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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

Notes of a Native Son (1955) ...The book contained practically all of the major themes that run through his work: searching for self when racial myths cloud reality; accepting an inheritance ("the conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American");

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

Thus comes the wisdom that would define Baldwin's philosophy: per biographer David Leeming: "salvation from the chains and fetters—the self-hatred and the other effects—of historical racism could come only from love."

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

John wants desperately to escape the threshing floor, but "[t]hen John saw the Lord" and "a sweetness" filled him. The midwife of John's conversion is Elisha, the voice of love that had followed him throughout the experience, and whose body filled John with "a wild delight".

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

"Who are these? Who are they?" John cries out when he sees a mass of faces as he descends to the threshing floor: 'They were the despised and rejected, the wretched and the spat upon, the earth's offscouring; and he was in their company, and they would swallow up his soul."

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

for Harlem taken as a whole, for America and its history, and for the "deep heart's core". John's departure from the agony that reigned in his father's house, particularly the historical sources of the family's privations, came through a conversion experience.

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

The phrase "in my father's house" and various similar formulations appear throughout Go Tell It on the Mountain and was even an early title for the novel. The house is a metaphor at several levels of generality: for his own family's apartment in Harlem,

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

for that same reason. Florence's lover Frank is destroyed by searing self-hatred of his own Blackness. Gabriel's abuse of the women in his life is downstream from his society's emasculation of him, with mealy-mouthed religiosity only a hypocritical cover.

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

all are stifled. Florence, Elizabeth, and Gabriel are denied love's reach because racism assured that they could not muster the kind of self-respect that love requires. Racism drives Elizabeth's lover, Richard, to suicide—Richard will not be the last Baldwin character to die thus

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

to the bottom of his people's sorrows, before he can shrug off his psychic chains, "climb the mountain", and free himself. John's family members and most of the characters in the novel are blown north in the winds of the Great Migration in search of the American Dream and

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

a clear allusion to another John: the Baptist, born of another Elizabeth. John's struggle is a metaphor for Baldwin's own struggle between escaping the history and heritage that made him, awful though it may be, and plunging deeper into that heritage,

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

served as best man at David's wedding on June 27...

The novel is a bildungsroman that explores the inward struggles of protagonist John Grimes, the illegitimate son of Elizabeth Grimes, to claim his own soul as it lies on the "threshing floor"—

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

also voyaging—his conversations with both on the ship were extensive. After his arrival in New York, Baldwin spent much of the next three months with his family, whom he had not seen in almost three years. Baldwin grew particularly close to his younger brother, David Jr., and

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

February 26, 1952, and Knopf expressed interest in the novel several months later. To settle the terms of his association with Knopf, Baldwin sailed back to the United States in April 1952 on the SS Île de France, where Themistocles Hoetis and Dizzy Gillespie were coincidentally

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

the preacher Sister Margaret—a fictionalized Mother Horn from Baldwin's time at Fireside Pentecostal...

Literary career

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) Baldwin sent the manuscript for Go Tell It on the Mountain from Paris to New York publishing house Alfred A. Knopf on

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

In 1954, Baldwin accepted a fellowship at the MacDowell writer's colony in New Hampshire to support the writing of a new novel and he also won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Also in 1954, Baldwin published the three-act play The Amen Corner which features

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

Bobby Short and Inez Cavanaugh's performances at their respective haunts around the city; met Maya Angelou during her European tour of Porgy and Bess; and occasionally met with writers Richard Gibson and Chester Himes, composer Howard Swanson, and even Richard Wright.

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

Around the same time, Baldwin's circle of friends shifted away from primarily white bohemians toward a coterie of Black American expatriates: Baldwin grew close to dancer Bernard Hassell; spent significant amounts of time at Gordon Heath's club in Paris; regularly listened to

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

Johnnie to trace his bouts of depression back to his inability to resolve the questions of filial intimacy raised by his relationship with his stepfather...

Beauford Delaney's arrival in France in 1953 marked "the most important personal event in Baldwin's life" that year.

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

"Too Little, Too Late", an essay about Black American literature, and he also published "The Death of the Prophet", a short story that grew out of Baldwin's earlier writings of Go Tell It on The Mountain. In the latter work, Baldwin employs a character named

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 2h

Parisian Africans. He also wrote "The Preservation of Innocence", which traced the violence against homosexuals in American life back to the protracted adolescence of America as a society. In the magazine Commentary, he published

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 3h

"The Negro in Paris", first published in The Reporter, explored Baldwin's perception of an incompatibility between Black Americans and Black Africans in Paris, because Black Americans had faced a "depthless alienation from oneself and one's people" that was mostly unknown to

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 3h

During his early years in Paris, prior to the publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1953, Baldwin wrote several notable works.

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 3h

Baldwin did not want to be read as "merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer." He also hoped to come to terms with his sexual ambivalence and escape from the hopelessness to which many young African-American men like himself succumbed...

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 3h

Life in Paris (1948–1957)
Disillusioned by the reigning prejudice against Black people in the United States, and wanting to gain external perspectives on himself and his writing, Baldwin settled in Paris, France, at the age of 24.

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Black Unity Over Disagreement (he/him) @audubonballroom.bsky.social · 3h

in "Journey to Atlanta", Baldwin uses the diary recollections of his younger brother David, who had gone to Atlanta as part of a singing group, to unleash a lashing of irony and scorn on the South, white radicals, and ideology itself. This essay, too, was well received.

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