Notes of a Native Son Essay -- James Baldwin

Everyone Likes a Good StoryBy nature, human beings analogous stories. Sea captains tell of ferocious storms, travelers describe exotic places, friends recall comfortably times s indite to welcomeher, and people listen. Thoughts are a different issue- few people will listen beca implement there is simply less to get excited more or less, especially if the listener can?t relate. throng Baldwin, originator of many novels and essays, including ?Notes of a Native Son,? has many thoughts to share, and keeps the reader interested slice he shares them. Baldwin carries the reader through ?Notes? by telling stories of his own life, and shares his thoughts about being a dim man along the way. Baldwin?s use of stories not only keeps the reader interested in the essay, but excessively lets the reader k instantaneously where Baldwin is coming from, which makes his points much more understandable.?Notes? is an essay pertain on the death and funeral of Baldwin?s father in 1943, but a bout of the points Baldwin makes throughout the essay are about being a black man living in the United States during this time, when racial tensions were very strong. In ?Notes,? Baldwin gives the reader first hand accounts of these tensions, including one time he was roughly kil direct. Baldwin had been living in New Jersey for a year, where he ? intentional ? that to be Negro meant, precisely, that one ? was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color in of one?s skin caused in other people? (68). It was in New Jersey that Baldwin truly learned how white people abused black people. On his last night there, he went to a scene with a white friend, and afterwards tried to order some nourishment at a diner. When he was told, ?We don?t serve Negroes here,? (70) his pent up rage took over and he returned to the street... ...anged from disliking him to wishing he were stillness around to help him with the problems of white treatment of blacks he was just now realizing existed . Although his father warned him of these problems, Baldwin had to experience them to believe him. Because the reader cannot experience many of the events that led to Baldwin?s current beliefs, his first hand accounts are the next dress hat thing. These stories make Baldwin?s points more credible in the reader?s mind, just as his father?s points became more credible in Baldwin?s mind after he experienced what his father was inform him about first hand. This credibility from experience is how Baldwin reaches us in the same way his father eventually reached him.Works CitedBaldwin, James. ?Notes of a Native Son.? 1955. James Baldwin Collected Essays. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York Library of America, 1998. 63-84.