Not as black as he paints us
Patrick Skene Catling EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN by James Baldwin
Michael Joseph, f8.95
James . Baldwin's latest polemic scolding, If you let it, could make you feel guilty and ashamed of being human, even if you are black.
A descendant of slaves, a one-time preacher in Harlem, he inherited racial memories and fundamental Protestant ethics which gave him good cause to feel righteous indignation, and, brothers, he really lays it on you. He writes as if Preaching an everlasting hellfire sermon, using italics like a fist on a pulpit, until his readers, all sinners, in his view, or at least acquiescent witnesses to sin, mustbe meant to squirm in their pews and whim- Per for mercy. These 125 pages are 125 lashes, which are probably more than many of his flock feel they really deserve. b. Playl, -°31, which sometimes publishes the est of writers, as if in atonement for the tawdry main bulk of the magazine, lured Mr Baldwin temporarily away from his e_.omfortable, self-imposed exile in St Paul de Vence to analyse the excruciating spir- itual discomfort of Atlanta, Georgia, as a result of what he calls 'the plague years of the child murders'.
`In June, 1981,' he relates, 'after twenty- two months and twenty-eight corpses, Wayne Bertram Williams, then twenty- three, was arrested for murder. That he is Black is important, since the Administra- tion of the city is Black, and all of the murdered children were Black.'
As Mr Baldwin adds, however, Williams was charged with only two of the 28 murders, the murders of two grown men, though the jury was influenced to perceive all of them as being of a single pattern, the crimes of one man.
Now [Mr Baldwin writes], this labyrinthine approach to justice must present itself to the layman — to say nothing of the accused — as a somewhat unprecedented basis for a mur- der trial. Either the accused is being tried for twenty-eight murders or for two. If he is not being tried for twenty-eight murders, it can only be, after all, for lack of evidence. How, then, does it happen — legally — that a man charged with two murders can be tried for twenty-eight?
But this contempt for the twisted justice of the pale Blacks or the city that used prophetically to be called Terminus, when it was only a railroad town, is merely a sign that Mr Baldwin is warming up to reiterate some more general complaints against the world. Given time enough, he can apply a knee to every groin.
Here are but a few of his characteristic, characteristically expressed, opinions: . . . the male cannot bear very much humi- liation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him. All men know this about each other, which is one of the reasons that men treat each other with a such a vile, relentless, and endless inventive cruelty.
. . . the action of the White Republic, in the lives of Black men, has been, and remains, emasculation. Hence, the Republic has abso- lutely no image, or standard, of masculinity to which any man, Black or White, can honourably aspire. The social contract smashed in Germany [during the Nazi years] will rank forever, quite beyond time's power to obliterate or the human or divine power to forgive, among the most abominable moments in the history of the human being. It also exposed, forever, and exploded, the moral authenticity of the Judaeo-Christian ethic and marks the end of the moral authority of the Western world.
(Yes: mark my words.)
History is a hymn to White people, and all us others have been discovered — by White people, who may or may not (they suppose) permit us to enter history. This history can, for example, be said to reach a kind of culmination of arrogance and mediocrity that marks those cousins, the English and the German, and is contained in their extra- ordinary assumption that the key to Civilis-
ation is in their hands.
. . . it has always been assumed that the Black's only possible aspiration would be to become White.
Mr Baldwin's rhetorical fugues, written in a series of angry crescendos, can be imagined spoken emotionally aloud. He brings his old-fashioned brimstone style to bear with great force and skill. Why, even when one agrees with some of the points he makes, does one eventually feel less exhila- rated than morose and then even, perhaps, just a bit bored?
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