Short Story Collection: Going to Meet the Man

Overview
James Baldwin’s 1965 collection gathers eight stories that range across Harlem, the rural South, and expatriate Paris, composing a portrait of American life haunted by race, faith, desire, and memory. Intimate domestic scenes sit beside public rituals of violence; youthful awakenings share the page with hardened power. Baldwin’s characters struggle to claim their bodies, voices, and futures amid structures that deny them, church and state, family and property, whiteness and masculinity, while music and love flicker as forms of rescue and reckoning.

Harlem, family, and faith
“The Rockpile” and “The Outing” return to the Grimes family familiar from Go Tell It on the Mountain. In “The Rockpile,” a Harlem summer landmark becomes both temptation and battleground: a boy is injured, and the fallout exposes Gabriel Grimes’s authoritarian piety and his favoritism, which wounds the family’s adopted son. “The Outing” follows a church excursion up the Hudson, where revival fervor, adolescent uncertainty, and unspoken desire churn beneath hymns and picnic chatter. Baldwin probes the holiness claimed by elders and the hunger felt by the young, measuring spiritual rhetoric against the complexities of love and the body.

Art, addiction, and the city
“Sonny’s Blues,” one of Baldwin’s most celebrated works, traces two brothers in Harlem, a schoolteacher-narrator and Sonny, a jazz pianist recovering from heroin. Their history is braided with a mother’s warning and the murder of an uncle by white men, a buried grief that resurfaces in Sonny’s struggle. The final club scene locates a hard-won communion in sound: music as testimony, suffering distilled into improvisation. “Previous Condition” follows a Black actor abruptly evicted from a rented room by a racist landlady, his day devolving into tense encounters and bars where the boundaries of belonging are policed. The story’s title sharpens how race functions like a pretext inscribed before any act is judged.

Love, gender, and alienation
“Come Out the Wilderness” centers on Ruth, a young Black woman in New York entangled with a white lover and alienated at work. Memories of Southern violation and Northern indifference coil together, making intimacy precarious and self-respect fragile. Baldwin maps the emotional weather of a city apartment and an office corridor as precisely as a revival tent, showing how private shame is produced by public arrangements, and how the ache for tenderness collides with the habits of domination.

Exile and return
“This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” follows a successful Black American artist in Paris preparing to return to the United States with his French wife and child. The safety and complexity of expatriate life, its interracial family, its friendships across lines of nationality and color, are shadowed by memories of American humiliation and by a jarring stop-and-search from French police. The prospect of going back summons both love of home and dread of a system designed to break him and mark his son.

Power, property, and ritualized violence
“The Man Child” relocates the drama of inheritance to a rural landscape where a boy is promised land and a dispossessed family friend seethes with despair. The story’s pastoral surface fractures into an act of intimate murder, exposing how property and manhood are fused in ways that deform affection and warp adult and child alike. The title story, “Going to Meet the Man,” enters the mind of Jesse, a white Southern deputy whose sexual impotence with his wife unlocks memories of a childhood lynching turned community spectacle. Desire and domination converge as he eroticizes terror; the private marital bed reveals the public pedagogy of white supremacy.

Style and resonance
Across the collection Baldwin shifts registers, from the incantatory cadences of church and blues to the clipped, watchful interiority of the city walker. The pieces interlock: family dramas echo in lovers’ quarrels; a jazz solo answers a sermon; a sheriff’s nightmare clarifies a boy’s wound. The result is a mosaic of American experience, where the hope of tenderness, art, and revelation contends with systems that teach people to harden their hearts.