The Black Issue of the Holy Ghost

Abstract

Baldwin asserts in his short essay “The Price May Be Too High” (1969) that his quest for truth has determined his vocation. He wants “to reach something of the truth, and to tell it—to use his instrument as truthfully as he knows how” (TCR, 86–87). ¹ But the “system” wants “the black face” to be part of “the national fantasy” and means to leave “the fantasy… unchanged” and “the social structure… untouched” (88). “Consider,” he writes, “what Sambo’s truth means to the governors of states, the mayors of cities, the chiefs of police departments, the heads of boards of education!” Sambo, a buffoonish caricature of blacks, is supposed to sing and dance for the American republic rather than to think critically about it. If he does, Baldwin argues, white Americans pretend “not to know the reasons for Sambo’s discontent.” Can you imagine waving a red flag at people who insist that the flag is white? The mendacity takes a toll on the truth teller, who “must deal not only with his public discontent and daily danger but also with the dimensions of his private disaster” (87). In “The Price May Be Too High,” Baldwin asserts that he had been writing for blacks and whites, but has concluded that most white Americans “have been white… too long… have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long”; and, consequently, its “effect on their personalities, their lives, their grasp of reality, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself” (88).