Response to "Many Thousands Gone"

Response to “Many Thousands Gone”

One thing that definitely caught my attention was the sentence we mentioned, briefly, in class: “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.” (pg. 27, Many Thousands Gone) This is what gave me some perspective as to the image of modernity and the progressive nature of the black community, at least according to Baldwin. On a more personal note, I have to say that his phrasing and attitude approaching it was particularly enjoyable. The idea that the slaves that had landed in the United States had faded away - not into oblivion, as he mentions that it is a “sentimental error...to believe that the past is dead” - and its essence has been reissued, reborn, so to speak, into this new, “ferociously literate” people, free and with more than just a few words to say, is something I can visualize very well. Given the right to freedom, they have taken the tools of the arts by storm, using literature, music, dance, imagery, colour, anything to get their message - their very strong message - across after what has veritably been generations of suppression of any such artistic, or creative urges. Baldwin’s clever acknowledgment that though they have come from Africa, it is not home to them any more. A part of them is from there, permanently marked on their skin - no one will deny that claim. However, they are now “almost as dark” - in other words, no longer as dark as they were. They have assimilated, gotten “well-dressed and scrubbed”, became a functional and significant part of the modern community. Baldwin recognizes that this is a part that comes into “[t]he making of an American” (pg. 29), where an American “adopts the vesture of [their] adopted land.” This is done with some disdain, but it is clear that he knows that it happens and that it has happened. After all, in making this acknowledgment, he identifies on multiple occasions as one of those that changes so dramatically that they now identify more with a Western perspective than any other. For he is one of these new people. He is one of the new, tempered, steaming machination, filled to the brim with literary impulses, a being who has discovered their eyes in a dark room, accidentally flipping on the light switch to find tales, stories, words, and finally, a pen and an oh-so-blank sheet of paper.