Assignment for 10/12 - Baldwin

The frame of “Stranger in the Village” allows James Baldwin to write about dangerous subjects in relative safety. He is thinking about America having left it, in this essay. Geographically in Switzerland, Baldwin is in a country famed for remaining neutral during wars. He is reporting on a war in this essay, one fought within America for control of history, perception, and power. He has taken on the role of observer while still claiming his place in the trenches. He moves from warrior to war correspondent without tripping.

Switzerland is not an entirely safe place for Baldwin, but it is unsafe in an almost quaint fashion. He is the first black man the people in this town have ever seen. The baggage they carry about having a black man in their presence is primarily religious. “...other children, having been taught that the devil is a black man, scream in genuine anguish as I approach.” (163) Their fear rises from a metaphor rather than from deep-rooted psychological uneasiness, and while their reactions anger him, he can come to terms with certain parts of his treatment in town because he can attribute it to a single source.

Baldwin is a stranger to this small town in more ways than one. He has left his country. He is a different color. The language he thinks in is foreign. One of the main attracting features of the town is the hot springs, and “cripples” often come. He is not physically a cripple, but the way he writes about being a black man in America is clearly meant to draw the parallel. He is in a place for restoration, and it seems that he does find some there. He writes about the way children respond to him in the first part of the essay, using the theme of childhood innocence and in fact, the innocence of an entire community of people, to set off what he has to say about America. “There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the city in which I was born, between the children who shouted Neger! today and those who shouted Nigger! yesterday--the abyss is experience, the American experience. The syllable hurled behind me today expresses, above all, wonder: I am a stranger here. But I am not a stranger in America...” (164)

He uses complex hypotactic sentences, stacking one after another. They link. They flow. They are arranged to make his point, and the point is not a pleasant one, so it has to be written as unassailable. The sentences also periodic. They have been planned. He is not talking. He is writing.