Previous
Allusions
Book 1, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—White Officer:
In this passage from the novel’s first chapter, Baldwin uses visual imagery and a flashback to show the reader the power Rufus’s violent military memories still hold. Rufus is in the middle of a conversation with Leona when this recollection interrupts his thoughts:
He laughed again. He remembered, suddenly, his days in boot camp in the South and felt again the shoe of a white officer against his mouth. He was in his white uniform, on the ground, against the red, dusty clay. Some of his colored buddies were holding him, were shouting in his ear, helping him to rise. The white officer, with a curse, had vanished, had gone forever beyond the reach of vengeance. His face was full of clay and tears and blood; he spat red blood into the red dust.
Rufus is being painfully subjugated by the White officer in this flashback. It brings the brutality and violence of boot camp into his present reality as he speaks to Leona. Even though she is not treating him violently, her Whiteness and the loudness of the bar they sit in send Rufus back in time to this moment.
Baldwin’s imagery here is all about contrast; between the white uniform and the red clay and between the White officer, the Black Rufus, and his “colored buddies.” The contrast between Rufus’s “white uniform” and the “red, dusty clay” is still powerfully present in his mind, and so the reader also draws closer to it. Visual details of texture and moisture, such as the “red, dusty clay” and Rufus’s “face...full of clay and tears and blood,” evoke how humiliating and infuriating being kicked in the mouth by the officer was for Rufus. After he leaves, everything seems to be blood-soaked, as Rufus “spit[s] red blood into the red dust.”
Related Themes:
