Rustle in the Bush

There are good and powerful reasons that Baldwin’s terrifying penetration of racial violence in “Going to Meet the Man” has been largely read in light of Jesse’s psychoanalytic development, masculine formation, or as an examination of racial terror’s spectacle. Early psychoanalytic interpretations fixate around castration anxiety and erotic obsession of Jesse, to readings of necropolitics and racialized death. What all of these interpretations correctly emphasize is how Jesse’s libido has been permanently structured by his experience of lynching. What is lost in these readings is stuck on the level of individual neurosis or political oppression without addressing how Baldwin’s insight reveals how violence acquires a communal and religious meaning. More than pathology or tyranny, the narrative reveals the lynching as a ritualized event through which the Southern White community secures their identity, transcendence, and belonging. 

Existing work ought to see the lynching as a perverse sacrament; a ritual converting violence into a sacred experience by the act’s transgression. Baldwin complicates traditional religious expressions of ritual by racializing the event. To make this clear I refer to the work of Georges Bataille, and his work on understanding the sacred, sacrifice, and transgression, as a conceptual vocabulary necessary to understand Baldwin’s dramatic racialization. Bataille’s articulation of sacrifice as non-productive and excessive violence moves the story’s reading from psychological accounts to a collective mode of meaning where erotic intimacy is grounded in a proximity to death. In this way, Jesse’s arousal is not simply pathological but an initiation into an ‘economy of whiteness’. Baldwin’s critical insight is to shift Bataille’s religious argument. While Bataille understands Christianity as a structure that represses the violent sacred, for example, ritual sacrifice, while Baldwin shows how American Christianity actively sanctifies its violence, marking its transgression as ethical, parentally instructive, and collective joy. Framed as righteous by Jesse’s father, the lynching as a social spectacle reveals how its Christian symbolism exposes its love for domination. In Baldwin’s South, faith has survived weakly as ritual power without ethical clarity. In Baldwin’s South the wood of the cross is cut from the corpse of a pepper tree.

What Baldwin insists upon in “Going to Meet the Man” is that racial violence is not merely inflicted but taught. The lynching Jesse witnesses as a child is staged not as a chaotic eruption but as a lesson deliberately transmitted through paternal authority. On the way to the spectacle, Jesse’s father frames the event in unmistakably instructional terms, “You won’t ever forget this picnic—!” (Baldwin 1998, 949). The line is chilling precisely because of its casual confidence. Violence here does not appear as moral failure or private sadism but instead it appears as a curriculum. The father does not apologize, hesitate, or explain. He promises memory. What is being taught is not simply hatred, but the conditions under which hatred becomes knowledge; knowledge secured through witness, repetition, and inheritance rather than argument or justification. As the spectacle unfolds, Jesse is not permitted the distance of interpretation or even the refuge of speech, “His father’s hands held him firmly by the ankles. He wanted to say something: he did not know what, but nothing he said could have been heard.” (Baldwin 1998, 949). The scene stages the closure of language itself. Belief is not argued into being; it is imposed through the body. Baldwin shows us how authority works. It does not persuade, it positions. Jesse is placed so that the lesson cannot be avoided. Crucially, the lesson is delivered in public. The crowd does not merely observe; it participates, moving forward in coordinated steps as the violence proceeds. “The crowd surged forward… Someone stepped forward and donned the body with kerosene” (Baldwin 1998, 949). The language of sequence suggests a ceremony with roles rather than a riot without structure. It confirms that what is taking place belongs to the community’s moral life. 

The most disturbing consequence of this pedagogy is not terror but incorporation. The child does not remember the lynching as horror alone; his body registers it as power. “Jesse felt his scrotum tighten; and huge, huge, bigger than his father, faceless, hairless, the largest thing he had ever seen filled him” (Baldwin 1998, 949).  Baldwin refuses euphemism as the lesson ceases to be external and becomes internal. Violence has done its work not by frightening Jesse away from it, but by binding him to it through sensation. What is learned is not simply who holds power, but how power feels. Read together, these moments establish lynching as a moral education enacted through ritual authority, communal witness, and bodily incorporation. Baldwin’s reflections on whiteness elsewhere help clarify why such witnessing is necessary. In “Stranger in the Village,” he writes that “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them” (Baldwin 1984, 105). Whiteness, in this sense, is not merely an opinion or ideology but an inheritance sustained by ritual practices that reaffirm its authority. The lynching functions as one such practice. It gathers the community in order to reassure it of what it believes, converting racial domination into a visible, repeatable truth. Violence here operates as ritual maintenance rather than exception, binding the witnesses together through the very act that destroys its victim.

