James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey

Coda

Coda It is my hope that this study results in an appreciation of James Baldwin's undervalued later work. His last three novels, in particular, reveal that Baldwin continued to be a profound witness to the American experience . He gave testimony to the racial struggles of the I960S and I970S by exploring the relationship between private life and political realities in ways no one has done since. As a witness he described not only the social landscape , but also the human heart, giving testimony to our desires and dreams for a new identity and a new nation. A serious evaluation of Baldwin's contribution to American letters cannot be undertaken without understanding that his later novels are a continuation and expansion of his earlier work. Beginning with Leo Proudhammer 's return home in Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, Baldwin 's novels explore the possibilities of resistance to a racially and sexually divided American landscape from within black experience and culture. Baldwin explores the family relationship as a potential site of resistance 170 WITNESS TO THE JOURNEY and black music as a language of cultural resistance. Moreover, he refigures the Du Boisian concept of "double-consciousness." Double-consciousness is more than a "negro problem"; it is a universal human condition. Our "double-consciousness," which is how we experience the "other" in the "self," is the most fundamental human challenge. Hall Montana is Baldwin's last character who represents the struggle to understand the life of the br(other) and thus himself. By viewing "double-consciousness" as a human condition, Baldwin alters the discourse of black and white in American letters. Clearly, Baldwin extends the double-consciousness descriptor to his white characters. Some, such as Barbara King (Train) or Guy Lazare (JAMH), are aware that they, too, are caught in a history of racism and sexual oppression that has divided them from the "other" and thus cut them off from part of the "self." Other white characters, such as Officer Bell of If Beale Street Could Talk, repress their self-division, insist on their identity as "whites," and become predators driven by anxieties and desires they can neither face nor articulate. What Baldwin's lovers and brothers discover at their best moments is the interdependency of personal identity. Recognizing that each contains the other, and is contained by the other, becomes a personal and a political statement of resistance. Hall Montana's struggle to tell the story of his br(other) is a metaphor for the necessity and the hazards of inscribing history-be it American history , African American history, gay history, straight history, or James Baldwin's history. Baldwin asks us: can we write our history, tell our stories , without denying the "other"? For that matter, can we pass on James Baldwin's legacy to America, insisting on his multiply connected identities as an American, a black American, a homosexual, a political activist, a novelist, an essayist, a preacher, a brother? Hall's reflection on the embattled nature of "history" near the end of Just Above My Head sums up the challenge: To overhaul a history, or to attempt to redeem it-which effort mayor may not justify it-is not at all the same thing as the descent one must make in order to excavate a history. To be forced to excavate a history is, also, to repudiate the concept of history, and the vocabulary in which history is written; for the Coda 171 172 written history is, and must be, merely the vocabulary of power, and power is history's most seductively attired false witness. And yet, the attempt, more the necessity, to excavate a history, to find out the truth about oneself! is motivated by the need to have the power to force others to recognize your presence, your right to be here. The disputed passage will remain disputed so long as you do not have the authority of the right-ofway -so long, that is, as your passage can be disputed: the document promising safe passage can always be revoked. Power clears the passage, swiftly: but the paradox, here, is that power, rooted in history, is also, the mockery and the repudiation of history. The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself-who, then, in such a fearful mathematic, to use Guy's term, is trapped? Perhaps, then after all, we have no idea of what history...