Ramona Tougas
James Baldwin’s Identity as an American

When a critic has hopes for a fellow writer that rely on a fundamental change in the way that they see themselves, it is not expected that these changes will come about or that these hopes will be satisfied. In 1956, Langston Hughes had one such hope for his young colleague: James Baldwin, an up and coming African American novelist and essayist. Hughes hoped that Baldwin would “come to a point where he could look at life purely as himself, for himself, the color of his skin mattering not at all” (Hughes 9). Before his death James Baldwin was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

Born in New York in 1924, his essays, novels, plays and speeches inspired and infuriated many Americans to action. His words have the power to get writers writing and to get anyone who cares questioning their convictions—particularly in regard to racial equality, justice, homosexuality, love, religion, and African American identity (Thorsen). In 1964, after Baldwin had gained the personal and literary maturity that Hughes had hoped for through life as an expatriate, he wrote Blues For Mister Charlie. This play exemplifies James Baldwin’s internal unity in his identity as an American.

From the film, The Price of the Ticket—a documentary biography on Baldwin that was made in 1989, two years after his death—and from reading his essays, it is apparent that although Baldwin was not a religious man, religion was a major part of his personal identity, his family history, and his way of seeing and talking about the world. His father was a Baptist preacher and hoped his son would follow in his footsteps; his father did not want him to be a writer. In an interview Baldwin says that he was intimidated by his father but did not plan to become a preacher (Thorsen). Despite this there was no other occupational option that young James could see for himself at the time so for three years he was an animated and popular Harlem preacher (Thorsen). Although his career as a preacher was relatively short, he related later of the experience that “it changed (his) life”(Thorsen). One of his friends reiterated in this film, that Baldwin had to “leave the pulpit in order to preach the gospel” (Thorsen). Maya Angelou, a writer and friend of Baldwin’s, said that he was always preaching through his subject matter and spiritual tone (Thorsen). In this way Baldwin was able to appeal to the religious instincts of his audience. Because a reader can trust him, his words can impart a lasting courage to change one’s behavior and the behavior of others.

Early in James Baldwin’s career, Langston Hughes, one of the most prominent poets of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote a critical analysis for the New York Times of Baldwin’s work up to that point. Although he was supportive of his talents as an essayist–and as a novelist to a lesser extent— he felt that Baldwin lacked maturity. He says:

There is something in Cervantes or Shakespeare, Beethoven or Rembrandt or Louis Armstrong that millions can understand. The American native son who signs his name James Baldwin is quite a ways off from fitting such a definition of a great artist in writing…James Baldwin writes down to nobody, and he is trying very hard to write up to himself. As an essayist he is thought provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing (Hughes 9).

Hughes felt that Baldwin’s main limitation as a writer was that he thought of himself as both an African American and as an American; “separate but equal” in his personality, opinions, and voice. For a writer to have two separate and often conflicting voices within their personal writing is confusing to a reader, even though it can be effective because it mimics the thought processes of many Americans. Still, Hughes was ultimately correct in his estimation that if Baldwin could become unaware of his own division in terms of race and “when, as in his own words, he finds ‘his birthright as a man no less than his birthright as a black man,’ America and the world might well have a major contemporary contender” (9).

Langston Hughes highlights James Baldwin’s inability to “fuse” his identity as and African American and as an American in his writing (10). He predicted that if Baldwin were able to bridge this gap he could become a fantastic and powerful writer who people of all walks of life would want and need to listen to. From the film The Price of the Ticket and its interviews with Baldwin later in life (and with his friends after his death), the impression given is that through travel, writing, and time, he began to see himself purely as an American man who was also homosexual and of African heritage but not internally divided because of this identity (Thorsen).

Baldwin left America so that he could focus all his energy on writing without the pressure of his family, the media, and daily heckling because of his opinions, race, and lifestyle (Thorsen). As an expatriate Baldwin experienced a transformation of viewpoint that would make his writing and his message more understandable and unavoidable to Americans back home. In his 1959 essay “The Discovery of What it Means to be American” Baldwin says (italics in the original):

I left America because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem here. (Sometimes I still do.) I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer. I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them (3-4).

Although he may not have been conscious of the similarities between his hopes of internal growth abroad and Langston Hughes’ hopes for Baldwin’s writing, both are intimately connected. Because of the massive response to his writings it is apparent that Baldwin succeeded in connecting with people instead of dividing himself from them.

