Two Ideas for Annotating “Come Out the Wilderness” by James Baldwin That Can Help You Practice Analysis
Short stories are great for annotating practice because themes and imagery are concentrated within a tighter span of words – making short story details feel more visible and findable than the details planted inside a big novel. I really feel like I can exhaust what a short story has to offer without exhausting myself in the re-reading process that’s required for deep analysis. It doesn’t take a lot of time to reread a short story, which makes hunting for every little bit of nuance and more textual clues pretty enjoyable and fruitful.
Below I’ve listed out two annotating ideas for James Baldwin’s short story “Come Out the Wilderness.” Everything I highlighted within two thematic categories can be found below. You can can try highlighting on your own or read the story and use my list of passages as a highlighting guide.
This story is available as standalone ebook from Penguin Random House or within James Baldwin’s book of short stories Going to Meet the Man. If you like audiobooks, Dion Graham narrates the short story collection, and it’s excellent.
IDEA ONE: Annotate Ruth’s Sense of Escape & The Repeated Imagery of Traps
What does love feel like physically?
To Ruth, the main character of James Baldwin’s short story “Come Out the Wilderness,” love feels like an iron maiden and her lover is a trap. These quotes stood out to me, and began to alert me to this developing imagery.
….what an iron maiden of love and hatred he had placed her…
for she was trapped, Paul was a trap.
As I read, I marked many more sentences about prisons, enslavement, and escape. I knew at the end, I would go over these annotations to try to explore the depths of what Ruth meant by love as a trap. In addition to highlighting these quotes, I made a margin note of trap/escape next to them.
Then she hated herself; thinking into what an iron maiden of love and hatred he had placed her, she hated him even more.
Then her past and her present threatened to engulf her.
She had no place to go, she only wanted him.
If I stay on this merry-go-round, she thought, I’m going to become very accomplished, just the sort of girl no man will every marry.
The people, so surrounded by heights that they had lost any sense of what heights were, rather resembled, nevertheless, these gray rigidities and also resembled, in their frantic motion, people fleeing a burning town.
She felt like a river trying to run two ways at once: she felt herself shrinking from him, yet she flowed toward him too; she knew he felt it.
For her as for most of Manhattan, trees and water ceased to be realities; the nervous, trusting landscape of the city began to be the landscape of her mind. And soon her mind, like life on the island, seemed to be incapable of flexibility, of moving outward, could only shriek upward into meaningless abstractions or drop downward into cruelty and confusion.
…she relapsed into bitterness, confusion, fury: for she was trapped, Paul was a trap.
She lived with him for more than four years. She did not love him all that time, she simply did not know how to escape his domination.
In fleeing Harlem and her relatives there, she drifted downtown to the Village, where, eventually, she found employment as a waitress in one of those restaurants with candles on the tables.
She would hear, while she ached to be free, to be anywhere else, with anyone else, from Paul, all about how stupid art dealers were, how incestuous the art world had become, how impossible it was to do anything…
I hope to God she marries you, she thought. I hope she marries you and takes you off to Istanbul forever….where I will never have to hear you again, so I can get a breath of air, so I can get out from under.
This hope resembled the desperation of someone suffering from a toothache who, in order to bring the toothache to an end, was almost willing to jump out of a window. But she found herself wondering if love really ought to be like a toothache. Love ought—she stepped out of the elevator, really wondering for a moment which way to turn—to be a means of being released from guilt and terror. But Paul’s touch would never release her.
for his failure, by not loving her, to release her from the prison of her own.
We’re not down on a plantation, you’re not the master’s son, and I’m not the black girl you can just sleep with when you want to and kick about as you please!”
A sound escaped her; she was astonished to realize it was a sob….It fell against her face and mingled with her tears and she walked briskly through the crowds to hide from them and from herself the fact that she did not know where she was going.
IDEA TWO: Annotate Vertical Imagery & Geography
On my second read of the story, I also annotated the plethora of vertical imagery and quotes about geography as it came up. Geography and direction is so important to Ruth’s story because, as you can tell from the number of annotations about feeling trapped above, escape is key to her story.
