Prologue
We appear to come into the world looking backward, looking for something we remember. As our eyes begin to focus after the storm of birth, we isolate the shapes of our relentless desire.
—James Baldwin
James Baldwin was just ten or eleven years old when he sat down in a darkened movie theater to watch 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, starring a screen siren who was about to become a source of unlikely salvation. As he would go on to tell it one day: “So here, now, was Bette Davis, on a Saturday afternoon, in close-up, over a champagne glass, pop-eyes popping.” He was transfixed by her eyes, which looked just like his mother’s, a shocking recognition that would allow him to understand, albeit years later, why the man he called his father—who unbeknownst to him at the time was actually his stepfather—was always at pains to remind him that the large, heavy-lidded eyes he had inherited from her made him “the ugliest boy he’s ever seen.” For it was not his “hatred of my frog-eyes which hurt me,” he would come to realize, but the fact that “he was not attacking me so much as he was attacking my mother,” and also, by extension, then, “my real, and unknown father.” But what he did see in this moment, clear as the daylight beyond the movie theater’s walls, was that he had caught his embittered father not so much in a “lie” as in an “infirmity”—for he “must have been stricken blind if he was unable to see that my mother was absolutely beyond any question the most beautiful woman in the world.”
This was a lesson in self-love that would be tested time and time again as he moved through the trials and tribulations of his adolescent years, and indeed throughout the entirety of his life. It was also a lesson about kinship, by blood, and beyond it.
He had been brought to this matinee by his teacher at PS 24 in Harlem, a twenty-four- year- old white woman whose tutelage would change his life forever. Orilla Miller, or “Bill” as he called her, had come to this “dreadful ancient New York schoolhouse,” as she described it, to teach drama and put on student plays thanks to an internship connected to the graduate degree she was pursuing at Teachers College. When Baldwin was sent to her by his regular classroom teacher because he was so far ahead of the other students, she was astonished by his intelligence. “To my amazement,” she later recalled, “I found we were both reading Charles Dickens, very enthusiastically, and in our discussions I soon realized here was an exceptional and brilliant boy.” She gave him more books to read, and talked to him about these books, and about the world, as Baldwin would later write, and eventually she took him to see the plays and films “to which no one else would have dreamed of taking a ten-year- old boy.” For all this, he “loved her, of course, and absolutely, with a child’s love,” and it was because of her, he conceded, “that I never really managed to hate white people—though, God knows, I have often wished to murder more than one or two.”
It was also because of her, he would write, and that day at the movies, in particular, “that my first conscious calculation as to how to go about defeating the world’s intentions for me began.” For he knew that not only did his father consider him ugly but he was also “considered by everyone to be ‘strange.’ ” Too bookish. Too sensitive. Too undersized. Too effeminate. But after seeing Davis on-screen, he abruptly stopped his practice of putting pennies on his eyes every night before he went to bed in his misguided effort to make them smaller. He now realized that “my infirmity, or infirmities, might be forged into weapons.” And if he was indeed “ ‘strange’—and I knew that I must be,” he would go on, “otherwise people would not have treated me so strangely, and I would not have been so miserable, perhaps I could find a way to use my strangeness. A ‘strange’ child, anyway, dimly and fearfully apprehends that the years are not likely to make him less strange. Therefore, if he wishes to live, he must calculate, and I knew I wanted to live.”
The presence of Bill Miller in Baldwin’s life confounded his parents, particularly his father, David Baldwin. The first time she came home with Baldwin after school to ask permission to take him on an excursion to see a real play on a New York stage, she was taken aback when they stepped into a steam-filled kitchen with a clothesline stretched all the way across it, his mother doing laundry by hand. The air was warm and moist and the small, hungry faces of Baldwin’s many younger siblings were peeking out from behind the drying clothes. In the face of such poverty—the apartment, located in the East Harlem neighborhood known as “The Hollow,” was dark and gloomy with a dismal view of the uptown railroad tracks—Miller became even more desperate to help. When she was told that his father was not home yet, they set a date for her to return another day. Soon, as Baldwin later wrote, “my father took me aside to ask why she was coming, what interest she could possibly have in our house, in a boy like me.” The only white people who ever visited them were welfare workers and bill collectors, and Baldwin’s mother, Berdis, usually dealt with them because his father’s temper was too excitable and he felt violated by their presence. After all, he spent his days laboring as a worker in a ginger ale factory on Long Island and his weekends preaching in a storefront church about how white people were the Devil. Theatergoing, like books, was forbidden in their household. But Baldwin desperately wanted to go and he intuited that the color of Miller’s skin, and the fact that it was all in the service of “education,” might cow his father into agreeing to it.
