Notes of a Native Son

“Notes of a Native Son,” and by extension the volume Notes of a Native Son, is a complicated synthesis of the personal and the political. Political can simply mean a reference to struggles and conflicts over power. Baldwin’s writing endures because he lays bare the personal nature of power and powerlessness. He also makes accessible the key insight that power is always relational: His father struggled mightily with the oppressive conditions of racist America, but he nonetheless dominated young Baldwin’s life.

“Notes of a Native Son” is a personal elaboration of Baldwin’s earlier analysis of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son. In “Many Thousands Gone,” Baldwin had defined a native son: “he is the ‘n*****,’” meaning he is the despised, a construct that embodies White desire and disgust, a tortured fantasy of violence (74). His quarrel with Wright’s novel was not that Wright was mistaken about this aspect of the native son. Indeed, Baldwin acknowledges how the “fierce bitterness at having been born one of them” can produce all manner of violence and personal disarray in Black life (75). Where Baldwin departs from Wright is in his depiction of the interior life of the native son. Baldwin argued that Wright’s Bigger Thomas was not known to others in the Black community because he did not know himself; he was a walking, stalking, breathing reaction to White fantasy. As such, he was a realization of that fantasy, a mere inversion of its racism. Only America could create such offspring, Black and White, bound hopelessly together in violent misunderstanding.

In many ways, Baldwin’s oeuvre was devoted to exploring the interiority of the native son. His dad was Bigger Thomas, in his own right. There was no murderous behavior on the part of Baldwin’s father—but not for lack of the same rage that Wright imagined in Native Son. Baldwin explains that his father was equally gripped by the rage of the native son, and his father’s inability to reckon with this inner terror corrupted Baldwin’s exterior persona: “When he took one of his children on his knee to play, the child always became fretful and began to cry; when he tried to help one of us with our homework the absolutely unabating tension which emanated from him caused our minds and our tongues to become paralyzed, so that he, scarcely knowing why, flew into a rage and the child, not knowing why, was punished” (129).

Baldwin left home at age 18, and in that year away before his father passed, he was able to become aware of the “the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings […] I had discovered the weight of White people in the world” (129). Baldwin recounts anecdotes where his recklessness with the etiquette of White supremacy should have, by all rights of the historical record, ended with his murder. Upon reflection, as shocking as the realization that he could have been murdered was the recognition that he too had been ready to commit murder: “my life […] was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart” (135). Living with weight of the White world, in other words, “had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me” (129). Baldwin, too, is the native son.