Going To Meet The Man

"And he was a good man, a God-fearing man, he had tried to do his duty all his life." 

Jesse, having been indoctrinated into the myth of white supremacy since birth, believes that his duty is to keep black people subordinate to white people. Jesse also believes that black people inherently act against God.

"They were animals, they were no better than animals, what could be done with people like that?" 

Lacking both empathy and an understanding of the structural racism that caused rural black Americans to live in poverty, Jesse strips the black population in his town of their humanity. He also blames them for their living conditions, and accuses black people of laziness and poor hygiene.

"Wouldn't you think they'd learn?" 

Because he grew up in a racist society, Jesse lacks the framework for understanding how structural racism has oppressed black Americans in every way. Instead, Jesse blames his black neighbors for their own poverty and puts the onus on them to change their lives for the better. 

"At the same time, he felt very close to a very peculiar, particular joy; something deep in him and deep in his memory was stirred, but whatever was in his memory eluded him." 

The memory of the man's lynching comes back to Jesse when he remembers the singing of an African-American spiritual. This event has such an impact on Jesse that it determines his sense of masculinity, sexuality, and life purpose—though these things sit uneasily with him for reasons hedoesn't quite understand.

"You going to call our women by their right names yet." 

Jesse's disrespectful addressing of the young man's grandson speaks to a consistent lack of regard for black Americans' proper names, as in the practice of calling grown black men 'boy.' Mrs. Blossom's grandson and his fellow activists demand respect from white America, even when bleeding and beaten on a jailhouse floor.

"I don't want nothing you got, white man." 

Even as a child, Mrs. Blossom's grandson understands Jesse's predatory racism and rejects it with the little power he has: language. Being called “white man” as an adult makes Jesse grab his privates, effectively causing Jesse emasculation.

"He was only doing his duty: protecting white people from the niggers and the niggers from themselves."

Jesse has only been exposed to one way of thinking about race: that white people are superior to black people, the latter of whom are incapable of overcoming their station in life. As evidence, he consistently refers to black people with the n-word and blames them for their poverty. Jesse also views the very existence of black people as threatening to whites, so he sees his role as protector of his race and patriarchal arbiter of African-Americans.

"Each man[…]seemed wrestling[…]with a secret which he could not articulate to himself, and which, however directly it related to the war, related yet more surely to his privacy and his past."

Jesse feels Southern whites are engaged in a clandestine war against the uprising of the Southern black population. The white men involved, though, each have complex relationships to race and express their beliefs in a slightly different way, mostly based on their past experiences, like Jesse's witnessing of a lynching.

"He felt an overwhelming fear, which yet contained a curious and dreadful pleasure." 

Baldwin does not give Jesse the stereotypical one-dimensional Southern racist treatment; rather, he portrays Jesse as a nuanced person with a complex relationship to his identity. Rather than a blind hatred, Jesse's racism encompasses fear, envy, confusion, arousal, and protectiveness, among other aspects. It’s at once complex and static.

"The singing came from far away, across the dark fields."

The mournful singing by the town's black population after the lynching becomes the key that unlocks this buried memory for Jesse. It helps the reader to understand why the protestors' singing is so traumatic and powerful for Jesse later in his life.

"He was a big man, a bigger man than his father, and black as an African jungle cat, and naked." 

Even as a boy, Jesse exoticizes and dehumanizes the black man he sees being lynched, comparing to something animate but non-human. The impression the man's body leaves on young Jesse causes him to feel both sexually intimidated and aroused by black men's bodies. 

"They wanted to make death wait: and it was they who held death, now, on a leash which they lengthened little by little." 

The power the lynch mob holds over the black man they've captured becomes a powerful metaphor for the absolute power whites held over Southern blacks for over a century, deciding how and when black lives will commence, continue, and end. As a boy this disturbs Jesse, who hopes for a quick death for the man, but it has penetrated his consciousness enough that, as an adult, he tortures black men in similar ways.

"Her eyes were very bright, her mouth was open: she was more beautiful than he had ever seen her, and more strange." 

Jesse's mother revels in the lynching, taking her time to get herself ready. As a white woman, witnessing the lynching of a black man for an alleged assault of a white woman would confirm the constructed vulnerability and primacy of her femininity and its need for protection. This affects Jesse greatly.