He was right. The fresh-faced teacher came back to the apartment and they all sat down in the living room. Miller found both of the parents dignified. Underneath, David Baldwin was seething. But as Baldwin would put it, “I then, very cleverly, left all the rest to my mother, who suggested to my father, as I knew she would, that it would not be very nice to let such a kind woman make the trip for nothing.” His mother knew very well that as miraculous as it had seemed, by the time he was just five years old he’d already read all the way through the only book they had in the house, the Bible; and that by eight he had somehow managed to get his hands on a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which he had read over and over again so compulsively she’d feared he was damaging his eyes, or that her husband might see it and lash out. But even after she’d stowed it away in a closet above the bathtub, her son had still managed to climb up and drag it down. These excursions with his teacher would at the very least allow him to explore his interests in relative safety outside the home, and, as Miller later recalled, she “seemed glad to see James happy but also for him to see a different side of life.”
And so began the first of many trips to see plays and films and visit museums, an education that Baldwin sorely needed. Although his still largely segregated school was headed by a dedicated principal, Gertrude Ayers, who for twenty-five years was the only Black person to hold such a position in the New York City public school system, the teachers were overwhelmed by the decrepit classrooms of up to fifty students at a time, all of them boys, and couldn’t possibly have provided Baldwin with the stimulation and attention he needed. A particularly memorable outing occurred when Miller got them tickets to an Orson Welles production of Macbeth. It was at the Lafayette Theatre on 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue, just a few blocks from his home. Baldwin was so excited, he read the play in advance enough times that he practically knew it by heart. The house lights dimmed and, as he sat next to Miller, he watched the slim ribbon of light connecting the stage curtain to the stage’s floor. Then the curtain rose. Baldwin was so entranced he didn’t say a word throughout the whole production. Welles had transposed the play to Haiti. It was an all-Black cast. Nothing he had seen at the movies prepared him for this, not even the Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer film adaptation Miller had taken him to of one of his favorite books, A Tale of Two Cities. These were real Black actors at work, in real roles, on a living stage. They were his people—the actress who played Lady Macbeth was “a colored lady,” Baldwin later wrote, and “Banquo’s face was a familiar face.” They were his flesh and blood, and their struggles were his own.
By now he’d already had his first brushes with the more blatant forms of racism. When he was ten years old, two Harlem patrolmen had stopped him in an empty lot. Even though he was very small for his age, they’d frisked him as they joked to each other about what they felt his ancestry meant about his sexual prowess, and then left him lying on his back. This only seemed to confirm the truth of his father’s rants about the evils of white folks. But Miller wasn’t white to Baldwin. Or at least she was a different kind of white person. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that she had grown up on a farm in Illinois, and when her family lost everything, she had dropped out of college and taken a job as a housekeeper in Queens, becoming involved in labor politics. Now she was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party; when she took Baldwin and some of his brothers and sisters to a picnic downtown, she became incensed when policemen handed out free ice cream to all the white children but balked at offering any to the children in her charge. “I don’t remember anything Bill said,” Baldwin later wrote. “I just remember her face as she stared at the cop, clearly intending to stand there until the ice cream all over the world melted or until the earth’s surface froze, and she got our ice cream, saying, Thank you, I remember, as we left.”
When David Baldwin was laid off from work, Miller helped the family survive an especially brutal winter by dropping off food and provisions regularly. It earned her Berdis Baldwin’s greatest compliment—she was a “Christian.” The love between Miller and Baldwin was quickly becoming a familial one. As Miller later said, “He was like my little brother.” When he wasn’t helping his mother care for his younger siblings, he spent time at her apartment on 124th Street near Eighth Avenue, which was just a few blocks away from his, marveling at how different her relationship with her husband, Evan, was from his parents’ marriage. He watched them silhouetted against their apartment window at dusk, in awe—they were actually speaking to each other, their faces lit up with affection and laughter. Evan, too, was committed to left-wing politics, and as Baldwin later wrote, together, the couple became, for him, “models of courage and integrity and love,” while she, in particular, “helped me to get beyond the trap of color.” But as close as Miller and the young Baldwin had become, there were still conversations he could not have—secrets he could not share with anyone.
For it had been just before she came into his life when he was about ten years old, as he would write one day, that he became infatuated with, and even felt he was “very much in love” with another boy, named Romeo Clarke. Baldwin remembered his friend, who lived directly across the street, as “very handsome and very gentle and we were so clearly and openly in love that we were known as Romeo and Juliet.” Although there was never anything “overtly sexual between us,” as he recalled, they “lived, practically, in each other’s nostrils.” It wasn’t long before Romeo and his family moved away, quite likely, he later realized, because their families felt they needed to be separated. Baldwin remembered how he stood before their shut front door not long afterward, “weeping.” They never saw each other again.
