Suspension Sloping Off, Stranger in the Village

I should have only taken two, but I was already high and not lending much focus to irreverent details like 'uptown,' 'downtown' signs, so it took three trains; that is three separate subway transfers to get me to Roosevelt Island on Saturday night. Resilient patience is a quality that these nights instill. Rushing between platforms to catch late night trains before they skid off into their tunnels, leaving only a fleeting gust of humid exhaust and a thirty minute interval before the next arrival, I have developed patience. L to 3rd, L back to 14th, and J uptown all the way to Roosevelt Island, a few flights of stairs, then a static escalator, and now all I have to do is find the place. I forgot to write down the address. It's starting to rain, not pour, but a light shower seems imminent. A dull blue light illuminates the phone dial, as I punch the keys in the dark; scrolling through names, noting those who might know the address, my destination. Manhattan looms between apartments to the east, as I squint at the screen and stroll without specific direction. I don't care. I'm tired. With any luck, I'll be drunk or half-drunk, within two hours and I won't have to care. Although the night skyline is really nice from Roosevelt Island, gazing from the outside in, but I don't really care: I'm tired.

Baldwin:

Though James Baldwin's tone oscillates throughout 'Stranger in the Village' between an ironic reflection and an emphatic examination of that same irony's underlying tensions; subtle narrative observations catalyze his argument by distinguishing his voice from writers who more directly and perhaps more haphazardly approach racial issues. Setting his essay within a vivid account of his stay in an isolated Swiss village, Baldwin may not only juxtapose America's race-relations to those of Europe's, but he manages to deter readers from judging his work as exclusively critical of America. Instead, early into the passage readers find themselves absorbed by its context without minding the political implications of it's content.

While Baldwin introduces the subject of 'the black man' within the first sentence of his narrative, he refrains moralizing thesis until well into the work, after he has established a humanizing precedent for the account. Much of his first two pages ironically describes the homogenous population of his Swiss setting. His account of the village's solitary Protestant church and the absence of a movie theater or even a bank, constructs a very un-American image of this locale, but ultimately Baldwin progresses to a humanizing element of the village cultural; which establishes the universality of his theme.

"There is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in the spectacle of a person who has lost one of his faculties," Baldwin describes the seasonal pilgrimage of handicapped citizens to dip in the mountain village's hot-spring, "a faculty he never questioned until it was gone, and who struggles to recover it. Yet people remain people"

This thematic parallel occurs within the same paragraph in which Baldwin's begins transitioning the tone of his narration by recalling the first encounter with European reaction to race. "Neger! Neger!" the children proclaim as Baldwin passes on the street, though he professes their innocents, he admits his own frustration with their disposition; and so as the fourth paragraph of his essay begins, Baldwin recalls his reaction and first begins his juxtaposition of 'the American Negro' with 'the black man' abroad.

A historical and moralistic narration ensues. His account questions not only race-relations in America, but the significance of those relations within the global discourse on race. By writing from a neutral nation, Baldwin frames his story beyond the scope of national politics, implying that race-relations are a transcontinental and essentially human controversy. As a writer, Baldwin emphatically and with some reasonably palpable rage, states his thesis for the rights of 'the black man,' worldwide and in America, but as a stylist Baldwin also empowers his ironic tone and setting to mediate his message in a means that surpasses the limits of language.