Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that we would never be free until we did. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. It was very beautiful because it wasn't hurried and it was no longer a lament. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song.
Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. Notice in that story how some of the experiences Baldwin has explained time and time again from the perspective of blacks are now reversed and we see just how different they can look from the other side of the aisle. Notice how so many of the stories deal with the struggles of African Americans living in America and having to deal with racist whites before you reach the last story, the titular Going to Meet the Man, and find a story told from the perspective of a racist white man.
The same cannot be said for this one each story is clearly chosen with painstaking attention to detail and organized in the same fashion. How do you decide which works to put into the collection? How do you decide what order to place the stories in so that they tell a grander story in the end? I've read a number of short story collections that don't seem to have a rhyme and reason behind these questions. As a fan of the short form, I've always been fascinated by collections of short stories. Going to Meet the ManĀ is the first collection of Baldwin short stories I've read, and it creates a wholly different feeling than reading his novels or a short story on its own.