Critical readings of “Going to Meet the Man” have long emphasized the psychosexual dimensions of Jesse’s desire with good reason. From the start, the story frames Jesse’s impotence as a symptom demanding explanation, inviting readers into what Roger Whitlow describes as a circuit in which “Sexual stimulation and subsequent gratification … can be achieved through racial brutality” (Whitlow 1977, 351). Whitlow’s reading remains prescient, because it identifies how Baldwin binds arousal to violence without recourse to metaphor. The body responds directly to racial domination, and the story refuses to sanitize that fact.

More recent psychoanalytic criticism has refined this insight. Kwangsoon Kim, for instance, reads the lynching scene as a primal encounter that interrupts Jesse’s passage through the Oedipal stage, transforming castration anxiety from symbolic threat into historical reality. The child’s forced witnessing of mutilation, Kim argues, produces a psychosexual arrest that later manifests as impotence and sadistic desire. Such readings compellingly demonstrate how racism deforms white subjectivity as well as Black life, and they rightly insist that Jesse’s pathology cannot be separated from the racial order that produces it.

Yet what these accounts ultimately leave under-theorized is authority. Psychoanalytic frameworks explain how Jesse’s desire is formed, but they cannot fully explain why that desire returns as confirmation rather than breakdown, or why it carries the force of inevitability rather than guilt. Even Kim’s account of castration anxiety presumes an internalized psychic drama, one in which the lynching functions primarily as traumatic stimulus rather than as socially authorized act. What recedes in such readings is the fact that Jesse’s experience is not solitary. He does not encounter violence alone, in secrecy, or in shame. He encounters it publicly, under paternal supervision, and in the presence of a gathered crowd.

What psychology alone cannot account for, then, is the ritual character of the lynching scene. Jesse’s desire is not simply conditioned, it is sanctioned. The spectacle derives its power not from repression alone but from repetition, witness, and instruction. To read the lynching as just psychic trauma is to misrecognize Baldwin’s claim that violence persists because it educates, not merely wounds. The ritual character of the scene is emphasized through instruction and sequence. Jesse is brought to the lynching in order to “learn,” and is restrained so that he cannot turn away. He is released only once the spectacle has reached its conclusion. What makes the lynching scene pedagogically effective in “Going to Meet the Man” is not only its violence but the moral framework that precedes and survives it. Baldwin takes pain to show that it isn’t the lynching itself which forms Jesse,  it is instead prepared by kind of goodness whose masculinity is found in Christian obedience. As an adult, Jesse understands himself as a man who has failed to live up to a moral ideal, in fact, he’s hardly thought about it. He “Tried to do his duty all his life”, Baldwin writes, “He was a good man, A God-fearing man” and he understands this goodness through Christian values of authority, discipline, and sexual order (Baldwin 1998, 934). Jesse’s impotence is therefore not merely physiological or psychological because it is experienced as a moral lapse when he cannot inhabit the role of the righteous man he believes himself to be.

Jesse does not imagine goodness as ethical openness or responsibility to others when he imagines it as an obedience to a sanctified order. He turns instinctively to God, expecting reinforcement without a traditional mechanism of confession or guilt typical of the faith. Prayer here does not interrupt violence or introduce ethical hesitation. Instead, it functions as reassurance, and as a way of submitting himself once again to an authority that promises order. This is why Baldwin includes, alongside the lynching,instructional scenes that are no less formative. Jesse’s childhood exposure to his parents having sex, which is experienced through Jesse’s misunderstanding rather than explained, mirrors the structure of the lynching. Sexual knowledge and racial knowledge is learned without interpretation, and is framed as something to be absorbed rather than understood. Authority does not articulate itself as argument but as presence. Both sex and violence are introduced as facts of the world that one submits to rather than interrogates. The lynching therefore completes a lesson that is already occuring. When Jesse’s father restrains him at the event, the gesture echoes earlier forms of paternal control, which are now intensified and sanctified socially. The father does not teach the event as evil, or sinful. He frames it as memorable. “You won’t ever forget this picnic,” he promises, not as a threat but as a gift (Baldwin 1998, 949). Memory, here, is inherited morally. To remember is to belong.

Crucially, this inheritance is aligned with Christian authority. The lynching does not take place in a moral vacuum. The story unfolds in a world where righteousness is already understood as obedience without explanation. In “Going to Meet the Man,” this is dramatized through Jesse’s moral confusion.Instead of questioning whether the lynching is right or wrong, he questions why it no longer serves him any utility. His crisis is not ethical but functional. When violence does not act as a stimulus, Jesse interprets his impotence as a moral failing. This distinction matters. Jesse’s longing to be ‘a good man’ is inseparable from his desire to recover the certainty that the lynching once gave him. Baldwin makes this explicit when Jesse’s arousal finally returns, not through intimacy with his wife or prayer to God, but through the memory of the lynching. “Jesse felt his scrotum tighten,” Baldwin writes, as the image of the body once again came upon him (Baldwin 1998, 949). Christianity did not not restrain this violence, it has preserved the ways in which it can use violence to educate the way people interpret desire.

