Notes of a Native Son

Notes of a Native Son

“Notes of a Native Son” is an essay that takes you deep into the history of James Baldwin. In the essay there is much to be said about than merely scratching the surface. Baldwin starts the essay by immediately throwing life and death into a strange coincidental twist. On the 29th of July, 1943 Baldwin’s youngest sibling was born and on the same day just hours earlier his father took his last breath of air from behind the white sheets of a hospital bed. It seems all too ironic and honestly overwhelming for Baldwin. From these events Baldwin creates a woven interplay of events that smother a conscience the and provide insight to a black struggle against life.

“He had been ill a long time-in the mind” (65) was the way Baldwin remembered his father. It is because of his father’s illness, that his paranoia is aimed at the world. The contradiction here is that his father is a preacher. Trust and all other forms of hope in human kind have been vanquished from him. He despises the world he lives in, the one that held his ancestors in fields working for rich white gentry. He looks to God for answers and preaches an angry version of lord’s sermons. Baldwin was pulled in the same direction as his father except he couldn’t truly hold the meanings of the words after long and lost aspirations of preaching. “It was said in the church, quite truthfully, that I was ‘cooling off’” (80) in his interest to the service of preaching and gained it in a service of writing.

The way Baldwin describes his relationship with his father shows an overall concern of the family. With eight brothers and sisters, the poor preacher had little money to support their mouths let alon...

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...hey actually did talk. His father asked if he wanted to write rather than preach. Baldwin answered yes and that was the end of it. Even though he was such a cold figure to look up to in Baldwin’s life he realized that it was a figure to look to. He leaves the reader with a question or perhaps two answers to a question. He realizes that he had leaned on the hatred and used it to shape his life and outlook. Now that it is gone, he feels unbalanced and inquisitive to how he will handle life. He looks to find a way to rise against the struggle of black people. Opposing forces lay present throughout the entire essay and the most interesting part about it is that Baldwin can cloak these contradictions.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. “Notes of a Native Son.” 1955. James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America, 1998. 63-84.