This Morning . . .

The title of James Baldwin’s short story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” references the traditional folk song “Tell Old Bill” that recounts the lynching of a black man who didn’t heed the warning to “Leave those downtown women alone.” Bill’s body is brought back slung on unceremoniously on a wagon. Those women against he was warned were colored white! Baldwin’s story recounts the last night in Paris of a Jazz singer returning with his son, Paul, to the United States for a contracted nightclub engagement. I suppose the line in the song refers to Bill’s setting out in the morning and coming home in the evening . . . and his violent death so, so soon. Returning to the United States returns the narrator too soon to the environment where the reality of lynching and race hatred exists as part of the air he breathes. Baldwin’s story concerns at least the freedom that the narrator has felt in Paris and the transition to America that would return him and his son this morning, this evening so soon to prejudice. The narrator says, “I always feel that I don’t exist there, except in someone else’s—usually dirty—mind.” Though he is returning with his son, the narrator also states that he doesn’t want to raise his son in the United States and under those conditions.
     There is more complexity in the story than I want to offer here: Baldwin’s insight into history, into the culture of America and its race relations is profound, but I don’t mean this post as another exegetical study of a beautiful short story, “This Morning, This Evening, So Soo.” But in my never-ending study that there is nothing new under the sun, I offer this. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ takes the title of his book, Between the World and Me, from Richard Wright’s poem published in Partisan Review in the 1935 July/August issue. The poet comes upon the scene of a lynching and the evidence of the crime sets him apart from this physical and emotional world:

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled
    suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly
    oaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting
    themselves between the world and me....

  

The poem narrates the scene and the pain of the tortured Black victim. Coates’ book, written as a letter to his son describes his own separation from the world that becomes epitomized in the senseless but unpunished murder of Prince Jones by the police. For Coates, Jones’ murder is another iteration of the lynching of a Black man by rabid White racists. But then I read in Baldwin’s short story published in the Summer, 1960 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, a description of a moment when he stood in Paris on the Port Royal Bridge with his white wife, Harriet. And the narrator says, “Never, in all my life, until that moment, had I been alone with anyone. The world has always been with us, between us, defeating the quarrel we could not achieve, and making love impossible.” What is acknowledged here is the existential barrier that in the United States prevents honest relations between him and everyone else. “During all the years of my life, until that moment, I had carried the menacing, the hostile, killing world with me everywhere. Not matter what I was doing or saying or feeling, one eye had always been on the world—the world I had learned to distrust almost as soon as I learned my name . . . the white man’s world.” But on that bridge at that moment on the bridge in Paris he experienced for the first time a freedom from that world that had forever threatened him and any honest relationship he could establish with a woman and by implication with any man as well. Standing with Harriet on the bridge the narrator experiences a moment of absolute intimacy: “For the first time, the first time, felt that the woman was not, in her own eyes or in the eyes of the world, degraded by my presence.”
     The insight Baldwin offers here and elsewhere in his writings into race relations in the United States is profound. He understood not only how they existed then but how they would continue to play out in the future. Baldwin prefigures the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Philandro Castile, Terrance Franklin and others. It interests me that Coates does not make reference to James Baldwin whose prescience about the United States continues to astonish me. He knew then what has since becomes reality on the streets in the cities of this country.