Baldwin held that terror cannot be remembered, only blotted out

Evidence

Some thirty years later, in his last book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, about the Atlanta child murders, Baldwin begins with a meditation on the difficulty of remembering the patterns of the past and separating that from what he imagines himself to be able to remember. “Terror cannot be remembered,” he writes. “One blots it out. The organism—the human being—blots it out. One invents or creates, a personality or a persona. Beneath this accumulation (rock of ages!) sleeps or hopes to sleep, that terror which the memory repudiates.” — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 175

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘terror cannot be remembered’ claim undergirds the core argument about how America blots out its racial trauma — direct evidence for the reader’s project of recanonizing late Baldwin.