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

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Robert Tomlinson

Bigsby rightly saw that the key to understanding the text's social and ideological dimensions was the parallel between sex and race(6) - one which Baldwin made explicit in an interview with Richard Goldstein:

The sexual and the racial questions have always been intertwined, you know. If Americans can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality . . . . I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. And homophobia is simply an extreme example of the American terror of growing up. (178).

Color and homosexuality assume a common rhetorical function, evoking the dark side of human nature, and this terror-ridden inability to come to terms with them was not, in Baldwin's view, his problem, but that of White America.

By posing the kinship of Black and homosexual as racial and sexual exiles, repressed by the national consciousness, it is not difficult to see the struggle of the European, Giovanni, and the American, David, as a narrative paradigm for the relationship of Black and White in America. Baldwin had already sanctioned such a reading in a 1965 essay: "It seems to me when I watch Americans in Europe that what they don't know about Europeans is what they don't know about me" (Price 406). He thus revealed beneath the explicitly Jamesian paradigm of the cultural clash between Americans and Europeans evident in Giovanni's Room the less obvious register of race. Giovanni's love stirs a dark and frightening memory in David. The adolescent body of Joey, his first homosexual experience, is described as being "brown . . . the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood" (14-15). Later, Giovanni's room, with its painted-over windows facing out onto a dim courtyard, will also become a dark cavern from which he flees in terror much as, according to Baldwin, a puritanical White American society rejected and suppressed the dark vision evoked by its first symbolic meeting with the White man. David only senses this relationship blindly: "My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past" (7). Europe is to be taken here as the source of a repressive White civilization, although in the person of Giovanni it takes on an opposite symbolic value. Stripped of its geographic ambiguities, Baldwin would set forth this theme in "Alas, Poor Richard," a 1953 meditation on the fate of his spiritual father, Richard Wright.(7) Here, Baldwin speculated on "the uses and hazards of expatriation" for his mentor:

Richard was able, at last, to live in Paris exactly as he would have lived, had he been a white man, here, in America. This may seem desirable, but I wonder if it is. Richard paid the price such an illusion of safety demands. The price is a turning away from, an ignorance of, all of the powers of darkness. . . . I am suggesting that one of the prices an American Negro pays - or can pay - for what is called his "acceptance" is a profound, almost ineradicable self-hatred. (Price 280-81, 286-87)