This was a precursor to what years later, in his first and most autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953, would become the story of a boy in Harlem, John Grimes, who is locked in an emotional battle with himself and with his overbearing preacher father. In it he would draw heavily on the shame of his own adolescent yearnings, writing: “He had sinned. In spite of the saints, his mother and his father, the warnings he had heard from his earliest beginnings, he had sinned with his hands a sin that was hard to forgive.” All alone in the school bathroom, he continues, “thinking of the boys, older, bigger, braver, who made bets with each other as to whose urine could arch higher, he had watched in himself a transformation of which he would never dare to speak.”
It wasn’t just his confusion over these first stirrings of desire that Baldwin could not share with Miller. As he later wrote: “Bill could instruct me as to how poverty came about and what it meant and what it did, and also, what it meant to do so; but she could not instruct me as to blackness, except obliquely, feeling that she had neither the right nor the authority.” Indeed, without his father’s love or support Baldwin was in search of role models who looked like him, and he found one when he entered Frederick Douglass Junior High School, located at 140th Street and Sixth Avenue, in the fall of 1935: another teacher, Herman Porter, who was also Black and advised the school paper, The Douglass Pilot. Like Miller, he quickly realized Baldwin’s talent and did all he could to support him. Baldwin became its editor in chief. The taunts of his classmates, who had regularly been calling him a “sissy,” fell silent. They were replaced by admiration. One Saturday, Porter picked Baldwin up at home to take him to the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street so he could conduct research for his ninth-grade essay, “Harlem: Then and Now.” He was greeted at the door by Baldwin’s father, clad in a bathrobe and slippers and surrounded by Baldwin’s younger siblings. Also like Miller before him, Porter was overwhelmed by the clutter and the number of poverty-stricken children—in addition to Baldwin, there were now six of them, with two more still to come. When he explained why he had come there, David Baldwin accused him of exposing his son to books written by white devils. But he let him go.
On the bus downtown Baldwin was so upset he became sick to his stomach, and as soon as they got off at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street, he vomited on the sidewalk. Baldwin would recapture some of the more positive aspects of this experience in Go Tell It on the Mountain: “He loved this street,” he would write, “not for the people or the shops but for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never dared to enter.” He knew he was allowed to do so, since he belonged to the Harlem branch, but he was cowed by his feeling that the “building was so big that it must be full of corridors and marble steps, in the maze of which he would be lost and never find the book he wanted.” Moreover, he feared that “all the white people inside, would know that he was not used to great buildings, or to many books, and they would look at him with pity.” And so he decided that he “would enter another day, when he had read all the books uptown, an achievement that would, he felt, lend him the poise to enter any building in the world.”
Unlike his protagonist, the young Baldwin did enter the library that day, and once he acclimated to its imposing size and serious-looking and almost exclusively white patrons, it became another sanctuary for him. Alongside his excursions with Miller, he was beginning to learn that his life needn’t be confined to Harlem. The literary and cultural resources of the whole city were open to him. Not that this lesson was uncomplicated. As he left the library one day a white policeman asked him, “Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?” But helped along by teachers like Miller and Porter, he was building the confidence to withstand these early encounters with racism and emerge with a stronger sense of his mission and destiny as a writer. As he wrote in an issue of The Douglass Pilot, “If I am a playwright, I should try to improve a troubled world, and try to be numbered among the great artists of my race.”
Baldwin’s ambition was growing and already gaining him recognition. He wrote a school song that earned him a letter of praise from Mayor La Guardia, and he published his first short story, about the Spanish Revolution, in a church newspaper. After school, he often returned to his favorite hill in Central Park. It was a refuge. He ran up the hill, gazing at the sky above. At the summit he would survey all of New York—from Harlem to downtown. Later, in Go Tell It on the Mountain, he re-created the exaltation he felt in these moments: “He felt like a long-awaited conqueror at whose feet flowers would be strewn, and before whom multitudes cried. Hosanna! He would be, of all, the mightiest, the most beloved, the Lord’s anointed; and he would live in this shining city which his ancestors had seen from far away.”
These lofty aspirations also surfaced in a recurrent dream. In it he was all grown up, living in a fancy apartment somewhere in the city he’d looked down at from the hill. He was always wearing a gray suit as he drove his big Buick uptown to his block in Harlem, where his family was waiting for him, all of them proud, even and especially his father. He picked them all up and drove them to his house in the country. They ate together at an expensive restaurant, harmonious, happy. All because he had become a rich and famous writer. He had to become a rich and famous writer—which despite his humble beginnings was exactly what he was destined to become, the house in the country (though it would be in the South of France, not New York) included.
