The Rainbow Sign

James Baldwin, 38, has brown skin, black hatreds, and a brilliant literary style. In his novels (Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country) and essays, Baldwin has written of things he knows well: his native Harlem, homosexuality, France (where he has lived as a sometime self-exile, supported partly by U.S. foundation grants)--and what he considers the all but hopeless estrangement between the American Negro and white man.

Soon to be published by Dial Press is another Baldwin book, based mostly on a 20,000-word New Yorker essay. It shows Baldwin as the most bitterly eloquent voice of the American Negro. Yet it also shows him as one who speaks less for the Negro than to the white--and it is in that sense that he is most compelling.

Elijah's Hopes. Negroes, he writes, "are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. This world is white and they are black. White people hold the power, which means that they are superior to blacks . . . and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared." When Baldwin was ten, two white cops "amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and, for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem's empty lots."

Baldwin has understanding but little sympathy for the Black Muslim movement (TIME, Aug. 10, 1959) and its mystical leaders, who contend that "Allah" will wreak vengeance on the "white devil." Visiting the Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad in Chicago, Baldwin found himself wanting to defend his white friends. "I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they are trying to prove that Negroes are not subhuman." When he left, he felt that he and Elijah "would always be strangers, and possibly, one day, enemies." The Muslim, fantasy of achieving power disturbed Baldwin. "I could have hoped that the movement had been able to inculcate in the demoralized Negro population a truer and more individual sense of its own worth."

How? By helping the Negro to accept his past and learn how to use it, says Baldwin. "The Negro himself no longer believes in the good faith of white Americans . . . When the country speaks of a 'new' Negro, which it has been doing every hour on the hour for decades, it is not really referring to a change in the Negro, but only to a new difficulty in keeping him in his place."

Aristocrats & Myths. Baldwin maintains that "Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats--the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced . . . The Negro's past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible--this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains . . . something very beautiful . . . That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth--and indeed, no church--can teach . . . It helps to explain how they have been able to produce children of kindergarten age who can walk through mobs to get to school. It demands great force and great cunning continually to assault the mighty and indifferent fortress of white supremacy."

The Negro, says Baldwin, "has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that."

On the Water Wheel. In short, whites have made themselves the "victims of their own brainwashing." Baldwin fears that "this dishonored past will rise up soon to smite all of us . . .A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay." The question of color is a "fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world --here, there, or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything white Americans think they believe in must now be re-examined . . . Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality," a distinction that Western nations have not yet been able to make. "And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one's power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk--eviction, imprisonment, torture, death. For the sake of one's children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion --and the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion.

"When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in [Harlem's] wine-and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty? . . . And when I sat at Elijah's table . . . and we talked about God's--or Allah's--vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then? I could also see that the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make that vengeance inevitable . . . And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen ... If we [whites and blacks] do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!"

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