As with any short story collection, some are better than others, so I'm going to give star ratings to each one. I recommend skipping the first three and just reading the final five."The Rockpile" 3 stars. I was dismayed to discover that this book contains two stories about the characters from "Go Tell It on the Mountain" which I barely liked. Johnny is a flat character to me, and I didn't want to spend any more time with him."The Outing" 4 stars. More Johnny/Roy/Gabriel, but the change to a sylvan setting and addition of a potential love interest invigorate the story greatly. Does anyone know if the word 'outing' could have been in use, at the time of writing, to mean forced out of the closet. I can't imagine it was, but it's a nice double meaning. "The Man Child" 3 stars. I kind of get what Baldwin is aiming for, but I didn't find any of it believable, especially the way Eric's father talked to Jamie. The ending was overreaching. I like Baldwin is best at realistic humanism and can skip the naturalistic stuff."Previous Condition" 5 stars. Just when it looks like Baldwin is about to have two characters sit down and start having a didactic conversation about the state of race, religion or gender, they instead start shooting from the hip, talking like painfully real people and we are left to infer what Baldwin really wants to say. He's also incredible at portraying the inner lives of people suffering from anxiety, as at the beginning of the story."Sonny's Blues" 5 stars. This one I will never forget. A must for anyone who has ever known an addict. It is beautiful and sad, and maybe hopeful, as it also portrays a creative process and catharsis. Memories go in and out, time passes, some things change, some don't. Some people belong easily, others find themselves on the outside, and this changes as well. And the previous generation always encountered more discrimination than we had to. "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" 5 stars. Another one I thought would be didactic, as much of it dealt with the different between being African American in the U.S. and in Paris. Note that I said African American, because someone actually from Africa is the victim of prejudice in this story, perpetrated by both French and African American friends of the narrator. And perhaps it is not because of his race but his Muslim religion, as the French are perhaps more tolerant of racial difference but less tolerant of religious difference? But how to account, then, for the African Americans who act like white folks back home, forcing the narrator to act like the white guy who has to always vouch for his black friend? And while 60s European socialist intellectuals fetishized the black American experience, the narrator's director friend also helped him locate a place of authenticity in his film performance. It's all very complicated."Come Out the Wilderness" 4 stars. The story, like most of these in this collection, can be summarized succinctly and will sound quite obvious. But the devil is in the details, the way people react to one another, the way almost nobody actually means harm, the myriad misunderstandings, or the way a person understands just exactly what a person meant but didn't say. "Going to Meet the Man" 5 stars. Just when I thought I had heard it all, Baldwin writes a story of a white man, having trouble getting it up in bed, remembering his parents taking him to a lynching. The details of the lynching, while occasionally focusing on the physical violence, are more revealing in the other details, like the mother wanting to fix her hair, or the way the crowd would get worked up at certain acts. The intertwining of violent racism and sexuality, while done many times before and since, are conflated masterfully. I have a deeper understanding of how sexuality and racism can reinforce themselves, though it is a very unpleasant knowledge.
This is Baldwin's collection of short stories. At first I wanted to give it a 4 because I did not like the first two stories. But then the other 6 stories blew me away, so I have decided to give 'Going to Meet the Man' 5 stars for those.These haunting stories have made a deep impression on me. Each story is more intese than the last one. While at least one of the stories was in first person, it is kind of hard to remember which ones exactly, because he really has a way of writing in 3rd person that feels like 1st person. Here are brief synopses of my favorite short stories:1) Previous Condition: First off, I think this is my favorite title of them all. If you loved the Catcher in the Rye, you will like this. Short, but profound narrative of a young black actor living in New York City. It is a quick portrait of his rough life and current living situation. Shows a bit into the relationship between how Jewish-Americans would rent housing for African-Americans in certain parts of the city due to housing discrimination back then. 2)Sonny's Blues: This was one of the most heart-breaking for reason. Probably because I have younger brothers and I could really relate to the main character. Told from the successful older brother's perspective on his relationship with his younger brother, Sonny. Sonny is a dreamer and pursues a path of becoming a musician. The older brother (name never mentioned), made a promise to his mother to protect Sonny and does what he can to convince his brother to pursue a more practical field. The more he does this, the more he pushes Sonny away...unfortunately towards a path of self-destruction.3) This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: It amazes me that the 30 or so pages that made up this short story were already better than The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway...at least thats just what I think! Story tells of a black man that moved from the U.S. to France to marry a Swedish woman and became a popular movie star. He has a young son named Paul who is Black and Swedish, and is dreading returning to the States for a bit because of the racism he has not entirely forgotten, but has been absent in his life while he had been spending years living with his wife and son in Paris. The night before he leaves to the States, he goes out to dinner with the Frenchman who directed the film he starred in. They meet a group of young Black college students traveling in Europe who admire and are inspired by the film star and what he represented to the Black community. More diversity is added with the addition of an Algerian boxer who feels alienated and looked down on by the French, and is happy to be spending time with other people of African descent. Talks about "code switching" between having to "act like" Whites' expectations of a Black man in the USA, versus his virtual liberation and freedom in France of being who he is without race as a defining factor.4) Come Out the Wilderness: I interpreted Paul in this story to be the son from the previous short story, but the stories or characters really have no connection. This is the only one told from a woman's perspective. She is a young Black girl from the South who moved to NYC. She is in a relationship with Paul, who is mixed. It explains tensions in their relationship, and tensions she feels at work with her supervisor.These short synopses do not even do the stories justice. Therefore, you should read them for yourself and see how phenomenal the stories really are!
