In Search of a Majority

Abstract

James Baldwin’s becoming a writer had to do with his “trying to discover and… avoid” himself (CE, 809). ¹ He wanted to sculpt an “accumulated rock of ages” to attain a weighty image of himself, and he wanted to make the portrait public and instructive; so he wrote about the conflicts within him (and perhaps in most of us). He wrote about racism, his conflict with his father, and his emerging sexuality both to know who he was and why he feared self-revelation. He struck the “rock” until it revealed what society and his father conditioned him to be and who he wanted, and needed, to be. The rock “scarred [his] hand, and all tools broke against it,” but he pounded away, for, as Baldwin put it, “there was a me, somewhere: I could feel it, stirring within and against captivity. The hope of salvation—identity—depended on whether or not one would be able to decipher and describe the rock” (809). To “claim [his] birthright, of which [his] inheritance was but a shadow, it was necessary to challenge and claim the rock” (810).