392
SUSAN SONTAG
able equanimity owes to the place of love in Baldwin's rhetoric. Love
is always on the horizon, a universal solvent almost in the manner of
Paddy Chayefsky. Again: from what we are shown of the romance struck
up between Richard qnd Juanita-which begins only a few days before
Richard is kiIled-it is unconvincing that Juanita should proclaim that
what she has learned from Richard is how to love. (The truth seems
rather that Richard was just beginning to learn to love, for the first
time, from her.) More important: the whole confrontation between
Richard and Lyle, with its explicit tones of masculine sexual rivalry,
seems inadequately motivated. Richard simply has not enough reason,
except that the author wants to say these things, to introduce the theme
of sexual envy on all the occasions that he does. And quite 'apart from
any consideration of the sentiments expressed, it is grotesque, humanly
and dramatically, for Richard's dying words, as he crawls at Lyle's feet
with three bullets in his gut, to be: "White man! I don't want nothing
from you. You ain't got nothing to give me! You can't talk because
nobody won't talk to you. You can't dance because you've got nobody
to dance with ... Okay. Okay. Okay. Keep your old lady home, you
hear? Don't let her near no nigger. She might get to like it. You might
get to like it, too."
Perhaps the origin of what seems forced, hysterical, unconvincing in
Blues for Mister Charlie-and
in
Dutchman-is
a rather complex dis–
placement of the play's true subject. Race conflict is what the plays are
supposed to be about. Yet also, in both plays, the racial problem is drawn
mainly in terms of sexual attitudes. Baldwin has been very plain about
the reason for this. White America, he charges, has robbed the Negro of
his masculinity. What whites withhold from Negroes, and what Negroes
aspire to, is sexual recognition. The withholding of this recognition-and
its converse, treating the Negro as a mere object of lust-is the heart of
the Negro's pain. As stated in Baldwin's essays, I am persuaded. (This
account doesn't hinder me from considering other consequences, political
and economic, of the Negro's oppression). But what one reads in Bald–
win's last novel, or sees on the stage in
Blues for Mister Charlie,
is con–
siderably less persuasive. In Baldwin's novel and play, it seems to me,
the racial situation has become a kind of code, a metaphor for sexual
conflict. But a sexual problem cannot be wholly masked as a racial
problem. Different tonalities, different specifics of emotion are involved.
The truth is that
Blues for Mister Charlie
isn't really about what it
claims to be about. It is supposed to be about racial strife. But it is
really about the anguish of tabooed sexual longings, about the crisis of
identity which comes from confronting these longings, and about the rage
