Baldwin and Myths

What it means to be a Negro in America is something Baldwin contemplates in his essay, “Many Thousands Gone.” He asserts that there are myths that time and history has placed upon the Negro, but only their origins are the key to really uncovering the true meaning.

“Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom are dead” (27)

Baldwin discusses the myths of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom—first by saying they are dead. Why dead? Why would he use such definite and concrete imagery to describe this myths that plagued American culture? I would assert that he did so to portray how the Negro has progressed since then, how he has strive to be all the more literate and how he understands his new place in society. The Negro is no longer the man who will simply say, “yes masta” but instead will think critically by using his new skills (Baldwin places a large emphasis on the Negro being literate, by reading and writing) to out think the white man. In addition he uses these archetypes to show the difference between the depictions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Aunt Jemima we all see on our favorite pancake box.

Baldwin goes on to depict the Negro who hasn’t found his rightful place in society.

“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.” (27)

He asserts that this Negro may have not found his place because he does not fully understand his origins. He has all but forgotten the struggles their predecessors (Aunt Jemima & Uncle Tom) endured. The “new” Negro does not understand the complexities and hardships experienced by others and cannot fully get ahead without looking behind.

“Most of them care nothing whatever about race” (27)

Baldwin also talks about other attributes of this new Negro. He asserts that he is “well-dressed and scrubbed” showing that he now has assimilated into American culture and taken up American ways. He is no longer wearing cultural garments, as we understand he places a big difference between the terms African and American. This Negro does not do field work like your Uncle Tom once did, and doesn’t have to tend on the white master like Aunt Jemima.  In addition, he notes that the new Negro is never “laughed at” showing the pain and suffering their predecessors endured that is no longer experienced.

Baldwin stresses these myths to depict the true differences and strides that have been made over time. He wants the reader to feel the complexities of the situation at hand and also get the new American Negro to understand that he cannot simply forget his origins.

Word Frequency in "Many Thousands Gone"

This is a visual representation of the word frequency in the first ten pages of James Baldwin's essay, "Many Thousands Gone." As you can see, the most frequently used word is 'Negro,' which is always capitalized and is distinguished throughout the essay from the descriptor 'American' and the social and cultural body of 'Americans.'

Baldwin establishes this differentiation from the get go:

"It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear" (24).

Baldwin in this essay and the character George Harris in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin do something very similar -- they add racial implications to the term "American" in their rejection of this identity and choose to identify with their African heritage instead.

Harris is the foil or complete dramatic opposite of Uncle Tom -- a figure Baldwin discusses -- because Harris he refuses to endure slavery and be liberated only in death or to even continue living in America. In his final declaration at the end of Stowe's novel (after Tom has been beaten to death and died a martyr on Legree's plantation), Harris defines himself as "African" (the historical meaning of "Negro") and refuses to "pass for an American":

"When I think of all [his mother] suffered, of my own early sufferings, of the distresses and struggles of my heroic wife, of my sister, sold in the New Orleans slave-market, -- though I hope to have no unchristian sentiments, yet I may be excused for saying, I have no wish to pass for an American, or to identify myself with them. It is with the oppressed, enslaved African race that I cast in my lot..." (UTC 393)

Baldwin does not understand this identification as a literal reidentification with Africa or a reason to emigrate there as Harris ultimately does, but a closer look at the etymology (history) of the word 'Negro' reveals its origins in European (namely Spanish) culture, its close historical association with the Atlantic institution of slavery, its reclamation in the 1960s and its disfavor since.

Baldwin's identifier of choice has long carried connotations of the same history of slavery that Baldwin contends blacks and whites are both afraid of and ashamed to face -- check out the lengthy Oxford English Dictionary etymology (history of the shifting forms and meanings of the word) and numerous definitions of the term 'Negro.' Writing in 1955, Baldwin's use of the term establishes an unresolvable tension been Americanness (which he implies is white) and Negro culture and community.

Our perception of this distinction is sharpened by his constantly shifting identifications:

"Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisable from our dehumanization of ourselves" (25).

"Time has made some changes in the Negro face. Nothing has succeeded in making it exactly like our own" (25).  

And, of course, his description of the identities of the problematic Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom figures:

"They prepared our feast tables and our burial clothes; and, if we could boast that we understood them, it was far more to the point and far more true that they understood us. They were, moreover, the only people in the world who did; and not only did they know us better than we knew ourselves, but they knew us better than we knew them. This was the piquant flavoring to the national joke, it lay behind our uneasiness as it lay behind our benevolence: Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom, our creations, at the last evaded us; they had a life -- their own, perhaps a better life than ours -- and they would never tell us what it was...The black man in our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance. We carried murder too, we wanted peace" (28).

Throughout the semester we will come to understand the deep significance of terms including 'Negro,' 'African,' 'African American,' 'African-American,' and black. We will also discuss the infamous n- word, which Baldwin treats as being wrapped up in white and black bitterness over fundamental differences and as having the potential to be internalized -- see 37-8. All of these descriptive, classifactory (and often discriminatory), as well as identifactory terms have long functioned in the Americas as boundaries for national and racial self-determination or self-definition, in other words, coming to a sense of who we are by either defining ourselves by or against them.

As we practice close reading this semester, I ask that you pay close attention to these vital indicators of belonging and exclusion, identification and othering (defining something or someone as being other or different).