Mob Scene: "Going to Meet the Man"

In a Universal monster movie, with old Una O'Connor hamming it up, a gathering of angry villagers could function as a bit of comic relief.  But there's zero humor to be found when the mob-scene setting shifts to an American town in the South during the Civil Rights Era.

The title story of James Baldwin's 1965 collection Going to Meet the Man features a grisly flashback scene in which a group of whites attend the lynching of a captured black man.  His execution is treated like some public holiday, as the caravan of cars traveling to the site carry baskets of food: "It was like a Fourth of July picnic."  Viewpoint character Jesse (eight years old at the time of the lynching) recalls his mother fussing to get dressed up as if for church, and his father nonchalantly sitting him upon his shoulders to provide better view of the proceedings.

What Jesse sees is a naked man chained to a tree limb and dangled
above a bonfire.  The captive's wretched screams only stoke the
crowd's bloodlust: "The cry of all the people rose to answer the dying man's cry.  He wanted death to come quickly.  They wanted to make death wait: and it was they who held death, now, on a leash which they lengthened little by little."  After the victim is unmanned by a "long, bright knife," the frenzied crowd pounces, "tearing at the body with their hands, with knives, with rocks, with stones, howling and cursing."  The vicious persecution concludes with a dousing of kerosene that reduces the man to "a black charred object on the black, charred ground." 

Presenting this harrowing event through the eyes of a child, Baldwin dramatizes a dark rite of passage and demonstrates a warping psychosexual effect.  Jesse (who considers the hanging body "the most beautiful and terrible object he had ever seen till then") grows up to be a virulently racist sheriff whose libido is a fueled by a confused mix of violent aggression and secret desire.
"Going to Meet the Man" is a deliberately discomforting read, but Baldwin's searing indictment of Deep South depravity makes for one of the most forceful and unforgettable stories in all of American literature.