Vanishing into Limbo: The Moral Dilemma of Identity as Property and Commodity

Abstract

In this 1955 essay, Baldwin explores Richard Wright’s novel Native Son to illuminate what it means to be a Negro in America. For Baldwin, this is visceral. He is tired of Black folk being treated as mere social agendas rather than as flesh and blood. He notes that dehumanization is never a one-way street, that the loss of identity—be it stolen, borrowed, denied, or annihilated—has consequences far beyond those who are the immediate victims. For Baldwin, our crimes against ourselves echo and haunt and damn and eviscerate us. It is not enough (not in 1955 when the essay was published, not today) to think that we can leave our memories checked at some dismal door of gerrymandered elections or xenophobic nationalism or sycophantic equalities. Indeed for Baldwin, the story of Black folk is the story of Americans, one that is not, in his words, “a very pretty story. ”² This is a story of shadows, or a series of shadows that are for Baldwin “self-created, intertwining.” And, sadly, Black folk do not exist except in “the darkness of our minds.”

… what it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested by an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him.

Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom are dead, their places taken by a group of amazingly well-adjusted young men and women, almost as dark, but ferociously literate, well-dressed and scrubbed, who are never laughed at, who are not likely ever to set foot in a cotton or tobacco field or in any but the most modern of kitchens. There are others who remain, in our odd idiom, “underprivileged”; some are bitter and these come to grief; some are unhappy, but, continually presented with the evidence of a better day soon to come, are speedily becoming less so. Most of them care nothing whatever about race. They want only their proper place in the sun and the right to be left alone, like any other citizen of the republic. We may all breathe more easily. Before, however, our joy at the demise of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom approaches the indecent, we had better ask whence they sprang, how they lived? Into what limbo have they vanished?¹

—James Baldwin,“Many Thousands Gone”