Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk

James Baldwin argues that “such Frustrations, so long endured, is driving many strong, admirable men and women whose only crime is color

In addition to the first person point of view, Baldwin also writes the story with the

James Baldwin is known to be one of the best essay writers in the twentieth century who wrote on a few topics including race, discrimination, sexuality and most of all his personal experiences. In “Notes of a Native Son”, he uses two main strategies to get his point across. First, he likes to tell a story in a narrative view. Following is normally his analysis of the event. He describes the event and then gives his theory on the matter. By doing this, he grants the reader a chance to decipher the meaning. His interpretation may not be what the reader’s is. He likes to argue and provides the basis for his argument in “Notes of a Native Son”. Throughout the essay he talks about himself and his father,

Baldwin strategically uses the first, second, and third person to strengthen his message and instill a sense of responsibility in his audience. The first instance of this technique occurs when Baldwin uses the first person to recount “[his] first sight of New York” (Baldwin 125). About halfway through this description he transitions into the second person, substituting “you” for “I” and “me” to put his audience into his position of living in a society that “is rich” but in which “none of [it] is for you” (Baldwin 125). In the next two paragraphs he further transitions into the third person to show how this society instills in a person “an absolutely inarticulate and dangerous rage”, which causes them to become “a kind of criminal” because lawbreaking is a necessity in a society whose laws are not designed for your benefit or even your

Baldwin uses the experiences he faced in New Jersey and the personal relationship with his father to show ethos throughout his essay. At one point in his essay, Baldwin finds himself in New Jersey where segregation still exist. “I learned in New Jersey…one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people” (68). Here Baldwin expresses how circumstances in New Jersey were like at the time, but also portrays the way people were viewed based on the color of their skin. Baldwin later goes on to mention the year he spent in New Jersey, was the year in which “[he] first contracted some dread, chronic disease” (70). This “disease” Baldwin contracted is not an actual disease, but more of a way in which he begins to feel and see the world around him differently. The disease Baldwin is referring to throughout his entire essay is bitterness. Living in New Jersey caused Baldwin to gain the sense of bitterness that his father had lived with during his life. Baldwin’s bitterness comes from the way he was specifically treated in New Jersey and how he allowed that feeling to affect his behaviors. Baldwin specifically mentions the moment in New Jersey where the white waitress approaches him at the restaurant stating, “We don’t serve Negroes here” (71). At this point we begin to see Baldwin as he acts out in violence by stating, “I wanted her to come close enough for me to get her neck

Here Baldwin connected the death and violence of the civil rights riots and his father’s death, to the destruction of pride in his father and himself. Baldwin admitted throughout the essay that he had hatred for his father. The ideas of hatred and apocalypse are repeated in this paragraph. The repetition of these evil words showed the relationship between the end of two worlds that affected Baldwin. Baldwin felt that his father left him with the world around him crumbling and his own world as well. Baldwin used the central idea of death to tie together the two ideas of the riots and his father’s death.

Other than Baldwin’s honesty, his ability to create emotion is also a part of his style. Zinsser advised, “Writers are obviously at their most natural when they write in the first person … Therefore I urge people to write in the first person: to use ‘I’ and ‘me’ and ‘us’...” (20). Zinsser believes that the use of first person allows the readers to relate and connect to the writing more. The words ”I”, “me”, and “us” signal that the book is written by an actual human and adds to the unique style of the writing. Baldwin is able to actively create a connection to the readers due to the story like manner of the book, yet, he is also able to get his point across by showing the differences in the experiences of a black man. Take for example, when

Baldwin determines that violence and racial separatism are not acceptable solutions for achieving “power”. Baldwin believes that black people will only be able to achieve lasting influence in America if they love and accept white people. In contrast, writing 52 years after Baldwin, Coats tells his own son to “struggle” but not

“Notes of a Native Son” is a narrative of Baldwin’s life. It is mainly about his relationship with his father and how after his father passed away he realized how his anger and rage, which was depicted as a disease, was

Baldwin, however, describes his father as being a very black-like “African tribal chieftain” (64) who was proud of his heritage despite the chains it locked upon him. He is shown to be one with good intentions, but one who never achieved the positive outcome intended. His ultimate downfall was his paranoia such that “the disease of his mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him” (66). Baldwin relates the story of a white teacher with good intentions and his father’s objection to her involvement in their lives because of his lack of trust for any white woman. His father’s paranoia even extended to Baldwin’s white high school friends. These friends, although they could be kind, “would do anything to keep a Negro down” (68), and they believed that the “best thing to do was to have as little to do with them as possible” (68). Thus, Baldwin leaves the reader with the image of his father as an unreasonable man who struggled to blockade white America from his life and the lives of his children to the greatest extent of his power. Baldwin then turns his story to focus on his own experience in the world his father loathed and on his realization that he was very much like his father.

In If Beale Street Could Talk and “Sonny’s Blues,” author James Baldwin shows that embracing suffering, rather than being trapped by it, leads to growth and enlightenment.

In Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, Baldwin uses various stylistic devices and rhetorical strategies such as personification, and metaphors. Baldwin first uses personification in order to describe his father's death. In this, Baldwin state's “Death, however, sat as purposefully at my father's bedside as life stirred within my mother's womb.” Baldwin uses this personification of death in order to show how death consumed his father, becoming a stronger person than his father was during his demise. Furthermore, this can be seen as irony, as while Baldwin's father lay dying, new life was coming about, relating to a larger theme of death leading into new life. Further personification can be seen when Baldwin states that “There is not a Negro alive who does not have rage in his blood.” Through the personification of rage, it can be seen that like death, rage can overpower one’s mentality, creating a strength equal to, or more than that of a human. Baldwin also uses the metaphor of hatred being a chronic disease as it describes how deadly hatred can be, to the point of one's life being filled and ended with rage inside their body. Together, these stylistic devices and rhetorical strategies work together to affect the overall tone and meaning of the work as they display how despair and hatred must be fought in one's heart, for one to achieve acceptance, and equal power. Overall, these stylistic choices affect the audience’s reactions as they are able to identify the tone of

Soon, Baldwin would go to high school, a predominately Jewish school, and would become educated. Not long afterwards, Christianity would lose its favor for the young man. Once again the idea of color, and the inferiority of his color especially, were being thrown back in his face. He suddenly was faced with the knowledge that Whites wrote the Bible, and that Blacks were descendants of Ham, who was cursed by God. This Jewish viewpoint suddenly changed Baldwin's view on religion. He realized that his ."..fate had been sealed forever, from the beginning of time"(36). He realized that this was not only what Christiandom believed, but also the way it behaved(36).

For the sake of letting children stay innocent from the harsh treatments of the world for as long as possible, adults don’t speak of theses realities in the presence of children. Baldwin constructs a

James Baldwin was an African American writer who, through his own personal experiences and life, addressed issues such as race, sexuality, and the American identity. “Notes of a Native Son” is one of many essays that Baldwin wrote during his lifetime. Within this essay, Baldwin talks about when his father died and the events that revolved around it. His father’s death occurs in the early 1940s, where oppression and racism were still fairly prevalent in many cities across the nation. So amidst the events that revolve around Baldwin’s father’s death, there are many riots and beatings taking place. This essay is simply not a recollection of what Baldwin experienced in the