I read James Baldwin’s book Another Country a couple of months ago, and I’ve been puzzled by one of the themes ever since: sex. Why is there so much of it? What is Baldwin trying to show?
So I got this idea, like all of my great ideas, in the midst of doing my math homework. The uncomfortable amount of sex in Another Country is a means through which Baldwin portrays race. Whoa, two big scary words. Take a big breath, kids, and let’s get to it.
First, let’s talk about violence. Whenever Baldwin writes about sex, there’s always some sort of violence involved. Unsettling, horrible violence. Take Rufus, for example, and his relationship with Leona. All day he beats her, and all night he loves her. There’s this pattern of violence and love and violence and love over and over again. The first clue I found on page 68, where we find Vivaldo (Vivaldo being Rufus’ friend for a long time, but being a white man, is rejected by Rufus time and time again) and Rufus talking, Rufus is already descending into madness. This is what he says:
‘She [Leona] loves colored folks so much,’ said Rufus, ‘sometimes I just can’t stand it. You know all that chick knows about me? The only thing she knows?’ (Baldwin 68)
He then crudely motions to himself, which I thought I’d leave out for the sake of decency. There’s this hate, real burning hate, that Rufus holds for Leona, but there’s love too, and he cannot distinguish one from the other. His feelings for her are twisted at best, and, well, I don’t really know what to call them at worst, and this is where Rufus’ madness comes from. It stems from the fact that he loves a white woman. Leona puts it quite nicely on page 58:
He [Rufus] had a fight last week with some guy in the subway, some real, ignorant, unhappy man just didn’t like the thought of our being together, you know? …he blamed that fight on me. He said I was encouraging the man. Why, Viv, I didn’t even see the man until he opened his mouth. But, Rufus, he’s all the time looking for it, he sees it where it ain’t, he don’t see nothing else no more. (Baldwin 58)
This is the internal struggle that Baldwin is trying to portray. It’s the fact that society has told the black man that he can never love a white woman, and that both of them are lesser for it. The black man, throughout his life, has hated the white, and then, when he falls in love, he cannot forgive himself. He cannot forgive himself for falling in love with his sworn enemy. Rufus feels this shame, this disgust with himself, and he believes that everyone around him knows it. Everyone around him knows that he was seduced by a white woman. To black people, that makes him a traitor, a creature less than a man. To whites, he is what he always has been. It’s this pressure that slowly builds in Rufus throughout the first few chapters of the novel, this feeling that he’s neither a man nor black. And he blames this on Leona, the white, depraved animal that has ensnared him, as we see in the first quote. He can’t for the life of him believe that Leona loves him for him. She’s white, how could she love a black man? So she must be an animal, and in his own words, a “whore.” So he beats her. He beats her, and then he loves her. He beats her to prove his manliness. He beats her to prove that he, a black man, is more powerful than a white woman. He beats her to show the world that this white woman has no power over him, and then he loves her. He loves her as an equal, and that’s the last straw for him.
Sex, Baldwin says, makes people equal. It puts two people on the same level, without the thought of race or status or whatever else. Sex reduces people to what they are: creatures that love. And this Rufus cannot stand. He can’t bear being on equal footing with a white woman and being reduced to what makes him human before the eyes of a southern white “chick.” So again, he beats her. This vicious cycle takes control of his mind until he finally can’t take it anymore and kills himself, though he was dead long before he jumped off the George Washington Bridge.
We see this in other places as well, the idea that sex reduces one to their barest forms of humanity. We see it in Ida and Vivaldo’s love for each other. (Ida is Rufus’ sister, and Vivaldo is his childhood friend.) After Rufus’ death, they come together in their grief, and they find love. Painful, ugly love, but love nonetheless. But it doesn’t work out. And that, overall, is what Baldwin is trying to say. That race, or people’s perception of it, has destroyed our ability to love.
