“[James] Baldwin’s bitterness was fired by working in a defence plant in New Jersey during the war, and learning that ‘bars, bowling alleys, diners, places to live’ were closed to him. There was something about him that made him insist on going into these places, suffering rejection, forcing them to refuse to serve him. He described his last night there when, having been refused in a diner, he went into ‘an enormous, glittering and fashionable restaurant in which I knew not even the intercession of the Virgin would cause me to be served’. He sat at a table until a waitress came and said: ‘We don’t serve Negroes here.’ He noted the fear and the apology in her voice. ‘I wanted her to come close enough for me to get her neck between my hands.’ Instead, he threw a half-full mug of water at her, missed and ran. Later, he realised that he ‘had been ready to commit murder. I saw nothing very clearly, but I did see this: that 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.’Baldwin’s tone in these early essays was not simply political; he was not demanding legislation or urgent government action. He did not present himself as innocent and the others as guilty. He sought to do something more truthful and difficult. He sought to show that the damage had entered his soul and could not be easily dislodged, and he sought also to show that the soul of America itself was a great stained soul. He shook his head at the possibility that anything other than mass conversion could change things. He had not been a child preacher for nothing.”
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