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Fiction. Short Stories. "There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.… (more)
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3.5 stars.
Baldwin died in 1987. He described the condition and treatment of blacks in the US as he had experienced them. I trust that all this has greatly improved since then, but I can’t
In Baldwin’s prose the n-word is used continually. Surprisingly, the blacks themselves use it about and to each other – “You dirty black n-----”.
This collection of short stories is the best fiction of Baldwin’s that I’ve read.
I didn’t understand The Man Child and the reason for the murder at the end.
I would really need to re-read the stories to properly appreciate them.
Understandably, most of Baldwin’s writing expresses the brutality he saw among the blacks in Harlem where he lived.
In my view, the best story in collection was the last one, Going to meet the man. It was also the most terrible. It shows how a little white boy, Jesse, taken to witness the lynching of a black man, grows up to to be a deputy sheriff who beats and tortures his black prisoners practically to the point of death. “They were animals, they were no better than animals, what could be done with people like that?”
The lynching itself is depicted graphically and horribly.
If you feel like beginning to read some of Baldwin’s fiction, this is a good place to start.