James Baldwin

The price one pays for pursuing any profession,

or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

Not everything that is faced can be changed,

but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

In The Price of the Ticket, with a mature perspective, we enjoy the collected nonfiction works of author James Baldwin between the period covering 1945-1985. Seldom can a work that seeks to explore an individual have as its foundation to reveal itself wholly quotes by that same individual, but such a study we have within the focus of this analysis. In the spotlight of such company we might propose a Gandhi or King, Jr.,; however, in the shadows, as consistent, as worthy, as humanistic, but, perhaps, less political or with a less full-blown but equally valid agenda, we find the distinguished Mr. Baldwin. Not a black writer, not a gay writer, not even a militant self-serving pamphleteer, just a passionate human being, who, refusing to accept the baggage of the former preconditioned occupations, only fought at a certain level of awareness engendered by the journey up till then, predicated and catalyzed by the latter concern. Sit back and learn the tale of humanism, it’s going to be a bumpy ride and, so, historically, it is a battle that has always been.

However, to get to the heart of the matter, which is to say the heart of the man who was all heart, let’s digres

. . .
s in an effort to retain supremacy as the “good” (read white) versus the “bad” (anything not white). In other words, this very oppressive structure of society was the same oppressive structure his father bought into, one he would reject from being educated enough to realize the broader, more subtle forces that create such a structure. In his critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin he undermines the supposed “lofty” purpose to chronicle the horrors of slavery by Stowe, because he knows the author did nothing to expose within the story the deeper, historically and socially constructed, phenomena that caused white people to commit such atrocities. While still a young man of 25, Baldwin dismissed the work as nothing more than a pretentious moral sampler: “Miss Ophelia’s reaction is, at least, vehemently right-minded: ‘This is perfectly horrible!’ she exclaims. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!’ Miss Opehlia, as we may suppose, was speaking for the author; her exclamation is the moral, neatly framed, and incontestable like those improving mottoes sometimes found hanging on the walls of furnished rooms. And, like those mottoes, before which one invariably flinches, recognizing an insupportable, almost an indecent glibness, she and S
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Approximate Word count = 6146
Approximate Pages = 25 (250 words per page)

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