James Baldwin: Going to meet the manxml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Deze bundel bevat 9 verhalen. Ze gaan over de jeugd van een zwarte jongen, over discriminatie, de gelovige gemeente, een lynchpartij, enz.

Beter dan de verhalen na te vertellen, kan ik enkele mooie passages overtikken.

Uit Previous Condition.

Een zestienjarige jongen verlaat zijn thuis en vindt onderdak bij een vriend. Als de landlady ontdekt dat hij zwart is, vliegt hij aan de deur. Hij gaat zich bedrinken en maakt in een bar kennis met een oude vrouw.

“Baby,” said the old one, “what’s your story?”

“I got no story, Ma”, I said

Uit Sonny’s Blues

Over een barmeid:

When she smiled one saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed, still-struggling woman beneath the battered face of the semi-whore.

Over het kind

He hopes that there will never come a time when the old folks won’t be sitting around the living room, talking about where they’ve come from, and what they have seen, and what’s happened to them and their kinfolk. But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they won’t talk anymore that day. And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that everytime this happens he’s moved just a little closer to the darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they have come from. It’s what they endure. The child knows that they won’t talk anymore because if he knows too much what’s happened to THEM, he’ll know too much soon, about what’s going to happen to HIM.

Over de kerkdienst

“Tis the old ship of Zion,” they sang, and the sister with the tambourine kept a steady, jangling beat “it has rescued many a thousand!”. Not a soul under the sound of their voices was hearing this song for the first time, not one of them had been rescued. Nor had they seen much in the way of rescue work being done around them. Neither did they especially belief in the holiness of the three sisters and the brother, they knew too much about them, knew where they lived, and how.

Uit This Morning, this Evening, so soon

Over de tegenstelling VS-Europa bij Amerikanen aan boord van een schip

It was a friendliness which did not suggest, and was not intended to suggest, any possibility of friendship. Unlike Europeans they dropped titles and used first names almost at once, leaving themselves, unlike the Europeans, with nowhere thereafter to go. Once one had become Pete or Jame or Bill all that could decently be known and any suggestion that there might be further dephts, a person, so to speak, behind the name, was taken as a violation of that privacy which did not, paradoxically, since they trusted it so little, seem to exist among Americans. They apparently equated privacy with the unspeakable things they did in the bathroom or the bedroom, which they related only to the analyst, and then read about it in the pages of best sellers.

Uit Going to meet the man

Dit is een verschrikkelijk lynchverhaal. Twee staaltjes van de racistische instelling van de blanke sheriff uit het begin en het einde van het verhaal.

He could not ask his wife to do just a little thing for him, just to help him out, just for a little while, the way he could ask a nigger girl to do it.

Come on, sugar. I’m going to do you like a nigger, just like a nigger, come on, sugar, and love me just like you’d love a nigger.