Notes of a Native Son

James Baldwin was among the most eloquent writers in mid-20th-century America to deal with black-white relations. His first published essays on the subject were initially collected in this penetrating and impassioned book, Held up to view are the failure of the "protest novel" from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Richard Wright; the falseness of the 1954 movie Carmen Jones, in which blacks play their roles as whites; the Harlem ghetto with its many churches doing "a fairly desperate emotional business," and its press seeking to emulate the white press. In the moving title essay, his father's funeral, set in the wreckage of a race riot, forces young Baldwin to examine the hostile relationship that existed between father and son. Finding America intolerable, Baldwin exiled himself in Europe for nearly ten years. He tells of the meeting of the American black with the African; of a harrowing Christmas sojourn in a Paris jail because of a friend's stolen bedsheet; and finally, the poignant and haunting essay of the first visit of a black person to a remote Swiss village, where he is treated as a living wonder and never becomes more than a stranger in the village.--Adapted from book jacket