I am a southerner. More specifically, I am a Black southern woman. I was born and bred in that part of the United States – the South and Alabama – that famed novelist and essayist James Baldwin, a son of the North (Harlem, New York), considered anathema. It is a fascinating feature of Baldwin’s biography that, though Baldwin may have been motivated by an activist impulse, it was a magazine assignment, combined perhaps with a desire to test his manhood, which led him to embark upon journeys to various parts of the South in 1957, when racism and racial violence were having a heyday. He set out initially for Charlotte, North Carolina. While in France in 1956, he had read about Dorothy Counts, a Black teenager who was trying to integrate a local white high school in Charlotte. Whites spat on her so much, Baldwin read, that spit dripped from her dresses. He could not remain in France and just read about such incidents, he avowed; he had to return home (though he delayed his return to New York for more than a year) and “pay his dues” by going south, into the mouth of the racist monster that the South would become to him. He mentions this trip in Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and discusses it in more detail in No Name in the Street (1972).Footnote ¹ He extended that trip to Charlotte by traveling on to Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Little Rock, where he met with famed civil rights activist Daisy Bates and her husband. While Baldwin might be applauded for venturing into the South, what he considered activism comes with problematic connotations and raises questions about his financial, political, and personal motives.

The trips to these flashpoints of racism and racist activity in the South had such an impact upon Baldwin that he was emotionally and physically paralyzed by what he witnessed and the conversations he had with political figures, civil rights activists, and ministers, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He recalls that, upon his return to New York and Harlem, he was unable to leave the cold-water flat of a friend for five days. He could not shake himself of the traumatic terror that had the power not only to grip him on southern soil but to saturate his mind and body to such an extent that he could not denude himself of the impact once he had returned to supposedly safe northern territory. He observes, “But, finally, I surfaced, fully conscious of how irresponsible I had been, and more than a little shaken by the realization that it had been a kind of retrospective terror which had paralyzed me so long. While in the South, I had suppressed my terror well enough, in any case, to function, but when the pressure came off, a kind of wonder of terror overcame me, making me as useless as a snapped rubber band” (57).

For Baldwin generally, the South is the land of balrogs, trolls, and other less than human racist and violent creatures. Before his arrival in the South, Baldwin imagines the region as having the power to emasculate him, if not to kill him outright. The very landscape, he avows in No Name, specifically the trees, and especially those around Atlanta, terrorize him with the prospect of seeing Black male bodies – and perhaps even his own if he is not careful – become strange fruit dangling from those trees. The powerful southern white man who groped Baldwin surreptitiously in a public space becomes the epitome of white power over Black bodies and the destructive potential inherit in that scenario. “This man,” Baldwin writes, “with a phone call, could prevent or provoke a lynching” (62). That unnamed white man helped to solidify in Baldwin’s mind the South he creates in his short story “Going to Meet the Man.” In a small southern town, a Black man accused of a crime is summarily lynched, and the lynchers, as in such rituals historically, celebrate their chilling murder. The story combines elements of race, sexuality, and manhood that underlie all of Baldwin’s comments upon and fictional treatments of the southern United States and interactions between Blacks and whites.

The South that Baldwin imagines is perhaps worse than his actual encounters with the South and southerners, but not by much. Baldwin burdens the South with horrors, and he depicts one of those horrors graphically in Just above My Head (1979), a novel that covers an incident in which a Black male singer on tour with a quartet from Harlem simply disappears when he ventures to an outhouse behind a church where the group is performing in Atlanta, Georgia. Baldwin bestows upon Peanut, that disappeared body, all that is wrong, cruel, violent, and evil about the South. It is bad enough to be a northerner and to die inexplicably on southern soil, but not to have the body recovered is even more traumatic and fear-inspiring. It signals that there can be no compromise with this southern part of hell. The South’s power to destroy reigns like a figurative sword of Damocles hanging over all Black bodies, especially over Black male bodies.

