Notes of a Native Son Read Free

college campus I had ever seen, and, without these men, I do not know what would have become of my morale. The play, thank God, was a tremendous seven-or ten-day wonder, playing to standing room only on the last night, in spite of a reluctant, not yet Black faculty (“This play will set back the Speech Department by thirty years!”), a bewildered
Variety
(“What do you think Negroes in the North will think of this play?”), and the fact that it was not to be seen again for nearly ten years. And I had fallen in love. I was happy—the world had never before been so beautiful a place.
    There was only one small hitch. I—we—didn’t have a dime, no pot, nor no window.
    Sol Stein returned to the attack. We had agreed on nine essays, he wanted a tenth, and I wrote the title essay between Owen’s house and the Dunbar Hotel. Returned to New York, where I finished
Giovanni’s Room.
Publisher’s Row, that hotbed of perception, looked on the book with horror and loathing, refused to touch it, saying that I was a young
Negro
writer, who, if he published this book, would alienate his audience and ruin his career. They would not, in short, publish it, as a favor to me. I conveyed my gratitude, perhaps a shade too sharply, borrowed money from a friend, and myself and my lover took the boat to France.
    I had never thought of myself as an essayist: the idea had never entered my mind. Even—or, perhaps, especially now—I find it hard to re-create the journey.
    It has something to do, certainly, with what I was trying to discover and, also, trying to avoid. If I was trying to discover myself—on the whole, when examined, a somewhat dubious notion, since I was also trying to avoid myself—there was, certainly, between that self and me, the accumulated rock of ages. This rock scarred the hand, and all tools broke against it. Yet, there was a
me,
somewhere: I could feel it, stirring within and against captivity. The hope of salvation—identity—depended on whether or not one would be able to decipher and describe the rock.
    One song cries,
“lead me to the rock that is higher than I,”
and another cries,
“hide me in the rock!”
and yet another proclaims,
“I got a home in that rock.”
Or,
“I ran to the rock to hide my face: the rock cried out, no hiding place!”
    The accumulated rock of ages deciphered itself as a part of my inheritance—a part, mind you, not the totality—but, in order to claim my birthright, of which my inheritance was but a shadow, it was necessary to challenge and claim the rock. Otherwise, the rock claimed me.
    Or, to put it another way, my inheritance was particular, specifically limited and limiting: my birthright was vast, connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever. But one cannot claim the birthright without accepting the inheritance.
    Therefore, when I began, seriously, to write—when I knew I was committed, that this would be my life—I had to try to describe that particular condition which was—is—the living proof of my inheritance. And, at the same time, with that very same description, I had to claim my birthright. I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.
    The conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American, be he/she legally or actually Black or White. It is a fearful inheritance, for which untold multitudes, long ago, sold their birthright. Multitudes are doing so, until today. This horror has so welded past and present that it is virtually impossible and certainly meaningless to speak of it as occurring, as it were, in time. It can be, and it has been, suicidal to attempt to speak of this to a multitude, which, assuming it knows that time exists, believes that time can be outwitted.
    Something like this, anyway, has something to do with my beginnings. I was trying to locate myself within a specific inheritance and to use that inheritance, precisely, to claim the birthright from