What I Learned From "Notes of a Native Son"
"Notes of a Native Son"
I had heard of James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son" long ago, but never got down to reading it until I bought an anthology of essays. "Notes of a Native Son" is an insightful and powerfully descriptive narrative of teenaged James Baldwin, confronting a nation willing to perpetuate a series of betrayals that left multiple generations struggling with unseen psychological wounds, resistant to the treatments intended to correct them. Those betrayals, rationalized over the generations, codified social and economic inequality, creating a class of people unable to gain access to, or develop, the resources that would buoy them in the resulting maelstrom of dehumanization.
I read Baldwin's essay several times and noticed that in several paragraphs, Baldwin describes instances where his father had displayed behaviors symptomatic of what is now known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); Baldwin describes his family's struggle to cope with their patriarch's increasingly bizarre behavior. After some research based on the descriptions provided by Baldwin, it appears that James Baldwin's father may have suffered from PTSD.
Baldwin's father was the first generation of Negroes in the United States who had been "born free". His father's teachings, examples and behavior, based on his life's learning, influenced the son to the degree that one would typically expect; the root of his father's teaching was grounded in the love he felt for his children. However, his experiences with white people had filled him with dread. He struggled to protect his children, "who were black like him and menaced, like him", from the inevitability of becoming despised, and desperately sought to protect them from being exposed to the "poison" of hatred. He lacked the wherewithal to create and express a life lesson from a perspective his own children could comprehend.
The elder Baldwin was a deeply religious man. His children witnessed him minister at several churches. As the fears in his mind overwhelmed him and consumed more of his thoughts, he lost influence over his congregations, eventually withdrawing entirely from friends and congregations. His fear terrorized him to the extent he habitually attempted to withdraw his children from the company of those friends he felt "were in league with the devil", those friends he felt may have complicity in robbing his children of their dignity and identity.
Mr. Baldwin was head of a family of nine children he could barely feed. They lived in poverty, and father "would make little jokes about our poverty". Those jokes were never far from the truth of their situation, and father would rage when the family failed to appreciate his sense of poverty humor. Perhaps those jokes were probing for a token of appreciation for the efforts father made to keep his family fed. Perhaps a laugh from a family member would have lightened the crushing load of responsibility he was obliged to bear, or provide some indication that his family did understand the peril they would all face one day, an indication that his message was getting through.
James describes situations when his father flew into rages for inexplicable reasons. Over the years, he had unintentionally instilled such fear in his children they were reluctant to play with him or have him help with their homework; they would break down and cry simply from the tension created while he was devoting attention to them. To the children he was trying to protect, it appeared their father was irrational and had no reason to lash out or punish his fearful children. Their father knew he was not the man they should fear. Perhaps his anger was born out of disappointment in himself, out of frustration arising from the realization that he could not deliver to his children an antidote for the poison, out of frustration that God may not have provided an antidote, out of frustration his children were rejecting his alternative, bitter counsel, "perhaps poison should be fought with poison." He must have recognized the poison had replaced his rationality with bitterness, distrust and fear; in his way, he became more devoted to God, seeking deliverance, "a stronger antidote to the poison."
Baldwin's family was growing up in a nation during a time when a portion of the population was menacing another through imperious Jim Crow law. In an article in the February 2003 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, Ilan H. Meyer describes "structural discrimination barriers" within the system of our own government, which worked to "thwart prosperity, esteem and honor, and power and influence". The domino effect of denial in political processes, housing, education, employment and health care left powerless African-Americans, like Baldwin's father, under the stresses that come with scant means to gain equal treatment.
Baldwin alludes to his father's feelings of helplessness, when it seemed his father surrendered his effort to "the impossibility every parent...faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child -- by what means? -- a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself." Baldwin describes his father's lesson as one describing how "white people would do anything to keep a Negro down."
The descriptions of his despairing father's behaviors are consistent within the three categories of identified symptoms associated with PTSD. Baldwin describes his father as suffering from frightening thoughts of his children being "menaced, like him." What degree of menacing would one expect the first generation, "born free", to have been subjected? To that point in our nation's history, white America had been at unholy war with African-Americans for hundreds of years, with those who had been denied freedom and equal treatment, treated as one would expect a nation to treat her enemies. Baldwin realized his father's legacy, "nothing is ever escaped". Families have histories with volumes of lessons learned being passed from one generation to the next. The lessons Baldwin's father learned from his mother may have included those things his mother could not escape. In their study published in the May 2002 publication of Ageing and Society titled "A Critical Review of Research on the Mental Health Status of Older African Americans", Terry L. Mills and Carla D. A. Edwards explain why neither generation could comfort the other. Baldwin's father carried lessons forward in his own life, possibly his own life experiences validated the lessons he had learned. There may have been throughout his life, incidents that served as disturbing reminders to his father, why his children must never be off their guard. Unfortunately, Baldwin leaves stories of his father's menacing to our imaginations. "Thou knowest this man's fall; but thou knowest not his wrassling."
