Notes of a Native Son

The motif of the native son lends the symbolic universe within which Baldwin writes. The native son is many things. Most immediately, there is the enormous impact of Richard Wright and his novel Native Son. Baldwin’s earliest writing inevitably emerges within the shadow cast by Wright’s work. Baldwin establishes himself as a new voice on the literary scene, in part, by staking a critical position on Native Son. There are obvious familial and religious overtones here. Baldwin’s writing career was fueled early on by his need to break free from his father’s house. His first novel was largely autobiographical in its depiction of a young man’s difficult relationship with his preacher father. Baldwin not only wrote Go Tell It On The Mountain, but also his first couple essays on Richard Wright, out of a need to assuage his own tensions between his stepfather and himself.

The religious overtones of the prodigal son, the chosen one, and the fallen one are also evident here. The prodigal son must risk disappointing the father to follow his own path; he must risk not being able to come home again. Baldwin had to flee the US to return home again several years later. His essays are replete with references to the perspective he gained on his sojourn abroad. The chosen one, the son of God, versus the fallen one, the arch angel who became the devil, is a tension encapsulated by the native son motif. He is destined to lead, but only if he submits to the authority of the father; otherwise he is damned, his choices construed as sinful. Baldwin began as a preacher in his teenage years before rejecting the church and his father. Baldwin was favored by his teachers throughout his schooling as an exceptionally bright student. In the schema of the White nation, he was poised to rise as a select Black person, useful only insofar as he submits to White leadership of his race.

As Baldwin explains in Notes of a Native Son, the native son is the vessel of others’ bitterness. The native son becomes bitterness personified. The native son “is the ‘n*****’” (74). In this way, the native son is the embodiment of the White nation’s racist fantasies about Black people. He is an idea, first, and then the horrible reality that comes to pass when one people’s ideas coerce other people’s realities. Bigger Thomas is Wright’s literary representation of this native son. Baldwin writes that his father, too, was the native son.

Furthermore, Baldwin needed to step outside Richard Wright’s shadow because he needed to slay his own father-demons—which is to say, Baldwin needed to slay his own American-born bitterness. Baldwin realized that he, too, is the native son. When he writes that he did not hate his father, but that he needed to exorcise his grip on him, what he is also saying is that he needed to get his father’s native son off of his back so that he could begin to confront himself as the native son. Notes of a Native Son thus extends his meditations on his father, begun three years earlier in his first novel, and at the same time makes it even more personal and political by extending his reach to encompass the historical, social, and political context that made his father, and thus made him, native sons and Negroes in the eyes of the world.

Baldwin’s recognition that the native son’s bitterness is a trap of internalized hatred, facilitates a deconstruction of the American mythology. The nation serves as the family for its citizens, a construct that seeks to repress as it binds and conforms. Baldwin, and all Black people, are the native sons and daughters of the slaveholding nation. When he is describing his memories of his father, locked up in his terrors, he was evoking Wright’s characterization of the violent Bigger Thomas. The native son is also a reference to the nation’s pact with violence: violence created the nation in the image of the violence that generated the native son in the first place, making violence an inevitable language of the nation. In America, men are socialized into a masculinity that teaches them to take the violence that they are victims of and enact that same violence on others. The price of this violence is tenderness lost. Baldwin’s father and Wright’s Bigger Thomas are twin representations of this lost ability to form human connection.

Although Baldwin does not discuss his sexuality at all in Notes of a Native Son, and only references sexuality once in the essay on Carmen Jones, Baldwin’s native son is prodigal, chosen, and fallen in all of the above ways with reference to sexuality. When slaveholding society claimed humanity in the image of Whiteness, it simultaneously attached Whiteness to all of the other categories it created to define what it means to be human, including sexuality, gender, family, citizen, and labor. The native son, then, is not only the product of racist violence, it is also a sexual violence and an attempt to fix a deviant, injured, and monstrous sexuality on Blacks. Notes of a Native Son begins to chart Baldwin’s construction of an alternate sexuality to that which the native son represents.

In the end, for Baldwin, the native son is not the problem. It is not that the native son must be killed off so that humanity, the black and White races, and all others besides, can live in harmony. Rather, it is that we all are native sons, full of hurt and bitterness, and no dream of “a dazzling future when there will be no White or black” will dislodge the scars in our hearts (78):

For, let us join hands on this mountain as we may, the battle is elsewhere. It proceeds far from us in the heat and horror and pain of life itself where all men are betrayed by greed and guilt and blood lust and where no one’s hands are clean (78).