This transformation came about, as he hoped it would, from living abroad. He lived in Paris, among other artists—many of them expatriates, some of whom were Americans (Thorsen). In a 1963 lecture called “The Struggle,” a lecture about the choices and the difficulties that accompany work as an artist, Baldwin explains that if an artist begins to be recognized for their talent—as he was by the time he left New York—they have a choice to either “become important and famous” or to continue to create. He chose to leave his country and write instead of staying to be in the spotlight; as he says, “you can’t do both” (Struggle). Baldwin would sometimes visit the USA to see his family and friends, and to take part in actions of the civil rights movement (Thorsen).

In 1963 Baldwin came to Washington DC to give a speech at the March on Washington (Thorsen). Baldwin did not speak, however. In a speech given by Malcolm X called “Message to the Grass Roots” the organizers of the March are criticized as “selling out” and compromising the strength and urgency of the demonstration by controlling the content of the speeches and choice of speakers:

No, it was a sellout. It was a takeover. When James Baldwin came in from Paris, they wouldn’t let him talk, because they couldn’t make him go by the script. Burt Lancaster read the speech that Baldwin was supposed to make; they wouldn’t let Baldwin get up there, because they knew Baldwin was liable to say anything (X 260).

In this instance Baldwin is used as an example of the uncompromising and penetrating honesty that was most empowering to the struggle for civil rights and most threatening to those how use their power to oppress. Although he was regarded as a powerful, and perhaps dangerous speaker before, after the work he had done abroad his words became more potent.

Baldwin and an Italian artist friend from Paris lived together in rural Switzerland; he later lived in Turkey (Thorsen). Most of Baldwin’s novels were written abroad, his European and American friends recall that he often seemed to need sleepless nights and endless parties to get any writing done (Thorsen). He always needed physical distance from his childhood in order to enliven it in his memory and put it into his writing (Thorsen). When listening to a recording of “The Struggle” it is clear that Baldwin did not just happen to write challenging material that made people feel uncomfortable, or empowered. It was his lifelong battle as a writer that he felt he had to take on to be true to himself and be a responsible artist (Struggle). He felt that the “framework” of society would kill it and that “the framework” discourages people from pursuing art as a vehicle for expressing truth (Struggle). He felt that it is an artist assignment to “bear witness” to the pain in the world (Struggle). And that artists know who they are because they do not belong anywhere, they feel pain just like everybody else but they are the only ones who can verbalize pain (Struggle). He says, “If it hurts you it’s not important. Everybody hurts.” What is important is to use it to connect to the pain of others (Struggle). He believed that people could “suffer less by sharing pain” and connecting each other’s pain (Struggle). And that it is the responsibility of an artist “not to lie,” that one has to be willing to “give up everything” because you can only have it “by letting go” (Struggle).

Because he was willing to write the truth about the pain he felt and saw, using what he calls “total risk,” he is able to command the attention of black and white Americans who need their frustrations articulated and their motives questioned (“Discovery” 5). In his essay, “Discovery of what it is to be American” Baldwin, recognized that living away from America had made him feel like an American. He reiterates this through the character of Parnell in the play, Blues For Mister Charlie (59&60). The character of Richard also seems to have had a bit of this experience when he went north (Blues 25-26). By leaving the US Baldwin felt for the first time that the way he saw the world was through the eyes and heart of an American. He felt kinship with other American expatriates and was struck by how different they were from their European friends. He realized more deeply than he could before his travels, that the heritage of their American parents and grandparents, whether they were sharecroppers, slaves, owners, Northern or Southern, it did not make a difference to their appreciation for American esthetics and ideals, and their search for personal identity and freedom as artists. Baldwin states plainly on page five that in Europe he “was released from the illusion that (he) hated America.” Mentally, and in his writing, there was no longer a division between his feelings as an African American and his feelings as an American.

With this discovery came a hope for Americans back home. He hoped that in each person’s search for their identity as an American, during the ongoing struggles for racial equality, that the same realization could come to them at home as came to him in Paris. He suggests in this essay, and in Blues For Mister Charlie (75, 85), more firmly than in his earlier essays, that honesty with oneself and responsibility for one’s biases and the deeds of ones ancestors is the key to combating oppression. Through his writing and as can be note when reading “Discovery,” Baldwin searched for a way that all Americans could join their internal divisions, so each person would feel the same impact of the power of being an American who demands the equal protection of the constitution and equal respect from fellow Americans. When these counterintuitive steps are taken, it brings one closer to being an active citizen who is able to speak with confidence and without fear of their own thoughts, most importantly, able to love and forgive others in their challenges from guilt to hate to self doubt. In this essay Baldwin relates part of this transformation as follows:

I had never listened to Bessie Smith in America (in the same way that, for years, I would not touch watermelon), but in Europe she helped to reconcile me to being a ‘nigger’ (“Discovery” 5).

