ge that blacks and other people of color in the country and the world will one day make such Whites irrelevant: "We will help to make it happen. We promise you" (xvi). It is far more than Baldwin's "tone" which tells us that he is not gently suggesting that whites awaken to reality, but rather issuing a warning of violence to come if they do not thus awaken and change. This passage, one among many, is not saying that whites will be alone responsible for their own irrelevance:
. . . There exists among the intolerably degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real. . . . There is . . . no Negro . . . who has not felt . . . simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day (38).
Such vengeful images are not mere lyrical artifacts of the author's appreciation of Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas. Again, it is not so much that Baldwin is a revolutionary calling for blood, but rather that he plays both the rageful revolutionar
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