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Vivaldo's Loneliness

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In an interview with the KPFA Pacifica radio for Northern California, Baldwin recalls sitting in an airport with a Black shoe porter who, he says, on one side of his mouth would belt yes mam’ed and yes sir’ed at the many white people who passed him (Baldwin remembers being the only other Black person in the terminal), and with the other side of his mouth, talked negatively about each white person who passed. This Black man, Baldwin says, had been already nearly destroyed considering the difficulty of maintaining one’s masculinity or personhood in such places as the Chicago, Brooklyn, or Birmingham during that time; and the reality of things, was that this man hated the white people who passed him, all white people for that matter, but they …show more content…
In the novel, his character Rufus too experiences the same infliction for solitude. However, his choice raddles everyone around him. He doesn’t seem at all to be level headed, and, most of all, the gas which seems somehow to douse and enrage the flame of his madness is Vivaldo’s worry which, frankly, is an inefficient one. The reality of Vivaldo and Rufus’ love was that it was fairly incomplete despite the time and patience that they had both devoted to fostering it. What was unfortunate about their love was that due to the mindset in which it was fostered, the country to which it was born, it could not be completed. Vivaldo’s inability to express a complete love for Rufus surely played a part in Rufus’ suicide, but this is likely only one reason among many. On the other hand, for Vivaldo this inability to commemorate their friendship with, sex or some romance as he expressed with Eric, troubled Vivaldo uniquely due to his stance as a white liberal. Rufus needed badly to be loved by Vivaldo, but Rufus was also deeply tormented by the country he lived in—before his death he was already killed by America. Baldwin wrote him in this way, and the story is not unfamiliar, many Black queer men contemplate suicide. Even Hilton Als recalls, in his Book White Women, starring starkly in his mirror, mouth brimmed with pills of some sort, until, finally, he burst into laughter bouncing the pills off his reflection upon coming to the resolve that as his mother did he would die slowly and elegantly by the hand of American ideology. Once Rufus dies and only by sleeping with Eric, does Vivaldo realize that he deeply needs the love of another man to satiate an, at first unquenchable, loneliness; And so, as we see, the anxiety which weighed on the foundations of Vivaldo and Rufus relationship was purely sexual and could only be remedied through sex. This however is something which Vivaldo and Rufus could not share.

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