James Baldwin, 38, has brown skin, black hatreds, and a brilliant literary style. In his novels (Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country) and essays, Baldwin has written of things he knows well: his native Harlem, homosexuality, France (where he has lived as a sometime self-exile, supported partly by U.S. foundation grants)—and what he considers the all but hopeless estrangement between the American Negro and white man.
Soon to be published by Dial Press is another Baldwin book, based mostly on a 20,000-word New Yorker essay. It shows Baldwin as the most bitterly eloquent voice of the American Negro. Yet it also shows him as one who speaks less for the Negro than to the white—and it is in that sense that he is most compelling.
Elijah's Hopes. Negroes, he writes, "are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. This world is white and they are black. White people hold the power, which means that they are superior to blacks . . . and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared." When Baldwin was ten, two white cops "amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and, for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem's empty lots."
Baldwin has understanding but little sympathy for the Black Muslim movement (TIME, Aug. 10, 1959) and its mystical leaders, who contend that "Allah" will wreak vengeance on the "white devil." Visiting the Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad in Chicago, Baldwin found himself wanting to defend his white friends. "I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they are trying to prove that Negroes are not subhuman." When he left, he felt that he and Elijah "would always be strangers, and possibly, one day, enemies." The Muslim, fantasy of achieving power disturbed Baldwin. "I could have hoped that the movement had been able to inculcate in the demoralized Negro population a truer and more individual sense of its own worth."
How? By helping the Negro to accept his past and learn how to use it, says Baldwin. "The Negro himself no longer believes in the good faith of white Americans . . . When the country speaks of a 'new' Negro, which it has been doing every hour on the hour for decades, it is not really referring to a change in the Negro, but only to a new difficulty in keeping him in his place."