“Going to Meet the Man” and James Baldwin’s Necrotaneic Imagination

James Baldwin’s short story, “Going to Meet the Man” (1965) explores the racial and psychological complexities at the intersection of violence, memory, and the white, masculine imagination, as it maps the means by which white, Southern racists used sexual violence and heinous murder to reify supremacist rule in the 1960s. Much of the critical commentary on “Going” argues correctly that Baldwin locates the deeper wells of reality in his protagonist’s neurosis, a condition formed from Jesse’s perception of Black men as “phobogenic” objects, and Jesse’s fear that African Americans exercising political agency disqualifies him as heir to his predecessors’ supremacist dominance. Rather than maintaining prevailing interpretive modes with intended outcomes, however, this essay argues that in “Going,” Baldwin demonstrates a simultaneous engagement with the present and the historical past to articulate an epistemology that explains how Black men experience death and the ever-present threat of nonbeing.