As is implied in this passage, just because he felt that he was as American as he was African American, and that there was no difference in his two voices, he did not feel any less black. By feeling his Blackness as his American-ness he was able to tell his story of the injustices done by Americans to themselves in an even more powerful way.

If travel made it possible for Baldwin to feel, without reservation, like an American, when would that become apparent in his writing? Would it have the strong effect that Langston Hughes predicted? Calvin Hernton, unknowingly, answered these questions in his analysis of Baldwin’s progression as a writer.

Calvin C. Hernton wrote an essay entitled “A Fiery Baptism” wherein he identifies Blues For Mister Charlie as the major turning point in Baldwin’s work (109). Although Hernton does not deal specifically with Hughes’ notion of the “fusing” of James Baldwin’s identities as the reason for the play’s impact, it is the root of this transformation Hernton wrote of. In his article “White Man’s Guilt” Baldwin proposes a dialogue to examine how white people have “(lost) touch with reality” and allow themselves to deny their history and present day oppression of people of color. Baldwin tells us:

The history of white people has lead them to a fearful baffling place where they have begun to lose touch with reality—to lose touch with themselves—and where they certainly are not truly happy for they know they are not truly safe. They do not know how this came about; they do not dare examine how this came about. On the one hand they can scarcely dare to open a dialogue which must, if it is honest, become a personal confession—a cry for help and healing which is, really, I think, the basis of all dialogues and, on the one hand, the black man can scarcely dare to open a dialogue, which must, if it is honest, become a personal confession which fatally contains an accusation. And yet if neither of us cannot do this each of us will perish in those traps in which we have been struggling for so long (412).

There is no better way to get white people “in touch with reality” and start this dialogue than in a realistic, heartbreaking and beautiful play about Americans being themselves.

For the lucky few who have seen a production of the play, Blues For Mister Charlie it was probably the beginning of this “open dialogue” in their lives. For white viewers it was a wake-up call back to the “reality” of their history and their responsibility to be a part of this dialogue in search of racial equality and forgiveness. The play is loosely based on the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi for flirting with a white woman. After Baldwin had begun writing the play in June 1963, one of his friends, Medgar Evers, was shot in Mississippi. Medgar Evers had been the field secretary for the NAACP and had pressed for the investigation into Till’s murder. At the time of his shooting Evers was field director for the NAACP and was leading a boycott to end segregation in downtown Jackson. He had investigated many lynchings throughout the South and had made many enemies doing it. Evers’ death gave Baldwin new resolve to finish the play and tell the story of young, idealistic blacks; poor, scared whites; and the way they succeed or fail to communicate with one-another.

In Baldwin’s introduction to his play: “Notes for Blues,” he describes his fear of writing a play, partly as a result of the heavy criticism he had received on his novels, but also because he did not have faith in American theater and its institutions as well as a fear of his subject matter. He goes on to say more specifically:

I began to see that my fear of the form masked a much deeper fear. That was that I would never be able to draw a valid portrait of the murderer (xiv).

Baldwin’s dislike for American theater is understandable because it represents, even today, an upper-class indulgence that is often self-congratulatory and rarely probes into the need for social change or the lives of people of color. Baldwin’s fear of creating an invalid “portrait of the murderer” is important to the play’s essential success. The fact that Baldwin was so concerned with putting love and humanity into the character of Lyle—a bigoted white store owner who kills Richard, a young black man with anger and self-confidence—shows Baldwin’s desire for lasting change rather than revenge (Wheatherby, Blues xiv).

Since Blues… is a play rather than an essay, novel or even a speech, viewers are immediately involved and must see the relevance to their lives and their daily behavior. In the play, real young Americans both black and white speak to each other the way they would in small town America. Hernton reports that audience members cannot pretend it is “just an exercise” or “just a problem for the South” or that they “would never act like that, themselves.” Because it is a play and not a book to be put down and forgotten, or to be read as an affirmation that they are an exception to the rule, most white Americans who have experienced the play squirm in their chairs, shut their ears, or storm out just as Shakespeare’s Claudius did when Hamlet subjected him to a re-enactment of his crime. In his essay, Calvin Hernton says that in both of the productions he attended, the majority of the audience was white and seemed to have a negative reaction to the play (110). Hernton also boldly states that Baldwin’s “realistic” and forceful confrontation of the way Emmett Till’s murderer was (not) dealt with was so powerful “that whites found it difficult to face what they had been hiding and gliding over for centuries”(109).