What fascinates me about Baldwin’s attitude toward the South is that he was so intent upon his own vulnerability, coupled with his labeling of monstrosity, that he almost forgot the Black people who were born on southern soil and lived their lives in the space in which Baldwin could not possibly imagine living. Ironically, therefore, even as he indicted the white South for its violence and cruelty, he simultaneously indicted all southern Blacks for being stupid enough to remain in the South. His indictment ignores the fact that, for generations, southern Blacks managed – despite the deprivation, violence, and cruelty directed toward them – to create vibrant cultures throughout the South. Their imaginations carved from their positioning as outsiders in the South a host of sustainable cultural practices, as reflected in church traditions, music, the artistry with which they cultivated gardens and farms, the folk traditions that they passed down to generations following them, and even their very own brands of activism. Southern Blacks were active shapers of their destinies even as they suffered indignities and death. In other words, they were doers. They did not sit still waiting and waiting for various evils to befall them, and they did not hide out in their homes because of some racist encounter. They lived. And the vibrancy of their living echoes the sentiments that Zora Neale Hurston expressed about Blacks in the South, especially those she interviewed for her folklore projects in Florida and Louisiana. Black people, according to Hurston’s documentation and as historical accounts suggest, did not sit around waiting for whites to come and destroy them. Nor did they hide away in their homes to recover from the shock of something they had witnessed. In the most extreme cases, such as with lynching, those Black folks did not stop their lives because one of their number was murdered. They regrouped, buried – if they could – the lynched body, and moved forward. They did not cower in cold-water flats, cultivating inertia and bemoaning their fates. They did what Baldwin did not have the mental or physical stamina to do.

Arguably, Black folks in the South proved to be far superior to their northern counterparts, at least as reflected in Baldwin. Southern Blacks stared into the mouths of lions every day, and they did not blink. They could not blink, because they did not have the option, as Baldwin did, of easily purchasing bus, train, or plane tickets and traveling away from their home territory. By maligning the territory on which they lived, therefore, Baldwin eventually and inadvertently transforms those southern Blacks from victims to heroes. They are heroic because they, unlike Baldwin, were raised in the racial kitchen of the South, knew the patterns of cooking there, knew how not to poison the food, and understood almost instinctively what temperatures could be tolerated before multiple lids would be blown off the pots on the stove. So southern Blacks were heroic in the quiet ways of understanding completely the environment in which they lived, devising strategies to survive in that environment, and knowing precisely how that environment operated so that they could, as often as possible, save themselves and their kin if or when there were disruptions on the landscape.

Of course I am not suggesting that Baldwin was totally wrong in some of his perceptions of the South. However, he was less willing to see the whole picture than what he had concocted in his imagination. The vicious, violent, evil South was much more useful narratively for him than a South that had Black folks thriving and surviving. So Baldwin sacrificed significant portions of Black history and culture in the South in order to make his case for violence and repression. I admit that Baldwin recognized and applauded the aspirations of Blacks in the South to acquire education and achieve other objectives. He even hinted that the South was the only region that could possibly transform America. Still, those caveats are minimal in comparison to the sharpness of his complaints and criticisms. By joining with other maligners of the South, especially northern white liberals, Baldwin executed a linguistic tour de force that earned him quite a reputation as a cultural observer and literary activist. It also earned him a reputation as a cultural denier, for he sacrificed southern Blacks and their incredible survival skills on the altar of his condemnation of white southern violence and racism. It is a noteworthy paradox that scholars treating Baldwin’s comments on the South have generally ignored. The power of Baldwin’s writing combined with received history to convince his readers of his position and, effectively, to erase – or certainly to diminish – a large portion of the southern American population.

As I write in my memoir Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South (2003), I don’t just live in the South. I am a southerner. I am a Black southerner who claims that identity and loves the South. I also love Baldwin’s writings and respect Baldwin’s criticisms of my home territory. There is no doubt that Baldwin came to the South, learned about its volatile racial situations, and wrote about those conditions. There is no doubt that he considered his actions as paying his racial dues. I can see that. However, given that Baldwin went South to “corroborate the nightmare” (51) he had conjured up about that region of the country, that he did not get arrested or spend time in jail, that he did not suffer any personal injury, and that he was constantly titillated by what could emasculate him or string him up from the nearest tree, I can also see that his trips to the South were an elaborate form of voyeurism.