A review by creekhiker
Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

5.0

Wow. James Baldwin is an absolute master. I've read and taught "Sonny's Blues," so many times over the years, but this is the first time I've read this entire collection, and it just devastated me in that way only the best fiction and writing can do. He writes from so many different POVs and perspectives, from the perspective of young kids, with two stories following the same two kids, as the older of the two, and the only one from the mothers pre-married life, endures the hate of his step-father, and the loneliness of his love for his best friend; he writes from the perspective a black woman in her twenties living in Greenwich Village and sleeping with an unfaithful white artist; he writes from the perspective of a musician who lived in France for 12 years, and now is facing returning to America with his white Swedish wife and his son who has never known racism and hate; and in the very last story in the collection, and the most devastating, he writes from the perspective of a Southern white deputy, facing the civil unrest and civil disobedience of the civil rights movement, and he remembers not just nearly beating a black man he arrested earlier, but then dips deeper back in his memory to remember the first lynching his father and mother took him too, in all its graphic horror. The feat of empathy that Baldwin achieved to write the voice of that white man filled with such hate and confusion, and to imagine him as an eight year old innocent, who loses his innocence, is truly astonishing.