Abstract
In this 1955 essay, Baldwin explores Richard Wright’s novel Native Son to illuminate what it means to be a Negro in America. For Baldwin, this is visceral. He is tired of Black folk being treated as mere social agendas rather than as flesh and blood. He notes that dehumanization is never a one-way street, that the loss of identity—be it stolen, borrowed, denied, or annihilated—has consequences far beyond those who are the immediate victims. For Baldwin, our crimes against ourselves echo and haunt and damn and eviscerate us. It is not enough (not in 1955 when the essay was published, not today) to think that we can leave our memories checked at some dismal door of gerrymandered elections or xenophobic nationalism or sycophantic equalities. Indeed for Baldwin, the story of Black folk is the story of Americans, one that is not, in his words, “a very pretty story. ”2 This is a story of shadows, or a series of shadows that are for Baldwin “self-created, intertwining.” And, sadly, Black folk do not exist except in “the darkness of our minds.”
… what it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested by an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him.
Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom are dead, their places taken by a group of amazingly well-adjusted young men and women, almost as dark, but ferociously literate, well-dressed and scrubbed, who are never laughed at, who are not likely ever to set foot in a cotton or tobacco field or in any but the most modern of kitchens. There are others who remain, in our odd idiom, “underprivileged”; some are bitter and these come to grief; some are unhappy, but, continually presented with the evidence of a better day soon to come, are speedily becoming less so. Most of them care nothing whatever about race. They want only their proper place in the sun and the right to be left alone, like any other citizen of the republic. We may all breathe more easily. Before, however, our joy at the demise of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom approaches the indecent, we had better ask whence they sprang, how they lived? Into what limbo have they vanished?1
—James Baldwin,“Many Thousands Gone”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
James Baldwin, “Too Many Thousands Gone” in Notes of a Native Son ( Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955 ), 27.
Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South ( New York: Pantheon, 1982 ), 201–202.
Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750–1925 ( New York: Vintage Books, 1976 ).
Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson ( Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987 ), 107.
Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition 1892–1976 ( Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980 ), 11–12.
Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow ( Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1994 ), 88.
Kenneth W. Goings, Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994 ), 28.
Scripps Howard News Service, “Blacks’ Image in Advertising Has Improved over the Years,” Bryan-College Station Eagle (March 1, 1987 ): 1E.
Tom Zeller, “Recasting Racism, One Icon at a Time” The New York Times, September 9, 2001, Section 2:6.
Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 254 and Manring, Slave in a Box, 68.
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom ( New York: Routledge, 1994 ), 81.
Copyright information
© 2006 Emilie M. Townes
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Townes, E.M. (2006). Vanishing into Limbo: The Moral Dilemma of Identity as Property and Commodity. In: Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601628_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601628_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-7273-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60162-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)