Early in the play there is a flashback to before the murder, when Richard has returned home after becoming a successful jazz singer in Harlem, and subsequently ruined by his dope addiction. At this point in the play Richard is being taken care of by his grandmother, Mother Henry; they are discussing the questionable circumstances of his mother’s death. Richard is adamant that she was pushed down a flight of stairs in a white hotel, rather than the accepted story that she fell accidentally. He tells Mother Henry (Italics in original):

I’m going to treat everyone of them as though they were responsible for all the crimes that have ever happened in the history of the world—Oh, yes! They’re responsible for all the misery that I’ve ever seen, and that’s good enough for me. It’s because my Daddy’s got no power that my Mama’s dead. And he ain’t got no power because he’s black. And the only way the black man’s going to get any power is to drive all the white men into the sea (Blues 21)

Mother Henry responds by saying that Richard is “going to make himself sick…with hatred” (21). But Richard persists with the powerful and combative reply that he “is going to make himself well…with hatred” (21). His Grandmother then says: “It can’t be done. It can never be done. Hatred is a poison, Richard” (21). Richard is not at all phased by his Mother Henry’s words of caution. His response is a stunning example of Baldwin’s skill at explaining Richard’s feelings and motivations in an honest and undeniable way. When told, “hatred is poison,” he says:

Not for me. I’m going to learn how to drink it—a little is the everyday in the morning, and then a booster shot late at night. I’m going to remember everything. I’m going to keep it right here, at the top of my mind. I’m going to remember Mama and Daddy’s face that day Aunt Edna and all her sad little deals and all those boys and girls in Harlem and all them pimps and whores and gangsters and all them cops. And I’m going to remember all the dope that’s flowed through my veins. I’m going to remember everything—the jails I been in and the cops that beat me and how long a time I spent screaming and stinking in my own dirt, trying to break by habit. I’m going to remember all that, and I’ll get well (21).

This passage is an example of Blues’ realistic portrayal of the hatred and frustration that many African Americans people felt and feel. These feelings, whether violent or not, are valid and need to be expressed and discussed if there is to be love and forgiveness between people in towns and cities everywhere. Richard has a need for recognition of his treatment in New York and the work it took to survive. He needs recognition for the injustice in his mother’s death and loss of his father’s power. This need for remembrance and recognition is a major issue for Baldwin, and the entire civil rights movement; but Baldwin had chosen to express the hate he has felt with love.

In the next scene when Richard is talking with his other student friends, Richard again talks about this need to have racial violence, in particular, recognized and his frustration with the inactivity in his community. The African American students: Pete, Juanita and Richard are discussing Lyle’s affair with a young black woman and the resulting murder of her much older husband. When Pete says that the women went North after the murder, Richard exclaims in frustration:

Jive Mothers. They can rape and kill our women and we can’t do nothing. But if we tough one of their dried-up, pale-assed women, we get our nuts cut off” (25).

Baldwin used scenes like this one, in Blues, as the start-off for recognition of the hundreds of murders and rapes that have occurred out of racism, and the lack of federal and community response.

During Lyle’s trial, Juanita is questioned about her time with Richard after a confrontation with Lyle, and his wife Jo, at their store, just before his murder. She explains the conversation they had at Richard’s family home:

We tried to make plans to go but he said he wasn’t going to run no more from white folks—Never no more!—but was going to stay and be a man—a man!—Right here. And I couldn’t make him see differently” (99).

Juanita loves Richard and wants him to leave town with her so that Lyle will not hurt him. Richard will not go because he found no less racial oppression in the North, and he feels resolved to change things for the people he cares about in his Southern hometown. Richard still feels hatred; presumably, any action he might take against the injustice he has seen would be carried out with hatred. Still, Richard’s decision to stay and set an example of the kind of strength he wishes his father had shown, is and indication of his love for his community and his hopes to improve it. Baldwin gave Richard this resolve to stay and face his problem, to encourage commitment and sacrifice for change, against all odds.

In Blues for Mister Charlie, Richard was killed the way Emmett Till and Medgar Evers were in real life; for being confident black men in front of bigoted whites. Baldwin’s Blues I not a threatening play and it does not condemn whites but many white people feel attacked by this play because it requires them to take responsibility for their biases. It is an assertion of the fact that black and white communities must recognize racial injustices; that people must begin to talk and act differently in their daily interactions.

