The Right and the Wrong

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"On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born," so memorably writes James Baldwin at the beginning of his essay "Notes of a Native Son." "A few hours after my father's funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker's chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass."

Reading the essay in order to teach it in the new school year, I was struck not just by the depth of feeling and the eloquence, but also, more surprisingly, by a strain of sardonic humor that runs like quicksilver throughout the writing. After being turned away by the ironically named "American Diner"—"We don't serve Negroes here."—Baldwin in his fury marched into a fashionable restaurant in which he knew "not even the intercession of the Virgin would cause me to be served." The humor surely helped to deflect the pain, reawakened by the memory. It is also a form of camaraderie with the reader as it invites us to smile wryly with the writer.

The same sardonic tone pervades the description of his father's funeral, daringly. The man eulogized was nothing like the bitter and cruel man whom Baldwin knew. Yet all the mourners wanted to believe that such a thoughtful and forbearing man could have existed unknown to them, because they too hoped that when their own time came, all of their lapses "would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity." Baldwin did not acquiesce to this false consolation. Instead, he had chosen to memorialize in the essay the man's sharpest faults. The same frankness, however, compelled him to write down what came back to mind at the funeral: the few moments when his father showed love and pride in him.

The one time, for instance, when they had really talked to each other. On the way back from church, where Baldwin was a "cooling" Young Minister, his father asked abruptly, "You'd rather write than preach, wouldn't you?" Coming after the description of the funeral, preaching is logically associated with "coherence" and "charity." Writing is an altogether different choice. To write, as Baldwin demonstrates so piercingly in his essay, is to stay with contradiction and honesty instead. Whether one is writing about one's father or a race riot, the writer must put down the right and the wrong, the love and the hate, life and death. To his father's question, Baldwin said simply, "Yes."

Jee Leong Koh
August 28, 2019

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