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

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Robert Tomlinson

The third and final book of the novel finds Cass almost fully initiated:

I'm beginning to think, she said, that growing just means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet - you drink a little of it every day. Once you've seen it you just can't stop seeing it - that's the trouble . . . . You begin to see that you yourself, innocent, upright you, have contributed and do contribute to the misery of the world. Which will never end because we are what we are. (341)

One cannot help thinking of the Prince's grave words toward the end of The Golden Bowl - "'Everything's terrible, cara - in the heart of man'" (566) - and the night scene on the terrace of an English country house where the heroine, Maggie, symbolically enacts the role of Christ at Gethsemane and receives a Judas kiss from Charlotte, her rival for the love of her husband, the Prince. By a mute gesture, Charlotte reveals to her the depth of her tragic situation, "She might verily by this dumb demonstration have been naming to Maggie the price, naming it as a question for Maggie herself, a sum of money that she properly was to find. She must remain safe and Maggie must pay - what she was to pay with being her own affair" (494).

Although much of the cited interchange between the two women deals with the details of their respective sexual liaisons, an implicit weight of history is also invoked during the taxi ride to the sardonically named Harlem club, Small's Paradise. In reference to her White lover, Ida warns Cass, temporarily united to her by suffering: "'But, imagine that he came, that man who's your man - because you always know, and he damn sure don't come every day - and there wasn't any place for you to walk out of or into, because he came too late. And no matter when he arrived would have been too late - because too much had happened by the time you were born, let alone by the time you met each other'" (294).

Despite the cross fire of sexual and interracial couplings which disconcerted many readers of Another Country, most criticism was ready to concede its social concerns. The same is not true of Giovanni's Room. Indeed, as already noted, the latter novel is often contrasted with Another Country for its supposed lack of these same concerns. And in 1957, one year after finishing the novel, Baldwin himself wrote of his return to America: "Everybody was paying their dues and it was time I went home and paid mine" (Price 475). One implication which might be drawn from this statement is that the dues were private in Paris and public in America. based on this interpretation, one could conclude that the significance of the expatriate experience was essentially an individual one: the search for personal identity. Such a dichotomy would be convenient for categorizing the two novels, but it ignores the social and ideological dimensions of Giovanni's Room.

At the time of the book's publication, Leslie Fiedler wrote in exasperation: "There is not only no Negro problem in Baldwin's new book; there are not even any Negroes," and a bit further on he unwittingly adds that "one begins to suspect at last that there must really be Negroes present, censored, camouflaged or encoded." I say unwittingly, because the critic makes nothing of this supposition other than to demand that in a hoped-for "mature novel" Negro characters be present (147). But, in fact, drawing on the personal experience of exile which he had mined so extensively for the early essays, Baldwin is examining here the same problems which had always concerned him. The central themes of the novel - false innocence, freedom, responsibility - are precisely those which Baldwin evokes when mapping the tragic American confrontation of Black and White.