As writer Maya Angelou pointed out in the documentary, The Price of the Ticket, African Americans had not had anything that related to their lives in theater. Angelou goes on to say that Blues was the first play to deal effectively with black and white communication. Although the play was produced on Broadway by The Actors Studio and had very fine actors it was not a major success (Wheatherby). Another of Baldwin’s friends noted in Ticket that the play had every element of the limited dialogue between black and white in 1964; there was an element of Malcolm X’s ideas in the words of Richard and Lorenzo as well as Martin Luther King Jr. in Mother Henry and Meridian—Richard’s father, a preacher. Parnell—an upwardly mobile, liberal newspaperman—and his split loyalty, internal conflict, good intentions and use of privilege for justice mirror Robert Kennedy’s civil rights work. Juanita, Pete, and Lorenzo give readers the impression that they are part of SNCC; boycotts and freedom rides are also mentioned. Although the play Raisin in the Sun was written earlier than Blues… this was the first time that Americans saw racial injustice in interactions with whites played out on stage, realistically, legitimately, and publicly with such honesty that it would be clear to anyone that national behavior had to change.

The play may have been the most intense expression of Baldwin’s power to address Americans and make them feel responsible for the terrible injustices and beautiful (albeit too few) attempts at justice and love that are and have been going on every day in this country for centuries. Because of Baldwin’s experiences abroad he came to realize that he had just as much right to create his production of Blues for Mister Charlie the way he wanted as any other American playwright would with their own. He also realized that it was not a “Negro Play” but an American play. It tells a story that can be understood and is critical to the lives of all Americans. Baldwin (far and away beyond Hamlet’s sensitivity and in a hope for growth, responsibility, truth and love that Hamlet has no interest in) succeeds in writing with as much sympathy and understanding of the white characters as he does the black. He gives no excuses or apology for their bigotry, arrogance, violence and closed-mindedness but he portrays them in a way that gives them a life and mind worth improving. In his artistry at creating the white characters of Parnell, Lyle, and Jo, viewers can see themselves in the characters and trust them before they realize how destructive their behavior and thinking is. The black characters of Richard, Juanita and Meridian are also portrayed with such love and humanity, full of courage, frustration and fear that is given context and life beyond what most whites allow themselves to see in their biased preconceptions of people of color.

Blues for Mister Charlie is a critical, compassionate, and powerful play that empowers white Americans to evaluate and eradicate their biases. It also affirms African American’s rightful place in American life, culture, and history as citizens. The play was a product of James Baldwin’s newfound identity as an American, an identity that he had always recognized as a part of him, but initially, as Hughes articulated, a lesser part. After living abroad and examining his place in Parisian and Turkish expatriate culture, he found that he was wholeheartedly an American in opinion and style. With this discovery came new authority as a writer that made Blues so effective.

Chronology of Some Major Works
April, 1947- “Maxim Gorki as Artist,” Nation (first published work)
1953-Go Tell it on the Mountain (first published novel)
1955- Notes of a Native Son
1956- Giovanni’s Room
1959-“Discovery of What it Means to be American,” New York Times Book Review
1961- The New Negro, symposium including Baldwin
-Nobody Knows my Name: More Notes of a Native Son
1962- Another Country
-“A Letter to My Nephew,” Progressive
1963- The Fire Next Time
1964- Blues for Mister Charlie
1965- Going to Meet the Man
- White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony
1968- The Amen Corner
-Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
1976- The Devil Finds Work
1979- Just Above My Head
1985- The Price of The Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction, 1948-1985

Works Cited
Baldwin, James. Blues For Mister Charlie. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage, 1992.
---. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dell Publishing, 1962. (3-13)
---. “The Struggle.” Audiocassette, 1971.
---. “White Man’s Guilt.” Ebony Aug. 1965.
“Enoch Pratt Free Library”. Photograph. <www.epfl.net/events/adults.html>.
James Baldwin: The Price of The Ticket. Dir. Karen Thorsen. Videocassette.
California Newsreel, 1989.
Hernton, Calvin C. “A Fiery Baptism.” Kinnamon 109-120.
Hughes, Langston. “From Harlem to Paris.” Kinnamon 9-11.
Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. James Baldwin: a Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-hall, 1974.
“Langston Hughes Memorial Library”. Photograph <www.lincoln.edu/library/>.
Wheatherby, W. J. James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. New York: D. I. Fine, 1989. (236-255)
X, Malcom. “Message to the Grass Roots.” The Eyes of The Prize Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts From the Black Freedom Struggle. Ed. Clayborn Carson, David J.Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, and Darlene Clark Hine. New York: Penguin, 1991. (248-260). text goes here:::your text goes here:::your text goes here:::your text goes here:::your text goes here:::your text goes here:::your text goes here:::your text goes here:::your text goes here:::your text goes here:::your text goes here:::your text goes here:::your text goes here:::your text goes here:::your text goes here:::