In the Castle of My Skin

NOTES OF A NATIVE SON (175 pp.)--James Baldwin--Beacon Press ($2.75).

"You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, "and my profit on't is, I know how to curse." Between Caliban's curses and nonstop Ariel flights of the liberal imagination, most writing on the Negro problem in America makes highly unprofitable reading, in the view of talented Negro Novelist James (Go Tell It on the Mountain) Baldwin. This sheaf of personal essays, written with bitter clarity and uncommon grace, is an effort to retrieve the Negro from the abstractions of the do-gooders and the no-goods.

"Everything Will Be All Right." The dilemma of the white American, as Author Baldwin sees it, is that he is caught between a West European legacy of white supremacy and the democratic ideal of equality and brotherhood. Unfortunately, the love of justice rarely bridges the absence of love. For his part, the Negro "hates and fears" the white man, but he cannot retreat to his African heritage, which was severed at the auction block; he can only find his identity within "the cage of reality" of the American scene.

This scene bustles with false, as well as real, progress. The "protest" novel, as Author Baldwin sees it, is a signpost of false progress: "So far from being disturbing [it] is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene . . . We receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all . . . 'As long as such books are being published,' an American liberal once said to me, 'everything will be all right.' " Far from dignifying the humanity that lies more than skin-deep, these books straitjacket the Negro within his skin: "The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended."

Black Devils & Revenge Fantasies. A fictional monster like Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas brings out the worst in both races, Author Baldwin suggests, for he arms the whites with proof of the black devil they see lurking and smirking in the lowliest handyman, and satisfies the Negro's revenge fantasies by permitting him to be what the white world has dinned into him that he is, a would-be rapist and killer. According to Author Baldwin, the Negro's pent-up hostility shows up in far stranger places, e.g., the rock-'n'-roll sects of the Harlem storefront churches where his late father used to preach. Says Baldwin: "Religion operates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: white people own the earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it; the bad will be punished and the good rewarded, for God is not sleeping, the judgment is not far off ... Bitterness is here neither dead nor sleeping . . . and this is not, as Cabin in the Sky would have us believe, merely a childlike emotional release."

In Jail for Christmas. Seeking emotional release himself, James Baldwin took off for Paris in 1948. Unlike Fellow Novelist

Wright and other self-exiled American Negroes, Author Baldwin does not pretend to have found the good, free life in Europe. On the contrary. He tells how, in Paris, he was clapped into jail at Christmastime when a prankster friend left a stolen sheet in his hotel room. Baldwin describes in chilling detail the glacial speed of French due process of law, the dank, verminous cells, the human derelicts ("faces the color of lead and the consistency of oatmeal''), and the laughter of the French court which released him, "the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real." Moving on to a tiny Swiss village high in the Alps, he found himself regarded as an exotic freak, the only Negro the villagers had ever seen. Daily, the children skipped at his heels, yipping "Neger! Neger!", and Author Baldwin sometimes muttered sourly to himself "exactly as I muttered on the streets of a city these children have never seen, when I was no bigger than these children are now: 'Your mother was a nigger.' "

Back in the U.S., Author Baldwin feels that every Negro must "make his own precarious adjustment to the 'nigger' who surrounds him and to the 'nigger' in himself." Says he: "I love America more than any other country in the world, and. exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." In that criticism, he has not spared his own race, ranging from the failure of Negro novelists to capture in print "any of the joy of Louis Armstrong or the really bottomless, ironic and mocking sadness of Billie Holliday" to the viciousness of anti-Semitism in Harlem. As for the future of black-white relations in the U.S.: "One's only got to look back to see that, though we certainly have cause for shame, we have, equally, cause for pride."

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