The Power of Love for
Survival with special reference to James Baldwin
R. Mary Sadhu
James Baldwin called the black determination, the beat of African American culture. His audience was the whole nation and he incorporated the whole nation into his voice. His voice was the voice in the wilderness like John the Baptist, the forerunner of Christ. The mission and ministry of John the Baptist is described in the gospel according to St. John. “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness to bear witness of the Light that all men through him might believe. He was not that light but was sent to bear witness to that light, the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” (John 1: 6-9)
In his personal life and work, Baldwin took sides of those who were made into exiles and outcasts by barriers of race, sex and class or who turned away from safety and chose the honorable path of tearing down such barriers. But he mourned for those who had created the barriers and had unwittingly allowed themselves to be destroyed by them. As David Leeming observes-“Illegitimacy and obsessive preoccupation with his step-father were constant themes in the life and works of James Baldwin.” The circumstance of his birth in Harlem Hospital, New York, was later to symbolize for him the illegitimacy attached to an entire race within the American nation.
Much of Baldwin’s early life was concerned with a search for a father, but not for a biological father. His search was for an ideal father who might have been for him a source of self-esteem, support and guidance in his quest to become a writer and a preacher. By extension, his search was a symbolic one for the birth right that was denied to him and all Negroes.
The novel, ‘Go Tell It On The Mountain’ is based on the author’s experiences as a teenage preacher in a small church. Baldwin had found release from his poor surroundings through a Pentecostal church. He was converted at the age of fourteen and served in the church as a minister for three years. He depicted two days in the life of Grimme’s family. The fourteen year old John was a good student, religious and sensitive. Everyone said that John would be a preacher when he grew up just like his father.
James Baldwin emphasizes the ethical value of family life. The key person in the family is the father. If he is willing to recognize the position God has given him and if he is faithful in being what the Lord wants him to be, the chances for successful living are increased tremendously. If he fails, his wife and children are going to suffer the tragic consequences along with him. The parents are exhorted to “Train up a child in the way he should go. When he grows old, he shall not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6)
In the novel, the struggle for John’s soul occurs on the ‘threshing floor’ that takes its name from the floor described by the earlier John the Baptist, born of another Elizabeth. John is forced to confront not so much his own sin as the historical source of misery of the saints who watch his agony. Once again we see John here, as a metaphor for the real story-the inner story-of James Baldwin. As David Leeming observes, “John’s night down at the cross is less the struggle for the soul of John Grimes than it is a metaphor for the struggle in the twenty eight year old James Baldwin between the instinct that said “I have escaped by heritage. I can be free of it now” and the instinct that told him he must journey to the very depths of the sorrow of his people, before he could ‘climb the mountain’ and be free.” (Biography of James Baldwin – P-86)
In the second part of ‘Go Tell it On The Mountain’ in which John’s stepfather, mother and aunt make their own night journeys into the past, Baldwin prepares us for John’s descent into history. Each of the family members in Mountain is a part of that great migration of Southern blacks to the North in search of the American Dream. The hopes of each have been dashed by the failure of the American nation to see through its own myths, by the dominance of the myth of racial inferiority over the reality of what it is to be human. Later on, John experiences the history of African Americans in the visions that precede his salvation. He looked down the lane of armies of darkness, army upon army and his soul whispered – “Who are these? Who are they?”(P. 231). He wondered where he could go. There was no answer. There was no help or healing in the grave. No answer in the darkness, no speech from all that company. They looked backward. John also looked back seeing no deliverance. “I, John, saw the future away up in the middle air.”
John, in the novel, struggles to flee out of darkness, out of the company into the land of the living so high and so far away. Fear was upon him, a more deadly fear that he had ever known, as he turned and turned in darkness finding no land, no voice, finding no door. He questions- “Who are these? Who are they?” They were the despised, rejected, the wretched and spat upon. He was in their company and they seemed to swallow up his soul. The stripes they had endured would scar his back, their punishment would be his, their portion his, their humiliation, anguish, chains, their dungeon his, their death his. They are synonymous to the sufferings of St. Paul in his ministry.
John was frightened that the dread testimony of the predecessors would be his. In the great agony he began to shout for help, seeing before him, the lash, the fire and the depthless water, seeing his head bowed down forever, he John the lowest among the lowly. And he looked for his mother, but her eyes were fixed on this dark army-she was claimed by this army. And his father would not help him, his father did not see him and the Roy lay dead. He had an instinct to escape, to get off the floor and to leave but a voice called him to go through and face the agony of his vision.
