Notes of a Native Son — Vocabulary
James Baldwin
1955 Essay
(Auto-generated)

The fact that he did not dare caused me to despise him: I had no way of knowing that he was facing in that living room a wholly unprecedented and frightening situation.†1 more

It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father's end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas.†1 more

I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had been central to my father's vision; very well, life seemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along.†2 more

The fact that he did not dare caused me to despise him: I had no way of knowing that he was facing in that living room a wholly unprecedented and frightening situation.†2 more

That year in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the year during which, having an unsuspected predilection for it, I first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels.†1 more

Once this disease is contracted, one can never be really carefree again, for the fever, without an instant's warning, can recur at any moment.†1 more

But the year which preceded my father's death had made a great change in my life.†

But now they were ready for me and, though some dreadful scenes were subsequently enacted in that restaurant, I never ate there again.†

When I was around nine or ten I wrote a play which was directed by a young, white schoolteacher, a woman, who then took an interest inme, and gave me books to read and, in order to corroborate my theatrical bent, decided to take me to see what she somewhat tactlessly referred to as "real" plays.†

When his life had ended I began to wonder about that life and also, in a new way, to be apprehensive about my own.†

Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity.†

The facts were somewhat different—for example, the soldier had not been shot in the back, and was not dead, and the girl seems to have been as dubious a symbol of womanhood as her white counterpart in Georgia usually is, but no one was interested in the facts.†

We had not known that he was being eaten up by paranoia, and the discovery that his cruelty, to our bodies and our minds, had been one of the symptoms of his illness was not, then, enough to enable us to forgive him.†

My father could scarcely disagree but during the four or five years of our relatively close association he never trusted her and was always trying to surprise in her open, Midwestern face the genuine, cunningly hidden, and hideous motivation.†

But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that.†1 more

When I was around nine or ten I wrote a play which was directed by a young, white schoolteacher, a woman, who then took an interest inme, and gave me books to read and, in order to corroborate my theatrical bent, decided to take me to see what she somewhat tactlessly referred to as "real" plays.†2 more

—a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself.†3 more

He treated almost everybody on our block with a most uncharitable asperity and neither they, nor, of course, their children were slow to reciprocate.†

The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustices is a commonplace.†

I did not know what I had done, and I shortly began to wonder what anyone could possibly do, to bring about such unanimous, active, and unbearably vocal hostility.†