Notes of a Native Son

This essay is noteworthy more for what it omits, than for what it includes. Baldwin is mostly concerned about his own fate here, and his reflections on this episode five years later remain tethered to describing the fright it gave him, understandably. Given the ubiquitous stereotype of Black criminality in America, and the bludgeon with which the criminal law is used to terrorize Black people in the US, it is ironic that Baldwin would find himself locked up in Paris instead. Many of the essays in Notes of a Native Son chart how his time in France enabled Baldwin to employ a critical distance from which to better understand American culture. And yet “Equal in Paris” seems bereft of the many insights on offer regarding imprisonment and being treated like a criminal for being, essentially, poor and in the wrong place at the wrong time. He makes no mention of what was going on in American prisons at the time he was writing.

In the 75 years between the end of Reconstruction in the U.S. and the post-World War II period when Baldwin first visited Europe, the American prison population dramatically expanded and became disproportionately Black, when it had been almost entirely White previously. One of the main reasons for this was the convict lease system in the South, in which states rented out inmates to private industrialists and planters at a nominal rate to use as forced labor. The convict lease industry created incentives to criminalize Black people for things that previously were not crimes, or to punish Black law-breaking with indefinite imprisonment when Whites convicted of the same crimes were simply fined. A conviction for receiving stolen goods, for example, the crime for which Baldwin was accused, could very likely mean the end of one’s life in a convict labor camp.

Criminalization and imprisonment were also key to how the North responded to the Great Migration of Blacks out of the South beginning in the early twentieth century. Baldwin’s father was part of this migration; and Baldwin was familiar with the role of the policeman in Harlem, having written about the police as an occupying force on a number of occasions. It is significant, therefore, that the only mention he makes of prison in Notes of a Native Son is his own brief sojourn in a French jail.

Not only did Baldwin not connect his encounter with a French prison to the wider impact of imprisonment on Black Americans, but his recollections of this episode suggest he failed to see his blackness, his status in America as the native son, refracted in the North Africans with whom he shared his prison cell. In that moment, he was American and not Black, an irony that he does not explore.