James Baldwin's story "Going to Meet the Man" is set in a southern town in the US. It's important that the story takes place in the south, but even more important than the where is the when.
It's always good to know two things about the timing of a story. When does the story itself take place? And when was the story actually written or published? This helps us make more sense of what's going on in the plot, plus we can get the big picture about what was going on in the world when people were first reading the story.
In this case, the story was published in 1965 (that's when people could first read it) and it takes place in probably somewhere between 1886 and 1900, a chaotic time of extremely violent racism toward blacks. We see the main character, Jesse, as both a child and an adult in the story, which is how we know that the time span of the story must be fairly long rather than a single year.
Reflecting on why it would be relevant for Baldwin to write in 1965 about the violence and cruelty of the not-so-distant past, it becomes clear that the struggle for civil rights was reaching a critical period then; it was important for people to understand just how far we as a society have come (or have failed to come) in our progress toward equality.
When a story doesn't say what year(s) it takes place in exactly, try looking for historical clues:
We know from the story that the Jim Crow laws are already in place, for example, so it has to take place after 1870. Since Jesse's attitude toward blacks is that they're the source of his problems and don't deserve any bit of humane treatment they do get, it's probably after 1875, the year the first of the Civil Rights Acts was passed. And since mob violence and lynching take center stage in the story, we might make a good guess that the section of the story with the child Jesse takes place between 1886 and 1900, the height of lynchings and one of the darkest time periods in our nation's history.
No comments:
Post a Comment