Before answering the question, it is convenient to mention that James Baldwin was a Black writer in the decade of the 50s and even though there were other Negro Writers in the literary world, they all suffered from racisms and social prosecution, the novel “Notes of a native Son” is close to an autobiography assembled from essays James Baldwin had written. In the novel the author intends to depict the hatred black people had to suffer at that time and it is overtly presented in the excerpt above, when the author mentions that: “…the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us.”
The key words that Baldwin used to convey the oppressive condition of his father’s life due to racial prejudice are:
buried, weight, tension, bleak