Beneath the Black aesthetic: James Baldwin's primer of Black American masculinity

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Andrew Shin, Barbara Hudson

Ultimately, David's existentialist quest - to find himself - fails, not because, confined by walls and mirrors, he has been unable to extricate himself from the malaise that plagues him at the beginning of the novel, but because, read in the light of Baldwin's subsequent career, the novel suggests that this quest is futile in the first place. Baldwin believes that Paris - a world of intellectual fertility and sexual outlawry emblematized by Sartre's lionization of Genet - is a milieu more tolerant of homosexuality than he can find in black America or the white liberal America of Norman Mailer. But the Paris of existentialism, of Camus and Sartre, in which the individual takes responsibility for constructing the rules of his own life, ironically defeats Baldwin's purpose, precisely because of its emphasis on the individual, its alienation from politics and collective action. David is unable to construct a gay identity for himself because this Paris is too aesthetic and its mandarin pleasures eventually degenerate into the grotesque lust of old fairies like Guillaume. In this context, Giovanni's room, both a haven from and a symbol of society's oppressive strictures, comes to sum up the impotence of the aesthetic ideal. In Giovanni's Room, homosexual relations cannot epitomize the new society because Baldwin cannot realize this vision apart from political commitment: Politics allows the gay man to rationalize his desires, and, in turn, his non-mainstream sexuality enables him to articulate a more egalitarian form of political protest. Ironically, Baldwin finds that his ability to mobilize the power of love depends upon the politics of American life, and he returns to this scene in Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, with mixed results, and again in Just Above My Head, which we read as the culmination of his career.

Just Above My Head contextualizes Baldwin's exploration of black masculinity in the most volatile decade of the Civil Rights Movement, a decade that witnessed the rage of Watts, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Moynihan Report, and the inception of the Black Panthers. Baldwin invokes the sphere of intimate relations to dramatize the pernicious mythology of black virility perpetuated by black nationalism, suggesting instead the power of brotherhood, an orientation rooted in the novel's very conception.(16) As Barbara, a character in Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, explains, "We felt that it [a scene in a play] made a connection - between a private love story - and - a - well, between a private sorrow and a public, a revolutionary situation" (296) - and, likewise, the relationship between Arthur and his older brother Hall, the two protagonists of Just Above My Head.

The novel begins with news of Arthur's death, as his utopian quest for a more sexually tolerant society comes to a violent end in the bathroom of a London pub, which becomes the occasion for Hall's meditation on the meaning of Arthur's life. In the process Hall attempts to come to terms with his own identity as a black man in America. Arthur's quest is thus realized through Hall, who reminisces, "Your life can now be written anew on the empty slate of his. . . . I saw myself in Arthur" (Just 89). The novel becomes a kind of elegy in which Hall, too, becomes a blues singer, trying to redeem his brother's life from the squalor of his murder in a men's toilet. In a powerful image of the claustrophobic nature of the closet Arthur is described lying prone, while with the last remnants of consciousness he imagines the ceiling descending ominously upon him. Hall realizes that there never was a place for Arthur in society, and his elegy is an attempt to make such a space.