Then John saw the Lord and broke through to discover the mid-wife of his second birth in Elisha, the seventeen year old piano player whose voice had been with him throughout his journey. When he heard that voice, as he rose from the floor, a sweetness filled John. This was the voice of love and the metaphorical birth of the main tenet of Baldwin’s prophecy, salvation from the chains and fetters, self-hatred and other effects of historical racism could come only from love. There was a sudden yearning tenderness for his guiding saint Elisha, to lie where he lay, to speak in tongues as Elisha spoke with that authority to confound his father. Love is a sacred trust and means for John, to be saved from the hatred represented by his stepfather.
Baldwin was able to treat the subject metaphorically in the novel to create a fictional hero of aesthetic and moral integrity. He could emerge as the first fictional embodiment of what Eleanor Taylor has called ‘The Baldwin Narrator - witness’, (he might also be called) ‘the Baldwin artist - hero’ or ‘Poet- prophet’, on his long quest for Love recorded fictionally in his novels and short stories.” James. A. Emmanuel in Bulletin of Bibliography observes: “Plainly autobiographical, this novel about a boy’s anguished choice between Church and jail metaphorically opposes the demands of those institutions as forces that have long constricted but spiritualized black people.”
Love is a human possibility and a deeper call of life above prejudices and racial differences. Survival is at stake without Love. The novel, Another country is a commentary on Love and cost of the failure to love on the relationship between racism and sexuality, on the necessity of honour and dangers of safety. Its subject is characteristic of a Jeremiah or an Ezekiel, namely, the spiritual state of the country. They warned the people of Judah to leave their sinful ways and turn to God, the all-wise, all-loving and Almighty God. Baldwin warns the Americans to leave their racial differences and treat African Americans as equals, and give them their liberty and dignity. Martin Luther King vehemently stated, “We may be black; we may be poor, yet we can be somebody.” (Martin Luther King P-7 by George Kaitholil)
Another Country, is an attempt to breakthrough cowardly and hypocritical morality. The novel suggests that love is refused at one’s peril. The first part of the novel is the story of the demise of Rufus Scott, a jazz musician. Rufus has been deeply wounded by the realities of racism. He is an embodiment of the curse that lurks in the American soul. Rufus said Baldwin is “the black corpse floating in the national psyche; he and what he represents must be squarely faced if we are to find peace in ourselves and in the society.” In Nobody Knows My Name, Baldwin had written, “The nation, the entire nation, has spent a hundred years avoiding the question of the place of the black man in it.” Rufus is that man. Although denied, he is an integral part of the identity of Americans.
It is obvious how much
of a victim Rufus is and how much he has been hurt, when he is found that he is
too broken to accept love or give it. Society has taken away his freedom to
find his individual identity and in so doing has removed the self-respect and
the respect for human life. Rufus can only assume the worst even of those who
mean well. When he makes ‘love’ to the white Southern woman, Leona, he does so
as an instrument of history. Rejecting the help of a would be friend, the
younger writer Vivaldo, rejecting the love of Leona and even the adoration of
his sister, Ida and the support of his family. Rufus follows in the path of
Eugene Worth, Baldwin’s friend of the village days and leaps off the Washington
Bridge. On the autobiographical level Rufus Scott is much more than a
fictionalized version of Eugene Worth; he is the embodiment of not only of the
collective tragedy of racism but of the personal crisis. Baldwin articulated
his ideas about love in his speech ‘In Search of a Majority’ that Love does not
begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, Love is a
war; Love is a growing up. James Baldwin left America to escape. In a sense,
all the characters in Another Country are versions of the author. It is
through Rufus sister, Ida, the surviving witness that Baldwin carries the
message of Rufus tragedy to the ‘white liberal world’ represented primarily by
her white lover Vivaldo. Like Baldwin, Ida sees herself as a voice in Another
Country.
When the young lawyer asked Jesus who his neighbour was, Jesus did not give any name. As Martin Luther King states, “He is anyone toward whom you are neigbhourly. He is any one who lies in need at life’s road side. He is neither Jew nor Gentile; he is neither Russian nor American; he is neither Negro nor White. He is a certain man – any needy man – on one of the numerous Jericho roads of life. Jesus defines a neigbhour not in a theological definition but in a life situation. Good Samaritan is the inspiring paragon of neigbhourly virtue and he was altruistic to the core.” (Strength to Love P - 21)
Charles Poore, in the ‘New York Times’, suggested that “Forty years after T.S. Eliot published ‘The Waste Land’ in verse, Mr. Baldwin has given us a prose version of human desolation in a very different manner and with far less obscure symbolism.” Baldwin tried to explain what he attempted in the novel, ‘Another Country’. In a note in the ‘New York Times’ Book Review he suggested that he was aiming at what Henry James called ‘perception at the pitch of passion’. Baldwin’s major theme is the search for identity, the acceptance of one’s inheritance, and the urgent necessity of love.