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Going to Meet the Man is a collection of short stories by James Baldwin, each pulsing with emotional heat, each itching and pinching with the discomfort of race. Baldwin grew up in the projects of Harlem in the 1930s and it is here that several stories in this collection are set. Baldwin’s choice to use his childhood home as setting for fictional characters textures the reading with both nostalgia and pain.

Baldwin left Harlem in his twenties after working odd jobs as volunteer preacher, sweat shop laborer, and Greenwich Village artisan. He fled to France where he hoped his homosexuality and African American status would not serve to type cast his creative work—writing fiction. And indeed, the work of Going to Meet the Man is not so easily shelved. Writer as exile appears in several Baldwinian protagonists in this series. Whether identity is within or without oneself is the question that arises when one writes of home. Does one find thyself by going home, or by leaving it?

Baldwin writes of the permanence of the projects and the people who live in the projects in the story “The Rockpile.” Two young brothers perch in a high rise fire escape and watch the dangerous neighborhood proceedings at the rockpile, a presumed playground. They both yearn to get out of their home and join the other boys climbing the rock, a formation which Aunt Florence had once told them was there and “could not be taken away” because of “some natural mystery concerning the surface and the center of the earth.” The rockpile has such mystery and allure it is inevitable that in the course of the story one of the two sneak out of the house against admonition and there the daring child is hurt. Home, as the rockpile, is: a place with equal danger and allure; at once a place that always is and also a place that must be found; a place that is as fundamental to earth as the very rock it is made of; a place where we are inevitably hurt.

The tension between inside and outside appears again in the story “Previous Condition.” Peter is a black actor in New York who literally cannot find a home. He gets evicted from an all-white apartment building where he lives as a squatter. He couch surfs on the charity of friends in his artist community, a family of misfits with whom he is alternately at ease and at arms. In the final scene he repairs to a Harlem “rundown bar on Seventh Avenue. My people, my people.” There he offends somebody’s grandmother who says to him “N[word], You must think you’s somebody.” He proceeds to drink excessively, alone, and admits that although he wants to stop drinking and leave, he is afraid to go because he has nowhere to sleep. So he keeps drinking. He offers the grandmotherly character a drink, and though she still does not trust him, a man who fits nowhere not even in his home with his people, she offers, “What’s your story?” to which he replies, “I got no story, Ma.” No home means no self. The reader wonders if Peter’s defeat and storylessness is Baldwin’s own. Writing home from France, does Baldwin feel he has no story that fits? Can he not sleep for want of story? Does he drink desperate for story?

The repetition of “My people, my people” has a sardonic and elegiac tone, and it is a device Baldwin employs several times in the story “Sonny’s Blues.” It has the sadness of Gertrude Stein’s writing of home in Everybody’s Autobiography, “There is no there there.” The opening scene of “Sonny’s Blues” finds a Harlem man on the subway reading of his brother’s drug arrest in disbelief. “I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again;” “He’d always been a good boy, he hadn’t ever turned hard or evil or disrespectful, the way kids can, so quick, so quick, especially in Harlem.” Shame, shame. Tsk, tsk. It is a denunciation and a mourning at once for what we rue that is but should not be: poverty; home falling apart; human frailty; suffering. It is a laughing curse like those of the children in his classroom, the Harlem boys like the one he used to be, boys whose laughter is not the laughter of children, but the laughter of the disenchanted. “[The laughter] was mocking and insular, its intent was to denigrate. It was disenchanted, and in this, also, lay the authority of their curses.” Insular is an important word here—meaning “of islands”—these children are not united in suffering, they suffer together but inwardly. They cannot share what hurts them, rather, they use it to disparage and belittle others also hurting. A violent way of grief. A hard look at home.

Home in Harlem in this story is described with imagery similar to what Baldwin used in “The Rockpile.” The brother and Sonny return together when Sonny gets out of prison. In silence they drive “toward the vivid, killing streets of our childhood. These streets hadn’t changed, though housing projects jutted up out of them like rocks in the middle of a boiling sea…houses exactly like those of our past yet dominated the landscape, boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn’t. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in the trap. It might be said, perhaps, that I had escaped, after all, I was a school teacher.” The primordial, primeval, primacy of poverty, of suffering, of home for Baldwin is tragic. He cannot decide whether he has or hasn’t escaped, whether he wants or abhors escaping a place he both loves and hates.