance, one which usually ends in death, that points the way to the larger purpose of these scenes. Works Cited Allen, Brooke. The Better James Baldwin New Criterion. (1998) Harris, Trader. Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Miller, Quentin. James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey. African American Review. (2002)


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Research essay sample on James Baldwin Dead Father

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