Notes of a Native Son

Notes of a Native Son Summary | Everybody's Protest Novel Summary

Notes of a Native Son is a collection of essays written by James Baldwin during the 1940s and 1950s pre-civil rights era to illuminate the life conditions for the Negro people during this in America. In the book's first essay, Baldwin derides Harriet Beecher Stowe's pre-Civil War novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, as the icon for inaccurately portraying the full scope of the Negro experience. Baldwin calls the book a very bad novel in its self righteous and virtuous sentimentality.

From that sentimentality stems dishonesty, and however well-intentioned Stowe may be, the novel does not accurately portray the complete dimensions of life in the time period. Stowe elicits sympathy from her readers in what Baldwin feels is the limited capacity of a pamphlet, not a full novel on the topic.

Furthermore, Baldwin believes that the only three important Negro characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin are Eliza, whose mulatto status saves her from the dire situation of most Negro women of the period; George, whose mechanical skills redeem him from being the typical darkie; and of course, Uncle Tom, who is the epitome of the jungle black man, destined to a life as a beast of burden. Stowe has chosen to make Eliza and George as white as Negro people could be and has projected Uncle Tom to the extreme of the Negro spectrum. Baldwin feels that, in the novel, black equates with evil and white equates with grace, which is a completely ridiculous and inaccurate perspective.

Baldwin also criticizes Richard Wright's Native Son as a more modern piece of shallow propaganda for the Negro experience. Badly written and lacking any strength, Native Son, according to Baldwin, raises questions that have no real bearing on Negro people. The form of the protest novel is comparable to missionaries who attempt to cover the nakedness of African people in order to make them more like white people and therefore, more worthy of redemption.