Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World

3. Deconstructing the Romance of Ethnography: Queering Knowledge in James Baldwin’s Another Country

3 / Deconstructing the Romance of Ethnography: Queering Knowledge in James Baldwin’s Another Country And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. james baldwin1 In August 1970, sitting across from Margaret Mead, James Baldwin recalls a run-in with the employees of a Tallahassee bank who had refused to cash his $250 check. Three months into researching a story on the American South, Baldwin was broke and desperate for money that might ward off any vagrancy charges that would land him on a chain gang. With real or imagined cops at his heels, Baldwin says that he could not allow racism to keep him and his money separated: “I saw everybody in that bank before they would cash that check. I was determined that they were going to cash that check or lynch me.” On the particular day he is remembering, Baldwin says that for the second time in twenty-four hours he found himself at the window of a young, white, female teller who had previously refused to cash his check. Yet, on this day, the teller was forced to work with him. Baldwin recalls for Mead the look of mystification that fell over the Florida teller’s face and speculates on its causes: she was mystified not only by his access to such a large sum of money but also by his ability to meet her gaze. Baldwin contends that the teller’s “American sense of reality” was shattered and only recoverable through the creation of a narrative that could 92 / deconstructing the romance of ethnography negate Baldwin’s Americanness. He tells Mead, “The only way she would understand that black boy in the bank was to tell herself , ‘He doesn’t know any better; he’s from Paris.’ Otherwise she was going to be haunted to her dying day.”2 Baldwin becomes a “French-issued” black American in the mind of the teller, and some readers might be inclined to think that this newly coined and ambiguous identity would be the sort of counteridentity desired by a self-described exile such as Baldwin. However, in addition to exploring new citizenship possibilities as an internationally mobile black subject, at the core of Baldwin’s remembrance is a desire to explore the power of African American national removal (even if only semipermanent) and the conditions under which one might make a return. Thus, the personal anecdote functions in a number of ways for Baldwin . First, the remembrance provides a public platform for him to ponder the way living outside the United States changes how he relates to mid-twentieth-century American racial hierarchies. At the heart of his story is the conflict between his sense of autonomy and personal agency gained through having lived outside America and his place within a southern American racial fabric upon his return. His anecdote connects him to the fairly commonplace narrative tradition of the black American who returns to a segregated nation after having lived or traveled abroad: the return to the United States involves an attempt to socially, economically, and psychologically confine black citizens through the practice of racial segregation. In “The Price of the Ticket,” Baldwin illuminates this racial-national dilemma more clearly: The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can’t betray a country you don’t have. (Think about it.) Treason draws its energy from the conscious, deliberate betrayal of trust—as we were not trusted, we could not betray. And we did not want to be traitors. We wished to be citizens. We: the black people of this country, then, with particular emphasis on those serving in the Armed Forc- deconstructing the romance of ethnography / 93 es. The way blacks were treated in, and by, an American Army spreading freedom around the globe was the reason for heartbreak and contempt. Daddy’s youngest son, by his first marriage, came home, on furlough, to help with [Daddy’s] funeral. When these young men came home, in uniform, they started talking: and one sometimes trembled , for their sanity and for one’s own. One trembled, too, at another depth, another incoherence, when once wondered —as one could not fail to wonder—what nation they represented. My brother, describing his life in uniform...