The first time Ruth escaped was when she was 17. She fled her rural home and went to New York City. Her sense of geography back then was expansive. She could envision going really far away—as far New York City.
Unexpectedly, love and life in New York City began shrinking Ruth’s sense of geography down to nothing. So, when Ruth at 26, feels sure about leaving home again (this time her Village apartment with Paul), she’s not sure about where she can go. Physically and mentally, she doesn’t have the capacity to imagine what lies beyond Manhattan. Manhattan’s island geography has her feeling walled in by water. The narrator explains that her mind has started to mimic the city’s buildings and subways. Her thoughts can only “shriek upward” or “drop downward.” There’s just no more room in her mind to imagine a life beyond.
One of the reasons she was able to go to New York City at 17 was because of Arthur, the musician she sort of loved at the time. In the “Happily Ever After” I keep making up for Ruth (the story ends with her in limbo), Ruth figures out that she can go to Long Island. Her escape could be to Brooklyn where Mr. Davis is. I think this life insurance man, her future boss, might also be the man she needs – the “great, slow, black man, full of laughter and sighs and grace, a man at whose center there burned a steady, smokeless fire” she imagines for herself. What if she can re-expand her sense of geography by living a life with him?
Here’s what I highlighted:
DOWN IN HELL
Always, this journey round her skull ended with tears, resolutions, prayers, with Paul’s face, which then had the power to reconcile her even to the lowest circle of hell.
CITY HEIGHTS
Blocks and squares and exclamation marks, stone and steel and glass as far as the eye could see; everything towering, lifting itself against though by no means into, heaven. The people, so surrounded by heights that they had lost any sense of what heights were, rather resembled, nevertheless, these gray rigidities and also resembled, in their frantic motion, people fleeing a burning town.
TREES AND GROUND
Ruth, who was not so many years removed from trees and earth, had felt in the beginning that she would never be able to live on an island so eccentric; she had, for example, before she arrived, dreamed of herself as walking by the river.
ISLAND GEOGRAPHY
For her as for most of Manhattan, trees and water ceased to be realities; the nervous, trusting landscape of the city began to be the landscape of her mind. And soon her mind, like life on the island, seemed to be incapable of flexibility, of moving outward, could only shriek upward into meaningless abstractions or drop downward into cruelty and confusion.
HIGHER UP IN JOB
The only other [Black man] there was male, a Mr. Davis, who was very highly placed.
WORLD TRAVEL
I hope to God she marries you, she thought. I hope she marries you and takes you off to Istanbul forever….where I will never have to hear you again, so I can get a breath of air, so I can get out from under.
RIDING AN ELEVATOR
Love ought—she stepped out of the elevator, really wondering for a moment which way to turn—to be a means of being released from guilt and terror.
HEAD-TO-TOE SCAN
From the crown of rakishly tilted, deafeningly conservative hat to the tips of his astutely dulled shoes, he glowed with a very nearly vindictive sharpness.
FLIGHT
…had gone to college in Tennessee, was a reserve officer in the Air Force.
FLIGHT
She was in a reckless, desperate state, like flight.
HEAVEN
Now it was all gone, it would never come again, and that face which was like the heavens was darkening against her.
TOP OF HEAD
…whose curly hair leaned electrically over his forehead like a living, awry crown.
The dim lights played on his crown of hair.
UP
In that gesture, that look upward, with the light so briefly on his face, she saw the bones that held his face together and the sorrow beginning to corrode his brow, the blood beating like butterfly wings against the cage of his heavy neck.
RAIN (FALLS FROM SKY TO GROUND)
It was dark now and the rain that had been falling intermittently all day spangled the air and glittered all over the streets.
Another Story with Big Geography Themes: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
If you like the way geography and height themes infused this short story, you may enjoy the challenge of reading and annotating the expansive geography themes in Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison!
Check out my post on this story on Instagram:
Annotate With Sara 