"Payin' one's dues": expatriation as personal experience and paradigm in the works of James Baldwin

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Robert Tomlinson

Trapped in a similar dilemma, the expatriate subject in France is distanced physically and emotionally from America, yet not fully integrated into French society As was the case for so many other American expatriates, life in Paris for Baldwin was largely one of cultural isolation in an English-speaking colony. French culture, to the extent that he experienced it, was only a vehicle for recuperating his own intensely American past. He described the expatriate experience as "a journey we make faraway to come full circle . . .," and he added: "I lived in a real silence, a real vacuum. But, I was absolutely active because in the silence I began to hear another language; began to hear French and I began to decipher it, in a way, which allowed me to go back . . . which allowed me to hear my father and behind my father my grandmother and the church I came out of and the pulpit I had just left" ("To Hear" 443, 437).(4)

Yves, the young Frenchman of Another Country, is also estranged from his own culture. He arrives in New York (described with ambiguous irony as "that city which the people from heaven had made their home" [366]), and the first thing he realizes is that, despite his disaffection, he is profoundly French. He will discover in New York what his American lover, Eric, had gone to Europe to find. This expatriate experience (situated on the frontier between two cultures), be it that of the American in Paris or of the Frenchman in New York, would then represent that of the African American subject - irremediably exiled from his/her African past, yet denied access to the new American culture.

It is thus only apparently paradoxical that the passage which seemed to me (when I first read it in Paris in 1963) to express the essence of that painful condition occurs in Another Country, despite the fact that the novel is set largely in New York. A 1986 interview with Baldwin published in The Henry James Review confirmed my earlier intuition.(5) When asked, "Is that what Henry James came to Europe to discover, what Newman and later Strether discover? Is that why you came to France - to redefine freedom and innocence?" Baldwin replied that freedom means the end of innocence, and that "the end of innocence means you've finally entered the picture. And it means that you'll accept the consequences too" (54). In other words, the expatriate is "payin' one's dues." As in James, the vision of life expressed in Baldwin's works is essentially a tragic one, the same contained in two key elements of the Aristotelian definition of the genre, anagnorisis and pathos, the latter not a brutish, animal suffering, but suffering consciously paid as the price of self-knowledge.

The scene in Another Country referred to above occurs in the final chapter of Book Two. Ida, a struggling Black jazz singer, and Cass, an aristocratic White woman whose marriage is falling apart, are sharing a taxi ride uptown to a Harlem night club. The Black woman angrily indicts the White one as a representative of her race: "'What you people don't know is that life is a bitch, baby. It's the biggest hype going. You don't have any experience in paying your dues and it's going to be rough on you, baby, when the deal goes down. There's lots of back dues to be collected, and I know damn well you haven't got a penny saved'" (295). Cass is still one of the "mere apprentices of suffering" (277). To Ida's claim that, although miles away, she knew her brother Rufus was spiritually dying, Cass objects: "'Your knowing it didn't stop anything, didn't change anything,'" to which the singer retorts, "'Maybe nothing can be stopped or changed, but you've got to know, you've got to know what's happening'" (292).