The Paris vs. America Scenes

It’s interesting how, in “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” Baldwin uses quintessential scenes to illustrate his points. We talked about this in class today, especially with the scene of the narrator and Harriet on the Pont Royal bridge with the “golden statue of Joan of Arc, her sword uplifted” and “the sun [falling] over everything” (Baldwin 157-8). Baldwin uses this moment, the stereotypical, beautiful scene overlooking the water with the sun shining in Paris, to emphasize the beauty and importance of the narrator’s epiphany at that moment. The narrator realizes, standing there and arguing with Harriet, that he could feel alone with this woman: “there were millions of people all around us, but I was alone with Harriet” (Baldwin 158). He didn’t have to feel self-conscious about what people might think when they seem him, a black man, with this white woman. He was alone with Harriet and didn’t have to “carry the menacing, the hostile, killing world, with [him] everywhere” anymore (Baldwin 158).

This moment of epiphany is contrasted with the moment when the narrator is recalling his first time returning to America since he had moved to France and married Harriet. As the boat is pulling into the New York harbor, the narrator observes “a big, sandy-haired man [holding] his daughter on his shoulders, showing her the Statue of Liberty” (Baldwin 162). This, here, is another classic scene--it’s quintessentially American, a dad showing his daughter the Statue of Liberty and explaining everything it represents. However, instead of using this scene to emphasize something American, as he did before by using the beautiful Paris scene to emphasize something beautiful and profound, Baldwin flips the tables on us. Instead of playing on the hope that fills this scene, he criticizes it and almost shuts that hope down. As the narrator is watching the dad show his daughter this statue, he remarks that he “would never know what this statue meant to others, she had always been an ugly joke for [him]” (Baldwin 162-3). This completely kills any kind of positive mood that could come from this scene and seems to make a larger point about the hypocrisy of America’s core values and the way it treats its citizens.

“This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” is the story that stands out the most to me so far, just because of how well Baldwin manipulates these stereotypical scenes to drive his points home.