Seen from this perspective, Jesse’s Christianity is not hypocritical but coherent when it offers him authority without accountability. Therefore, Jesse learns what it means to be a man and a Christian through a forced witnessing instead of belief. Baldwin’s insight is not that faith disappears with racial violence, but that it survives when it makes it so that violence is intelligible.

Georges Bataille offers a vocabulary that clarifies this structure without explaining it away. In Erotism, Bataille describes the sacred as emerging through transgression: acts that violate moral prohibitions while reaffirming the social order they appear to threaten. As Bataille puts it, “If the taboo loses its force, if it is no longer believed in, transgression is impossible” (Bataille 1986 , 140). Transgression, in other words, presupposes belief when it depends upon the continued authority of the boundaries it breaks. Acts like this momentarily breach the reason of utility, and create an experience of continuity that is felt rather than reasoned. Bataille insists that “For us, discontinuous beings that we are, death means continuity of being” (Bataille 1986, 13). The sacred experience he describes is thus not rational reconciliation but a felt experience beyond separation.

What Bataille describes in Theory of Religion is a theory of authority prior to morality. Religion, for Bataille, does not begin as ethics or doctrine, as it begins in submission to a force that precedes explanation. “Religion,” he writes, “whose essence is the search for lost intimacy,” is articulated as a mode of being that dissolves the separations imposed by utility, reason, and individual identity (Bataille 1989, 57). Yet this intimacy is not peaceful. It is rather violent, and indifferent to moral reason such that the sacred quality comes from ritual constraint rather than the overcoming of this violence. This claim sharpens the stakes of Baldwin’s lynching scene. Jesse’s initiation into racial violence does not simply awaken forbidden desire when it inducts him into a sacred social order which is organized around authority instead of justification. What matters is not the victim’s guilt or innocence, but the community’s desire to waste and sacrifice life outside the logic of usefulness. Sacrifice, in this sense, does not correct disorder but it instead produces unity.

Crucially, Bataille emphasizes that sacrifice depends upon prohibition when he says that the sacred is prohibited and dangerous, and it is only through maintaining the taboo that transgression acquires force . This is why sacrifice cannot occur in a world where belief has collapsed. In Erotism, Bataille makes this explicit: “If the taboo loses its force, if it is no longer believed in, transgression is impossible” (Bataille 1986, 140). Transgression presupposes authority. It requires a structure capable of being violated. Baldwin’s intervention is to show that American Christianity has preserved this structure with success. The lynching is not staged against disbelief or moral confusion as it unfolds within a world that is already saturated by Christian authority. Jesse’s father does not explain the violence. He commands Jesse’s witness. “You won’t ever forget this picnic,” he says, framing memory itself as an obligation (Baldwin 1998, 949). This is precisely the form of authority Bataille describes as command without explanation and submission without understanding. Religion survives here not as doctrine, but as the power to demand participation.

Where Baldwin departs from Bataille is in his attention to difference. For Bataille, sacrifice produces a continuity that dissolves individual differences. “For us, discontinuous beings that we are,” he writes, “death means continuity of being” (Bataille 1986, 13). This continuity is imagined as universal, even if it is fleeting. Baldwin exposes the misapprehension of universality. The continuity produced by lynching is selective in its violence. It binds the white community together by enforcing absolute discontinuity upon the Black victim. Intimacy is achieved for some through the annihilation of others.

This is why Baldwin’s Christianity is structurally necessary. In Theory of Religion, Bataille argues that religion precedes morality and survives its erosion while Baldwin shows what happens when that power is severed from love and responsibility but allowed to persist as authority as the sacred hardens into law. The cross becomes indistinguishable from the lynching tree not because belief disappears, but because it remains as command without ethical reckoning. Jesse’s arousal marks the success of this economy. Violence educates desire because it is sanctified. The father’s authority mirrors a theological structure in which obedience precedes understanding. Jesse is not asked to judge the violence when he is asked to remember it. Belief is transmitted not as conviction but as a habit. In this sense, Baldwin radicalizes Bataille. He shows that the sacred need not oppose order to persist. It can be made to serve domination. Sacrifice does not threaten the social world; it secures it.

