This study will examine James Baldwin's portrayal of interracial relationships in the story "Come Out the Wilderness" (from the collection Going to Met the Man) and in the novel Another Country. The study will focus on the relationships between Paul and Ruth in "Come Out the Wilderness" and Rufus and Leona and Ida and Vivaldo in Another Country. The relationship between Paul and Ruth is far more simple than the other two relationships, and Baldwin's attitude toward that relationship seems clearly judgmental. The two interracial relationships in Another Country are more complex and it is not nearly so clear what Baldwin's attitude is toward them.
Paul in "Come out the Wilderness" is the epitome of the victimizer as white man, and Ruth is the epitome of the victim as black female. Ruth never knows Paul in any significant way, as white or as man, because she does not know herself, as black or as woman. She sees him through the illusion of her fantasies white men, in both negative and positive terms. She immediately shows her ambivalence toward Paul on the first page of the story. First, she says that his hairy body proves that whites are less evolved than blacks who have less hair. Then she compares him to the extraordinariness of the sun and to a statue by Michelangelo. Yet, as badly as he treats her, as disrespectful and uncaring as he is toward her, she is dependent on him and is terrified of losing him. In this passage she worries as he leaves the house late at night:
She was very sensitive to his comings and goings. . . . She lay there on a bed that inexorably became a bed of ashes and hot coals, while her imagination dwelt on every conceivable disaster, from his having forsaken her for another woman to his having, somehow, ended up in the morgue (Baldwin, "Come," 197-198).
The relationship from Ruth's point of view can be compared to that of slave's attitude of dependence and fear toward her owner. She is a subservient b...