What do You think about Going To Meet The Man (1995)?
Amazing; my first exposure to James Baldwin was in my Modern American Literature class. The short story "Going to Meet the Man" lured me in, I resolved to read this whole book when I got the chance. It is a collection of several short stories by Baldwin, dissecting the ideas of love, hate, life, death, sexuality and race with his persistently poignant prose. The way he treats the subject of death is unlike any author I have encountered. The death of a child in both "The Man-Child" and "Sonny's Blues" is so convincing--it becomes nauseating. The final story of the book, "Going to Meet the Man", is one of the most hideous, well-written, and arresting stories available in the English language. Baldwin proposes the possibility of racism being driven by this innate hunger for domination--something that is manifest within the story's redneck deputy sheriff Jesse--in the form of extreme sexual sadism. The fusion of sexuality and sadism--at an almost psychopathic level--suggests not only do we have predisposition as people to wish to dominate one another; it expresses our capacity for being callous and unimaginably cruel. The last story (flawlessly) links together sexuality, violence, sadism, racism, and religion to form this surreal and haunting chunk of short story fiction. This book is incredible.
—Daniel
This collection-- containing eight excellent James Baldwin short stories-- reminds me of the adage about poetry, that a poem is not "about" anything-- it just is. I feel that way about many of these stories, which take in a lot of different ideas and experiences but filter them through characters that are real, complicated, and human. The book contains two stories that borrow characters and ideas from Go Tell it on the Mountain-- one of which, "The Outing," is a true knockout, with a final sentence that will have you scrambling back to read the whole thing again. Also included are Baldwin's miniature masterpiece, "Sonny's Blues," and also "Going to Meet the Man," which is a horrifying account of racism's roots. Throughout, Baldwin's prose is exemplary.
—Josh
These collections of short stories from James Baldwin were for the most part a really intense, deep, and raw portrayal of the trials and tribulations of black people dealing with racism, bigotry, infidelity, and unimaginable pain and horrors that are very reflective of the African American experience. They're all very well-written, however, the majority of these stories either are very boring or just don't really grab the reader's attention long enough to read it in its entirety. The highlights: * Sonny's Blues- it was very reminiscent of his novel Just Above My Head in terms of the theme/plot of a brother learning of his little brother's demise into drug addiction and how, with him being a musician, has made him a stronger person. It's with music that his drug-addicted brother fights against his own demons. * The Man-Child- I dunno way, but I thought this story was interesting and well-done. * Going To Meet the Man- it's perhaps the most chilling and frightening story in this collection about a man who recalls a memory of how when he was a young boy his parents took him out to witness a black man being tortured and burned to death. It's also startling at just how deeply Baldwin went into the mind of a racist and of a sexually repressed racist at that, a racist that hates black people but also enjoys having brutal sex with black women. It was also creepy at how after he recalls the memory of that brutal killing, he immediately gets hard and makes love to his wife. It's a story that's scary, frightening, and might make the reader feel uncomfortable, but that's the point, and it does that job very well. The rest were either too forgettable or just a little bit boring or too dragged out, where though a point was made it was sort of overkill. Overall, not a bad collection and certainly not a bad representation of Baldwin's work and style, but not his best either. It's a hit-or-miss collection that is definitely worth reading at least for the story highlights that I mentioned above.
—Vanessa (V.C.)
