"Going to Meet the Man"

James Baldwin, a civil rights activist, born in Harlem, New York in 1924, tackled the social injustices with his talent in writing. “Going to Meet the Man,” the last short story in one published compilation of work also titled “Going to Meet the Man,” was composed somewhere in the 1950’s and 1960’s and finally published in 1965. In order to understand this story you have to have a feel for where the writer was coming from. Now, the battle against black oppression had been going on long before Baldwin targeted the issue with his short story. If you recall from your high school U.S. history class, the 15th amendment was ratified in 1870. As we all know, and as Baldwin did, too, the ratified amendment didn’t really grant ALL black men the right to vote. On the surface, Baldwin addresses this particular inequality (voting privileges), but he also says a whole lot more. When the Jim Crow laws (enacting a "separate but equal" conditions for African Americans) began being challenged (as in infamous instances such as Rosa Park's stand and Brown vs. Board of Education), much of the white Southern population answered with violence, oftentimes by beating, humiliating, and lynching innocent black citizens. In the context of "Going to Meet the Man," the main character, a white southern male named Jesse, is agitated by the people who are rioting for equality in voting, and perhaps more importantly, by the direction the U.S. is moving towards for equal freedoms.

We chose to use “The Method: Working with Patterns of Repetition and Contrast” in exploring this work simply because there’s a great deal of, you guessed it, repetition and contrast. We counted the word "light” 26 times. Double that number and you get the amount of synonyms and allusions to light. Meanwhile, the opposing force of light, darkness, occurs less frequently, but the synonyms and allusions to darkness are more than abundant (i.e. "nigger"). The light/dark binary opposition is pretty consistent with society's portrayal of light/dark: light is good and dark is bad. On page 236, Jesse's thought process creates a metaphor of his life: "drowning in niggers;" Jesse is drowning in darkness, an abyss of a hole in which he cannot escape, which parallels the way he feels about his life. He feels as if he cannot escape this "darkness," or specifically, black people. In fact, the word "nigger" is repeated quite often, and is arguably a motif. In contrast, the light imagery seems to correlate with white people. In Jesse's flashback of his first lynching, the morning is described as bright and glorious. In fact, there's not a single sign of darkness around, including black people; on that day, everything was white: the black church was dead-white...not a single black person was spotted. There are a few instances where the light/dark contrast is different, and quite frankly, very ironic. Looking at the story as a whole, it is easily seen that white man is dark inside (inflicting torture and beatings), while the black man is white inside (singing to God and the owners of the only church referenced in the story): the cruelty of the whites reach an atrocious level, while the blacks are depicted as saintly martyrs (Braveheart, anyone?). From here we can begin to make deductions about the intentions of Baldwin in writing this piece and his interpretation of the mind of a 60's southern white man.

Lastly, before you begin tackling this story let us leave you with one last hint: search for some other of the abundant similarities and contrast in the text, particularly events that explore the past and present, as well as instances that connect sex and power.

Love and Kisses,
Sam, Bruce, and Jenn