Going To Meet The Man By James Baldwin

Reading "Going to Meet the Man" Without Glossing Over the Hard Parts

The story sits in Baldwin's 1965 collection and runs roughly twenty pages. It follows Mr. Lee, a white sheriff in the rural South, as he waits for a Black man accused of killing a white woman to be processed through his station. Between arrests and paperwork, he has sex with his wife Grace. The scene is long, uncomfortable, and deliberately unromantic. Afterward, Mr. Lee falls asleep and drifts into a memory from his childhood — his grandfather being castrated by Black men, or so the family legend went. The story ends on that note, with Mr. Lee waking up and heading back to work like nothing happened. Baldwin wrote this in the mid-60s, right when the Civil Rights Act was passing and the country was pretending that everything was fine. The title comes from a line in the story where Mr. Lee says he's going to meet the man — meaning the Black prisoner. But the meeting never really happens. What we get instead is an extended interior monologue that peels back the psychology of the man doing the persecuting. That's the whole trick of the piece. Baldwin isn't writing a story about racial conflict as a surface-level drama. He's writing about how racism lives inside a person's nervous system, how it gets wired into desire, memory, and violence. I've assigned this story in seminars for years, and the first-time readers always get stuck on the sex scene. They want it to mean something tidy. It doesn't. It's meant to feel grotesque and mechanical, the way power operates when it has no other outlet. Mr. Lee uses Grace the way he uses the legal system — as an instrument of control. The language Baldwin uses during that passage is blunt and repetitive on purpose. You can find it in any edition of the collection, or in many online archives if you're trying to copy passages for a paper. Just make sure you're citing properly.

One thing students consistently miss is the role of the grandfather's story. Mr. Lee's entire worldview rests on a family myth — that his grandfather was castrated by Black men during Reconstruction. This isn't presented as fact in the story. It's presented as propaganda passed down through a lineage, something Mr. Lee believes so deeply that it shapes his sexual response and his professional authority. The castration anxiety maps directly onto his fear of losing power over Black people. When he touches the prisoner's alleged crime — murder of a white woman — it triggers something in him that blends rage, fear, and arousal. That's not an accident. Baldwin is showing you that racism isn't just ideological. It's somatic. There's also the question of time. The story takes place over a single day, but the emotional timeline stretches across generations. Mr. Lee is a middle-aged man, but he's psychologically still the boy hearing his grandfather's tale. Baldwin collapses time the way people actually experience trauma — it doesn't happen in sequence. It happens all at once. This is why the transitions between present action and memory feel jarring. That's intentional. You're supposed to feel disoriented. If you're reading this for a class or writing a paper, the most productive angle is probably the relationship between violence and intimacy. Almost every interaction in the story involves some form of domination disguised as care or duty. Mr. Lee is a law enforcement officer. He's also a husband. Both roles are performative in the story, and both rely on the same structure of control. Baldwin doesn't moralize about this. He just shows you the mechanism.

Why the Story Still Feels Uncomfortable Decades Later

The reason this story hasn't aged into a period piece is that Baldwin wasn't writing about a specific moment. He was writing about a structure. The dynamics between Mr. Lee and the unnamed Black prisoner could be transplanted to almost any setting where institutional power meets racial hierarchy. That's why the prisoner stays anonymous. He doesn't need a name. He's a function in Mr. Lee's psychology. I tried once to use this text in a graduate seminar alongside Foucault's lectures on power and discipline. It worked, but the students kept trying to extract a political program from it. There isn't one. Baldwin isn't offering a solution. He's offering a diagnosis. The story refuses to let the reader off the hook by positioning them on the side of the angels. You're not watching Mr. Lee from a safe distance. You're inside his head for twenty pages. That's the uncomfortable part. You're meant to feel complicit. One practical note for anyone citing this: the original publication was in The Partisan Review in 1965 under the title "Going to Meet the Man," and it was later included in Baldwin's collection. Different editions vary slightly in punctuation and paragraph breaks. If you're doing close reading, stick to one edition and note which one you're using. I once had a student get penalized because they quoted from a PDF version that had different paragraph breaks than the Norton anthology they cited. Minor issue, but it matters when you're analyzing pacing and structure.

Going To Meet The Man By James Baldwin: A Note on Language and Style

Baldwin's prose in this story is denser than in some of his other work. The sentences run long, often stacking clauses in a way that mimics the pressure building inside Mr. Lee's mind. There are very few periods doing real work. Most of the punctuation is commas and em dashes, which keeps the reader moving forward without a chance to pause. This is a stylistic choice, not a habit. Baldwin wants you to feel the momentum of Mr. Lee's thoughts, the way they pile up and compress until they become something almost physical. The dialogue, when it appears, is sparse and functional. Most of the story is interior. Baldwin trusts the reader to track shifts in perspective without signaling every transition. That can be frustrating if you're reading it fast. Slow down. The story rewards attention. There's a common misreading that Mr. Lee is simply a villain. He is, but that's too simple. Baldwin gives him enough humanity — moments of tenderness toward Grace, flashes of self-awareness, genuine fatigue — that you can't dismiss him as a cartoon. The point is that someone like this is the one holding power. That's the real horror. A monster would be easier to deal with. A man like Mr. Lee is the system itself, and systems don't collapse because you identify their worst elements. They persist because those elements are ordinary.

I don't recommend this story for casual reading. It's not entertaining in a conventional sense. It's not supposed to be. It's a confrontation, and the confrontation is with the reader as much as with the character. If you're approaching it for a class, come in prepared to sit with discomfort. If you're approaching it alone, same advice. Baldwin doesn't write for people who want to feel good. He writes for people who want to understand.