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From Harlem’s Native Son to New Jersey's Invisible Man

Writer L. Lo Sontag kicks off the essay series when Baldwin had his mental break(through) in a fine dining establishment in Trenton.



James Baldwin, Dewitt Clinton High School, Bronx, NY, 1942.
“I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people…”

― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son


Blackness often renders one invisible.


Right out of high school, young Jimmy Baldwin headed to Belle Mead, NJ, in 1942, where civilians were busy building America’s largest and most discretely located army depot right in the heart of the Eastern Seaboard. Baldwin made good money for the time—$80 per week plus overtime, or the equivalent of nearly $1,600 today. Most of it went back home to Harlem, and the rest fueled his disgust for the Trenton bars and Princeton restaurants that turned him away.


At the same time New Jersey was denying Baldwin service, Black people were being denied jobs in New York and Chicago, and their bodies and lives in the South. The lynching of the 1920s terrorized the Black population into subordination, bringing about the end of Black suffrage, working professional jobs, and walking around after dark. The Negro Motorist Green Book began publication in 1936 to protect its readers from lethal consequences for minor transgressions. With few job prospects or basic dignities, Black men were quickly drafted for the war effort and sent “down the river” to the South to undo their uppity Northern ways.   

Civilian Recruitment Efforts for Belle Mead Army Service Forces Depot

Civilian Recruitment Efforts for Belle Mead Army Service Forces Depot.


A mere five miles from Princeton is Grovers Mill – the setting for Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of HG Wells’ “War of the Worlds.” In this dramatic 1938 retelling of a Martian invasion, it was initially reported – and later debunked – that a nationwide panic ensued, to the point of prodding the FCC into a 60-day investigation. If this smacks of paranoia, remember that this is the eve of World War II, where Europe and its political pawns are bracing for more earthly invasions, while at home, the National Urban League and the NAACP are galvanizing the civil rights movement. Just as “War of the Worlds” was a contrived group panic in reaction to fake aliens, so was the response to Baldwin’s arrival into 93%-white New Jersey four years later.


Baldwin described his year in New Jersey in Notes Of a Native Son – in an essay of the same name – as an experience so guttural it takes up the midsection, of the midsection, of this autobiographical work. Notes Of a Native Son was his allusion to Richard Wright’s Native Son, written two years before Baldwin arrived in the Garden State. At the center of Wright’s novel is Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old who can’t seem to escape a fate that is ultimately of Wright’s making. Baldwin criticized the work as being a distorted stereotype of the consequences of racism – a bit of a prickly critique owing to the fact that Wright was a kind of mentor: 

It seems to me that this idea carries, implicitly, a most remarkable confession: that is, that Negro life is in fact, as debased and impoverished as our theology claims; and, further, that the use to which Wright puts this idea can only proceed from the assumption—not entirely unsound—that Americans, who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experience, have therefore no way of assessing the experience of others and no way of establishing themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own. The privacy or obscurity of Negro life makes that life capable, in our imaginations, of producing anything at all; and thus the idea of Bigger’s monstrosity can be presented without fear of contradiction, since no American has the knowledge or authority to contest it and no Negro has the voice.

Everybody’s Protest Novel, Baldwin (1955)


In other words, Bigger was too big and too visible in all the wrong ways. In an interview with Richard G. Stern, Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, concurred that “Bigger Thomas had none of the finer qualities of Richard Wright, none of the sense of poetry, none of the gaiety. And I preferred Richard Wright to Bigger Thomas.” 


Perhaps it was Ellison’s rendition of an invisible Black man that Ellison preferred most, one who hides from the world but treads his way back into it in search of his moral ground:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.

Invisible Man, Ellison (1952)


In a sort of critical fabulation in reverse, Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son adds the lacking context to Wright’s Bigger, delivered as a lived experience of America's racism through the lens of New Jersey (and Harlem and New Orleans, for that matter). There is no American refuge to be found for Baldwin, Bigger, or any Black person. Like “War of The Worlds,” the public prefers the distortions that corroborate already baked hate and fears, especially when they can render those distortions as truth. 


The truth can’t be allowed to live under the occupation.

—This Land is Mine (1943)


On his last night in New Jersey, after viewing a screening of the film “This Land is Mine,” Baldwin had his mental break(through). The irony of the film he had just beheld was not lost on him: an innocent man being forced to confess to a crime carried out by lying fascists. What was Baldwin’s crime? Not understanding his prostrate place in his (un)changing homeland of America. 



Poster and Film stills from "This Land Is Mine," 1943.


“‘We don’t serve Negros here,’ said the waitress … with a note of apology.”

Notes on a Native Son, Baldwin (1955)


“Here” was the American Diner in Princeton, but for Baldwin, “here” was now America itself. Words uttered a thousand times finally sank in as rage and had him running for his life.


So, was it just a New Jersey thing? The racist policies of the Wilsonian era – starting as president of Princeton University, then governor of New Jersey, and finally as President of the United States – had been reverberating for decades by the time Baldwin arrived. Woodrow Wilson’s Presidency (1913-1921) saw the systematic dismantling of African American civil rights and a lifting up of the neo-confederacy. The South rose again under his time and shook out the fruits of Reconstruction that produced W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey. Without those fruits, Baldwin was on his own.


1924 marks not one but two entangled anniversaries: the year Baldwin was born, and the year Wilson died. Together, their worlds created a heaving 1940s, when racism was very real and often violent at the same time that it was publicly repressed and increasingly resisted. One way to control the resistance of Black people was to limit where they work and how they assemble. This is the machine that produces their invisibility – Wilson was the operator, and Baldwin was the cog. 


[W]ho vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall

Howl, Allen Ginsburg (1955)



James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg, 1986.

Photo by Patrick Warner.


To borrow from Marx, a specter is haunting America, and the specter is New Jersey. Being visible is more than having a name. It is an individual identity. When Baldwin was in New Jersey, he was no longer an individual. He was no longer James. He became a name that we will not print. We do not wish to empower and sanction the slur. James was an American with a heritage from the US South and Africa. He had a loving mother and eight siblings. He was an aspiring writer, but outside of his neighborhood, he was a racial slur, a word that is shorthand for a social hierarchy based on race and socioeconomic standing. 


In many ways, New Jersey has to contend with its own besmirch. The slur “the suburbs” has become shorthand for a regional hierarchy in which the city of New York is the Master, then New Jersey is the “downstairs” servant and everything else is either invisible or unacknowledged. But in his neighborhood of Harlem, Baldwin attended a culturally diverse school with Black, Puerto Rican, Italian, and Jewish Americans. The school teacher who mentored and chaperoned him at his first play was a white woman from the Midwest, but this American Jambalaya of Harlem would be short-lived in the Metro. The Ginsbergian “Howls” would not be heard in Harlem until the late 1930s.


When Baldwin left New Jersey, he stated it was not because of what he feared would happen to him by others, but what he feared his growing hate of his situation would do to him. When one becomes invisible to become visible, one often screams, but it never works because if you cannot be seen, you also cannot be heard. To be seen again, he had to leave the US, not New Jersey, and that is the most critical part of Baldwin’s New Jersey anecdote. 


 

L. Lo Sontag is an urbanist, essayist, and poet living in the “City of New Jersey.” She, is the Inaugural Sadie T.M. Alexander Economics Fellow at The New School and a former Ethic and Equity Fellow at the Lincoln Land Policy Institute. She is the curator of La Ciclovía de Bloomfield Conversations, a series discussing the climate crisis impacts on New Jersey.

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