Feline Warrior

I am cranky with myself because I didn’t mention something crucial to James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man during class. Never again will I not speak up, even when I feel like I’m having a one-on-one discussion with the professor!

That said… Here’s the crucial part of the story: When the story opens, the main character, Jesse has failed to either attain or maintain an erection. His wife tells him that he has been working too hard and doesn’t make a big deal out of the situation, but it’s important to him. He can feel excitement “like a toothache,” but it isn’t going to his penis. Jesse thinks about asking his wife to perform oral sex on him, “the way he could ask a nigger girl to do” but that, apparently, would not be proper.

As Jesse lays in the dark, his hand is between his legs. He hears the night sounds, but his mind goes to the events that will come the next day - apparently young Blacks trying to get other Blacks registered to vote and Jesse’s role in preventing them from doing so. Jesse ponders this, and he remembers beating the living daylights out of a young Black man in the jail earlier that day. That memory triggers one from his childhood. The childhood memory is horrific (to the reader, to me) yet it is crucially related to the state of Jesse’s penis - and an erotic state of mind.

Of course, the story about the captured Black man being hung and dipped into the fire is just horrible. (Personal aside: I wept when I read it. I get weepy thinking about it. The reality of it makes me sick and weepish.) One of the white men responsible for the torture of the Black man approaches him with a large, gleaming knife. He holds the man’s “privates” in his hand and stretches them out. Jesse has eye contact with the Black man for not as “long as a second, but it seemed longer than a year.” Then the white man takes the knife and cuts up and then down, slicing off the Black man’s “privates.” After this happens, the crowd tears at the man’s body, with knives, rocks, and their hands, and then someone throws kerosene onto the man’s body, which goes up in a huge flame.

This is the connector, the horrific connector. There is so much to say about it that I hope I don’t get off-track in my attempts to share my thoughts. First, there is to consider the belief at that time (and still now, to varying degrees) that Black men are sexual animals, that they want white women sexually and cannot control themselves. (As we discussed in class, a Black man speaking to, looking at, or otherwise interacting with a white woman often resulted in lynching.) So there is a sense of fear of the Black man’s penis - this is what gives him power (in the eyes of the white people). By cutting off the man’s penis (and presumably his scrotum), his power was taken away from him - right before the eyes of the “offended.” That they did it while he was still alive was, of course, monstrous - the pain alone must have made the kerosene seem a gift. However, he was humiliated all along the way: First stripped naked; then hung by a chain over a fire; then dipped into the fire so that his body hair was burned off; then the rest of the torture… all done in front of a crowd of people - white people.

So then, there is humiliation, pain, even more pain, and then a stripping of power - not even a power that the Black man was likely aware of, but a power in the eyes of the white people. If the Black man was aware of that “power,” it was not something that he believed he truly had, but knew it was a fear conjured up by people who wanted to hate him, who wanted to be afraid of him, and who would -and did- kill him because of it. The Black man would not have intentionally acted on that perceived power, because it would land him exactly where the story finds him - being murdered by a hideously perverted, picnicking crowd of whites.

Jesse felt a sense of sexual arousal when the Black man’s “privates” were being displayed by his captor; he felt a sense of arousal later, when he was beating the crap out of the young Black man in the jail. When he recalls these two incidences, his own penis becomes erect and he has sex with his wife. But not just any sex; he says to her, “Come on, sugar, I’m going to do you like a nigger, just like a nigger.” Jesse’s sexual power is returned to him when he is reminded of the Black man’s power being so violently taken away.

This is not a practice that I am familiar with, cutting off a Black man’s genitalia. It sickens me to think that it happened outside of Baldwin’s story, but I imagine it must have happened more than a few times.

Something else that has struck me as fascinating is the title of the story and its meaning. In relation to Blacks, white men in power positions (isn’t that repetitive?!) have often been referred to as “the man” in literature and other cultural/historical references. Yet in this story, the white people are going to see the torture and murder of a Black man. Who is going to see whom? Is “the man” a reference to Jesse’s penis, to his erection? The story is about, in essence, the power that this white man feels as a direct result of witnessing the dreadful event, the violent removal of the Black man’s genitalia; Jesse’s father also becomes aroused by the event. It’s about the arousal this white man feels later, as an adult, when he carries out violence against a Black man. It’s about attaining power at the expense of a Black man.

So there you have it - my thoughts on the sexual-power theme of the story. What a powerful story.