Going to Meet the Man [Mass Market Paperback]

James Baldwin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1986

'Few, it seems to me, have driven their words with such passion' - "Guardian". How our earliest experiences can shape our destiny is the theme that runs like a thread of revelation through these extraordinary stories. They explore the roots of love, of murder and of racial conflict, from the child in "The Rockpile" who can never be forgiven by his God-fearing father for his illegitimacy to the loneliness of a young black girl in love with a white man who, she knows, will leave her in "Come Out of the Wilderness" and the horrifying story of the initiation of a racist as a man remembers his parents taking him to see the mutilation and murder of a black man in "Going to Meet the Man". In them Baldwin unlocks the concepts of history and prejudice and probes beneath the skin to the soul.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.

By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was educated in New York. He is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, Another Country, and Blues for Mister Charlie.

--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Laurel (January 1, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0440329310
• ISBN-13: 978-0440329312
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #559,790 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Greatest American Short Story Collection, September 7, 1999

By 

supastar (brooklyn) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Going to Meet the Man: Stories (Paperback)

Baldwin's ability to weave through various times throughout a story is exemplified best in "Sonny's Blues," where he alludes to Isiah with the cup of trembling, and moves through different periods of Harlem, the childhoods and young lives of the narrator and his brother, the constants, in the church and the community and the music, which tells that same story, which must be retold, again and again. The way Baldwin writes about music is virtually unparallelled. In these short stories, he manages to stay clear of the sometimes excessive sentimentality that comes out in novels like Another Country. We sympathize with everyone, we see everyone's need for love, the intense loneliness of human experience, and the individual alienation and experience that results from societal divisions of race and sexuality. The first two stories contain the same characters from his famous first novel Go Tell it on The Mountain. The biblical imagery in these stories is not always pronounced as it may be in Go Tell..., but Baldwin's command of the bible show us the fear and the decadence that it exalts even when the allusions are abstract. The cup of trembling, the sight of the father's foot in the first story. Baldwin is a writer whom people have expected something out of and have been disappointed with because he does not fit into the desired mold of the black writer or the gay writer or even the american writer. He can be an objective political essayist or a sentimental dramatist, and here, he offers cold, somewhat detatched portraits of american lives which are among the best portraits of these people ever written. He puts the lives of marginal americans, from poor white rural southerners, to expatriates, and black urban displaced men and women, into the dramatic realm that hints of myth. His descriptions are riveting, his sexual honesty can be rude, exposing the reader to the America that exposed him.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good collection of short stories!, September 28, 2001

By 

Robert Ortiz (The Southwest) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Going to Meet the Man: Stories (Paperback)

Each of the stories contained in this book deal frankly and honestly with the fear and agony associated with love, hate, prejudice and the suffering humans endure at the hands of their fellow man. All the stories are intense, haunting and in the case of the title story, "Going to Meet the Man", just plain chilling. Other notable stories are "The Man Child", "Sonny's Blues" and "Previous Condition". This is a good place to start if you're just discovering James Baldwin. Also recommended are his novels, "Giovanni's Room", "Another Country" and "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone".

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Painful. Almost too painful., December 20, 2005

By 

J. N. Marks (Near. . . Manicougan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Going to Meet the Man: Stories (Paperback)

I am slowly understanding why Mr. Baldwin elected to leave the United States for more than a decade in the 1940s and 1950s. He apparently is on record as saying that he needed to flee because his anger was going to destroy him if he did not seek a respite from American injustice.

Upon reading this collection, I think I am really beginning to understand what must have been going through his mind. Read "Previous Condition" where a young African American man keeps being thrown out of hotels and denied jobs simply because of the color of his skin. There is nowhere he can go without meeting the hostile glances and conspiratorial whispers of people on the street simply because of his skin color. And there is a moment where it all came into focus for me, standing in the kitchen of his Jewish friend's Jules' apartment. And I quote:

"Oh," I cried, "I know you think I'm making it dramatic, that I'm paranoiac and just inventing trouble! Maybe I think so sometimes, how can I tell? You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. Oh, I know, you're Jewish, you get kicked around, too, but you can walk into a bar and nobody knows you're Jewish and if you go looking for job you'll get a better job than mine!" (78)

It is deeply disturbing to think that a person has the suspicion and rage of the world cocked against their temple, but that was how it was (and still is). I have read much about the Civil Rights struggle and as a Jew myself, have listened to many stories from members of my family about prejudice but these stories, they uncover something. After seeing what happened in New Orleans with Katrina and listening to the empty discussions of "good schools", No Child Left Behind and test score mania, it opens your eyes to the fact that performance, optimism and opportunity are perceptions that, when absent, can ruin lives in ways that are hard to qualify.

I highly recommend these stories but be prepared to become deeply uncomfortable because Baldwin had a powerful case to make about American hypocrisy and he makes it.