James Baldwin's South, Part 4 Ordering Food in Princeton, New Jersey
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
James Baldwin was a critically-acclaimed African American author and activist. Much of his writing focused on racial disparity and intersectionality in the United States of America. Part 4 of this series seeks to inform our readers on Baldwin’s personal experience with discrimination during the Jim Crow era through the lens of food.
Baldwin recalls his first run-in with de facto Jim Crow in Princeton, New Jersey. He says, “I went to the same self-service restaurant three times and stood with all the Princeton boys before the counter, waiting for a hamburger and coffee; it was always an extraordinarily long time before anything was set before me; but it was not until the fourth visit that I learned that, in fact, nothing had ever been set before me: I had simply picked something up.” He goes on to say, “Negroes were not served there, I was told, and they had been waiting for me to realize that I was always the only Negro present.” He adds, “Once I was told this, I determined to go there all the time. But now they were ready for me and, though some dreadful scenes were subsequently enacted in that restaurant, I never ate there again. It was the same story all over New Jersey, in bars, bowling alleys, diners, places to live. I was always being forced to leave, silently, or with mutual imprecations” an action that led to the brutal beatings and death of blacks in the South. After months of eating out in Princeton, the Harlem-born Baldwin developed the habit of answering the counterman’s question at the American Diner in the town, what would you like, with a “casual sharpness” responding, “We want a hamburger and a cup of coffee—what do you think we want?” Baldwin says, “I do not know why, after a year of such rebuffs, I so completely failed to anticipate his answer, which was, of course, ‘We don’t serve Negroes here.’”
Baldwin left the restaurant having been completely exposed to the indignities suffered under Jim Crow segregation and filled with the rage that it could cause. In anger, he walked several blocks until he came to another restaurant which he describes as, “an enormous, glittering, and fashionable restaurant in which I knew not even the intercession of the Virgin would cause me to be served.” He pushed the doors and “took the first vacant seat I saw, at a table for two, and waited.” After the waitress made eye contact with Baldwin, she came toward him and repeated the Jim Crow restaurant mantra “as though she had learned it somewhere.” He writes that she said, “We don’t serve Negroes here.” Baldwin noted that the waitress and the white tablecloth restaurant “did not say it with the blunt, derisive hostility to which I had grown so accustomed” to in the less expensive eateries around Princeton “but, rather, with a note of apology in her voice, and fear.” So, Baldwin pretended that he did not understand her, “hoping to draw her closer. And she did step a very short step closer, with her pencil poised incongruously over her pad, and repeated the formula: ‘We don’t serve Negroes here.’” The repetition of the racist phrase rang in his head “like a thousand bells of a nightmare,” he recalls. When he realized that she would not come any closer to him he snapped and picked up “a water-mug half full of water” from his table and “hurled it” at her, missing her and shattering it against a mirror behind the bar. The sound of the broken glass “abruptly thawed” his frozen blood and returned him “from wherever I had been.” He writes:
I saw, for the first time, the restaurant, the people with their mouths open, already, as it seemed to me, rising as one man, and I realized what I had done, and where I was, and I was frightened. I rose and began running for the door. A round, potbellied man grabbed me by the nape of the neck just as I reached the doors and began to beat me about the face. I kicked him and got loose and ran into the streets. My friend whispered, “Run!” and I ran. My friend stayed outside the restaurant long enough to misdirect my pursuers and the police, who arrived, he told me, at once. I do not know what I said to him when he came to my room that night. I could not have said much. I felt, in the oddest, most awful way, that I had somehow betrayed him. I lived it over and over and over again, the way one relives an automobile accident after it has happened and one finds oneself alone and safe. I could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder. I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.
Most interesting in Baldwin’s Princeton restaurant experience is that the Jim Crow indignities that the restaurant staff dished out to him made the food he initially desired undesirable. The restaurant staff’s racist behavior destroyed the positive image he had of the food’s taste, feel, smell, and view. It vanished when the staff disrespected him as a customer, removing the tantalizing and eatable qualities of the food and rendering it almost indigestible and indescribable. The reader is left with no knowledge or description of each eatery’s signature dish. Even if the staff had served him, the anger that they provoked in him as the customer made it impossible to enjoy a good meal in the midst of bad company. What Baldwin tells us about food and 1940s Princeton can be reduced to nondescript images of “something” I picked up, “a hamburger and a cup of coffee” and “an ordinary water-mug half full of water.”
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