By reading “Going to Meet the Man” through Theory of Religion, Baldwin’s story emerges not as an account of religious failure but of religious survival. Christianity has not evacuated the violent sacred; it has preserved it in racial form. The lynching functions as a ritual through which authority, identity, and belonging are reproduced, generation after generation. What endures is not belief emptied of violence, but violence sustained by belief’s residual power. Read through this lens, the lynching is not a lapse into barbarism but a sacred act that reasserts the boundaries of the profane world by violently marking who belongs within it. What distinguishes Baldwin’s account, however, is that this continuity is not universal or redemptive. The continuity produced by the ritual does not dissolve difference. Jesse’s incorporation into the social world is secured by the absolute discontinuity imposed on the Black victim. Where Bataille theorizes continuity as a longing that unsettles the individual, Baldwin shows how continuity can be socially engineered and made legitimate through repetition, inheritance, and belief. As the father tells Jesse, “Well, I told you…you wasn’t never going to forget this picnic” (Baldwin 1998, 949). Continuity here is not discovered through ecstatic rupture but taught through instruction, authority, and enforced witness.

If the lynching functions as ritual, then it also operates as an economy whose logic cannot be explained by punishment, deterrence, or utility. Baldwin is careful to show that nothing is achieved by the violence in any practical sense. No order is restored, no crime corrected, no future secured. What the spectacle produces instead is excess: a surplus of meaning, cohesion, and affect that binds whiteness together. The violence persists because it does not serve a rational end; it serves a symbolic one. What Baldwin ultimately exposes in “Going to Meet the Man” is not the absence of faith, but its deformation. Christianity does not fail to restrain violence in the story; it survives as violence’s enabling grammar. The lynching is not staged against a backdrop of disbelief or secular nihilism. It is staged within a moral universe already shaped by Christian inheritance, and particularly one in which authority, and sacrifice retain their force even as love and responsibility are hollowed out. Baldwin is careful not to attribute this collapse to hypocrisy alone. The problem is not that Christian ideals are violated in practice, but that they are reduced to ritual form without ethical demand. The father’s authority mirrors a theological structure: command without explanation, obedience without judgment, certainty without accountability. Jesse is not asked to understand the violence, only to witness it. In this sense, beliefs persists not as doctrine but as habit and as a mode of submission transmitted through repetition rather than conviction.

Baldwin’s essays make clear that he understands this as a distinctly American religious failure. In The Fire Next Time, he insists that any faith worthy of the name must be measured by its capacity for love and responsibility, not by its ability to preserve order or innocence. The Christianity on display in “Going to Meet the Man” fails this test. It does not confront sin but it displaces it onto a racialized body. What remains is not belief emptied of violence, but violence sanctified by the hole left in the absence of belief. This is where Baldwin’s vision diverges decisively from Bataille. For Bataille, the sacred names a transgressive excess that momentarily dissolves the boundaries of the self. For Baldwin, when the sacred is severed from love, it hardens those boundaries into law. Ritual does not enable continuity between beings but it enforces continuity for some by imposing absolute discontinuity on others. Faith survives, but only as domination. The cross and the lynching tree converge not because Christianity disappears, but because it is allowed to persist without ethical reckoning.

This essay has argued that “Going to Meet the Man” is not best understood as a case study in psychosexual pathology, but as a diagnosis of how violence becomes meaningful through ritual, economy, and belief. Baldwin shows that lynching persists not because it is irrational, but because it works: it binds communities, stabilizes identity, and transmits authority across generations. Psychology can describe the damage such violence inflicts, but it cannot explain its legitimacy. However, by reading the story through ritual sanction and nonproductive expenditure, Baldwin shows how violence educates desire rather than merely distorting it. Jesse’s arousal is not an aberration to be cured; it is the residue of a sacred economy in which death produces meaning and belonging. The community’s coherence depends upon what it is willing to spend, and black life becomes the currency of that expenditure.

Baldwin James, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” in The Fire Next Time. New York, NY: Dial Press, 1963.

Baldwin James,  “Going to Meet the Man,” in James Baldwin – Early Novels and Stories, James Baldwin. New York, New York: Library of America, 1998.

Baldwin James, “Stranger in the Village,” in Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press. Boston, MA, 2012

Bataille Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Translated by Mary Dalwood. 1st English ed. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1986. 

Bataille Georges. Theory of Religion. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1989. 

Kwangsoon Kim, “Oedipus Complex in the South: Castration Anxiety and Lynching Ritual in James Baldwin’s ‘Going to Meet the Man,’” CLA Journal 60, no. 3 (2017): 319–33.

Roger Whitlow, “Baldwin’s ‘Going to Meet the Man’: Racial Brutality and Sexual Gratification,” American Imago 34, no. 4 (1977): 351–56.Dorothy Stringer, “James Baldwin’s Psychoanalysis,” James Baldwin Review 10 (2024): 1–18.