Baldwin recounts a summer spent in New Jersey, experiencing the personal, intimate impact of "jim-crow". From his struggle to remain employed at a defense plant surrounded by migrant white southerners, to the "American Diner" where the wait staff refused to serve a Negro, the events that took place on his last night in New Jersey delivered a frightening epiphany, and he figuratively snapped. That night, following a public rage in a second restaurant that refused to serve Negroes, he realized two facts, "that I could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder...my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart".
Dinesh Bughra and Oyedeji Ayonrinde published a study titled "Racism, Racial Life Events and Mental Ill Health" in the September 2001 publication of Advances in Psychiatric Treatment. In their study, they explain that stress due to prejudice may be viewed objectively or subjectively.
The objective view defines stressful life events as real and observable phenomena that are experienced as stressors because of the adaptational demands they impose on most individuals under similar circumstances. The subjective view defines stress as an experience that is contingent on the relationship between the individual and his or her environment. This relationship depends on properties of the external event but also, significantly, of appraisal processes applied by the individual.
To maintain his employment in the defense plants, Baldwin was forced to adapt to a virulently hostile culture that dominated his workplace; his determination to act with self-assuredness at his work resulted in outrageous behavior from his superiors and co-workers, whose basest goals were to deprive him of his livelihood. Possibly, the type of hostile behavior Baldwin was subjected to in his workplace would be in violation of the law today. Through an appraisal process of the "racial life events" he had experienced in New Jersey, he recognized the validity of his father's dread fears.
We learn nothing of any racial life events that Baldwin's father witnessed and experienced in his life. It is common knowledge that slaves were prohibited from obtaining an education. Slaveholders felt it was not in their best interest to have a well-educated workforce. One may suppose his mother may have been so deprived. If so, she would have been no different than the millions of other slaves who were freed suddenly, lacking the resources or empathic support required to meld with the privileged society that had benefitted from hundreds of years of "unrequited toil". There is little reason to suspect Baldwin's father, as a young boy, benefitted in any way through the system of suffocating discrimination that he found himself obliged to live with his entire life.
The National Institute of Mental Health explains that symptoms of PTSD that present themselves as flashbacks or bad dreams or frightening thoughts are grouped as "re-experiencing symptoms". Individuals suffering from these symptoms may suffer anxiety for decades following a traumatic incident, with no evidence of symptoms stabilizing or diminishing in severity over any length of time. NIMH also states:
PTSD was first brought to public attention in relation to war veterans, but it can result from a variety of traumatic incidents, such as mugging, rape, torture, being kidnapped or held captive, child abuse, car accidents, train wrecks, plane crashes, bombings, or natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes.
Throughout the essay, the language Baldwin uses indicates his father suffered from frightening thoughts. His father gradually lost his drive to continue ministering. Worry consumed him over the future his children would see. He was a great deal on edge, "hyperaroused" and prone to raging. He exhibited paranoia, refusing to eat because, he said, his family was trying to poison him. His family had him committed to a hospital, when they learned he had contracted tuberculosis. Perhaps his mistrust of white people extended to white doctors, causing him to ignore the symptoms of any physical or mental disease he may have recognized he was suffering from, and he grew more determined to fight the fever on his own terms. Jim Crow laws effectively restricted African-Americans access to health care training or medical practice. Many suspicious African-Americans suffering from physical and mental health issues chose plainly to "handle it", treating themselves through prayer, faith, family and friends. Just as he had lived until his own mind yielded its control to runaway thoughts.
That summer in New Jersey young James Baldwin confronted racial life events, contracting the dread fever, with a rage in his blood. By the time his father died that summer, he had wrassled those things his father had.
In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father's bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.
It is challenging to study the effects of racial life events due to differing interpretations of events from one individual to another. Events, which are apparently racially motivated, may not be verifiable. Individuals, who may wake one morning to find their property defaced by racial graffiti, may not be able to identify the perpetrators due to the time of day the crime was committed. It may have been too dark for witnesses to identify a suspect observed in the act. Some acts are interpreted initially to be racial; perhaps, on closer examination, it is evident the act was not racially motivated.
However, there is no room for a misinterpretation of Baldwin's description of the events in New Jersey. He was one of the population whose treatment had been determined by the ethnocentric law of the land enacted by those who sought to deny equal opportunity to education, access to health care and employment. The cumulative adverse effects of torturous denial of these opportunities had undeniably affected millions of people over scores of generations, with generations denied the powers to affect the sweeping changes required to hoist themselves from the bottomless pit; each generation passing lessons learned to the next. Mr. Baldwin, and his son, had been so effected. "The past is never dead. It's not even past".
- -- Posted by lamont on Thu, Feb 12, 2015, at 2:57 PM
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