Notes of a Native Son

At the time, “Many Thousands Gone” was not as controversial as “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” perhaps because the latter explicitly linked Native Son to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Read together as they are in Notes of a Native Son, however, reveals the continuities of Baldwin’s analysis, his ascendance as the preeminent Black essayist of his time, and as one of the most critical readers of American culture. This was also not without its own controversy. With both essays, Baldwin unwittingly participates in that conceit of White society that permits only one ascendant Black voice at a time. There is always a multiplicity of Black voices, of course, but American society tends to elevate one Black person at a time to represent the race. Later in his life, Baldwin would criticize this phenomenon at length. But in 1949, Baldwin was recently arrived in Paris and was just getting his start as a writer.

Wright, meanwhile, had been the preeminent Black writer since the 1930s and was moving at the center of Parisian literary and political circles. Wright was very angry with Baldwin for attacking him in order to advance Baldwin’s own status. Many years later, after Wright had died, Baldwin would express regret about this, realizing that he was in some ways guilty of precisely what he had critiqued in Native Son—of fueling White desires to consume Black culture for entertainment and psychic fantasy. This historical dynamic is complex and ongoing.

The persona of Baldwin as the emergent Black critic aside, his analysis in “Many Thousands Gone” stands the test of time. There are at least three key ideas about US society that Baldwin uses in his critique of Native Son. First, the “Negro,” as Baldwin uses the language of the time, is nothing more than an idea, a notion, a construct of equal parts fear and desire: “He is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence” (66). The centrality of this idea to US society is revealed whenever it threatens to collapse. Such a threat invariably elicits a “blind and immediate retaliation” (66). The reason White society attacks Black people who do not fulfill the stereotype it creates for them, is because what society really feels about the Negro is bound up with what it feels about itself.

Secondly, this figment of American imagination defines the meaning of the “native son.” As Baldwin writes, “Let us refrain from inquiring at the moment whether or not he actually exists; for we believe that he exists […] He is indeed the ‘native son’: he is the ‘n*****’” (74). The native son must either fulfill the fantasy White society harbors about him or endure this hatred, the self-hatred it can induce, and the “fierce bitterness at having been born one of them,” a “despised people,” as Baldwin puts it (75). At the same time as his dreams for his life and his people are thwarted by this White fantasy, he sees all around him White dreams play out every day as actual violence against him and his people.

The third key insight in “Many Thousands Gone” is that there is no intramural perspective in Native Son. There is only the extramural: what White thinks about Black and how Bigger Thomas embodies this externalized image. The narrative thus becomes one dimensional. Baldwin notes that the reader knows as little about Bigger Thomas at the end as we did at the beginning of the novel; that we know next to nothing about the social dynamic which produced him; and that the other Black characters in the story are not endowed with their own perspectives on the world. The result, writes Baldwin, is that the relationship that Black people bear to one another is cut away, leaving the Black man as an isolated figure from within his own group. It is as if there is no tradition, no social intercourse, no field of thought and belief intrinsic or internal to the Black community. This lack of an intramural perspective allows Native Son to conform to the White paradigm and was an unintentional reason for its run-away success with White readers.