"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways
to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these
eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level,
and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the
ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep
their head above water. It may be the heroin that a
down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring
his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle
piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his
illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a
redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood
memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man
being murdered by a gleeful mob.
By turns haunting,
heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by
Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in
both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man
is a major work by one of our most important writers.
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