Sublime

The writer James Baldwin—the man who is, for my money, the greatest writer of the twentieth century—said: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

William Maxwell says it somewhere in The Folded Leaf: that the teenager gets so brooding in his sexuality and self-sanctity that all he requires of others is their absence.

I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.

And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no-one to watch, no penalties attached—it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

“while the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are among the heaviest counts in the indictment against humanity, colour prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun.”

“It tells what happens to an intelligent Negro who discovers that he has, within American society, no future,” observed the Times review. “And it tells in the most powerful and precise terms what this really means—the systematized destruction of Negro self-esteem as an almost automatic function of white society.”