Dont Know How He Did It

I Don’t Know How He Did It

In James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” he goes through emotions that are key to helping him deal with conflicts in a remote Swiss village. While he was living in this secluded village he goes through a lot of things that most people wouldn’t be able to go through. He deals with these issues in two different ways, one is astonishment and the other is rage.

I don’t know how James did it staying in a village where the children would shout the “N” word at him, and the older women would just turn there head at him when he would walk by just because he was black. He says that “Some thought my hair was the color of tar, that it had the texture of wire or the texture of cotton(pg.94)“. When I read that I thought to myself what would I do if that was to happen to me right now?, if some person came up to me and thought that my hair was the texture of wire, if the children would shout the “N” word at me, or I knew that some of the children were being taught that the devil was a black man. It actually scares me because I couldn’t imagine that ever happening and if it did then I don’t think I would be able to control myself from wanting to seriously hurt someone. Even though I don’t feel that the situation is entirely the villagers fault because If anyone grew up in a place that is secluded like that village they

Neal 2

wouldn’t really know any better, James did a good job of controlling himself in the situations he put himself in.

James Baldwin is correct when he says “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them(Pg.95).” I really don’t know if there is any truer statement in the story than that. Now a days people do need to let go of history because there is nothing we can do but learn from the past. Some tend to hold onto it and it causes conflict. James Baldwin was one of those people stuck in the past but somehow he controlled it better then others, If he couldn’t control his anger the way that he does than he would of probably used the rage he did feel and make most of the situations that arose a physical conflict. It was probably harder in the 1950’s to deal with these circumstances then it would be now because from the stories I hear from my family there was still a lot of prejudice going around at that time, and dealing with that before he went to the village would have given him harsh feelings towards white people.

While I was reading this essay it amazed me how well James handled the vicious discrimination that he received while living in the village. While I was thinking about this story it came to me that not too many people could have done what he did. First he moved to a place were no one knew him, he moved to a place that has never seen a black man in person, and so because of him being different they yelled racial slurs at him. If something like this happened in today’s society it would be all over the news, people would be getting arrested, and it would probably cause violent riots everywhere. James could have caused a lot of these situations