A year later, in 1936, as his relationship with Miller continued to grow, a third teacher also took the young Baldwin under his wing while he was still at Frederick Douglass Junior High School: the noted Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, who had taken a job there teaching French, which he had perfected during his many trips to Paris, one of them funded by a Guggenheim. It was in his French class that Baldwin first fantasized about traveling to Paris himself. He also read and imitated Cullen’s poetry, along with that of Langston Hughes. Cullen frequently took his students on tours of Harlem and instructed them to write down everything they saw, describing the buildings and the people. Soon Baldwin had left behind his attempts at writing a version of one of his favorite books, Oliver Twist, with leading Black characters replacing white ones. Instead, he began to take his own life as inspiration in what he would later call the “first version” of Go Tell It on the Mountain, working through his desire to exact revenge on his father through the character of a ten-year- old boy named Teddy who poisons his deacon father.
Cullen was the adopted son of a minister, with whom he’d had a conflicted relationship. He, too, had struggled with the impression that he was ugly, but had a cultivated charisma and sartorial elegance to which Baldwin aspired. Unlike Baldwin’s father, Cullen was emotionally open and physically affectionate with all his students, which surely provided Baldwin some measure of comfort during an increasingly confusing period. But since Cullen did not acknowledge his homosexuality publicly or to Baldwin, their connection must also have been an especially complex one. For while Cullen is perhaps best known for his 1925 poem “Yet Do I Marvel,” with its famous lines—“ Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black and bid him sing!”—several poems included in that same award-winning collection, Color, are notable for their implicit homoeroticism, including “Tableau”:
Locked arm in arm they cross the way,
The black boy and the white,
The golden splendor of the day,
The sable pride of night.
From lowered blinds the dark folk stare,
And here the fair folk talk,
Indignant that these two should dare
In unison to walk.
Oblivious to look and word
They pass, and see no wonder
That lightning brilliant as a sword
Should blaze the path of thunder.
The image of James Baldwin as an intellectually precocious and sexually confused adolescent reading and likely imitating this and other homoerotically charged love poems written by Cullen is a striking one, even if he may not have been fully aware of their subtexts. On the one side, you have Cullen, whose career many believe was derailed not only because of racism but also because the closet constrained his literary voice. His dreams of supporting himself as a poet and writer, and living an extravagantly international life, had not materialized. On the other side, you have in Baldwin the person who will grow up to throw open the closet door for Black writers while fashioning precisely the kind of glamorous transatlantic life his predecessor yearned for. Even if neither student nor teacher (nor indeed history itself ) was prepared for an explicit conversation about homosexuality, the mere existence of Cullen and his poetry must have sent an early signal to the young Baldwin that there were other ways of living his life, and other models of Black manhood, in particular, than the one his father and society in general mandated.
Still, when Baldwin fell hard for another boy at school, Arthur Moore, he would have to face his growing confusion alone. As Baldwin later wrote, “I was in love with my friend, as boys indeed can be at that age, but hadn’t the faintest notion of what to do about it.” Two years older, Arthur was more athletic and physically mature than Baldwin, who could not join him playing handball in the streets. But Arthur also loved books. The two of them would go to the used bookstore on 125th Street after they scrounged enough change to buy a book for a nickel or, if they were lucky, six for a quarter. Later, Baldwin would immortalize Arthur as the inspiration for the character Elisha in Go Tell It on the Mountain. The conflict at the heart of that novel—the protagonist John’s struggle to choose between his devotion to God and the truth of his sexual desires, embodied by Elisha—was a major preoccupation for the remainder of Baldwin’s teenage years; indeed, the summer of 1938, in particular, was a turning point.
As he would recount decades later in one of his final essays, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” published in Playboy in 1985, a crucial encounter occurred during this period, just after he graduated from junior high school and turned fourteen years old:
I was certainly unbelievably unhappy and pathologically shy, but that, I felt was nobody’s fault but mine. My father kept me in my short pants longer than he should have, and I had been told, and I believed, that I was ugly. This meant that the idea of myself as a sexual possibility, or target, as a creature capable of desire, had never entered my mind. And it entered my mind finally, by means of the rent made in my short boy-scout pants by a man who had lured me into a hallway, saying that he wanted to send me to the store. That was the very last time I agreed to run an errand for any stranger.
The essay moves on quickly to other topics, but portions of an unpublished earlier draft paint a far more elaborate picture of what happened that day, and why it was so traumatic. Baldwin concludes his narration of this disturbing encounter by acknowledging how fortunate he was that before things could have gone even further than they already had, a door had slammed above them and the man had stood up, fumbled in his pockets, and then shoved some coins into Baldwin’s hands and disappeared down the stairs. Baldwin then recalled how moments later he had run down the stairs himself, then out into the street and all the way home. Overcome with confusion and shame, he’d locked himself in the bathroom, where he’d counted the money the man had given him and then tossed it out the window: “A quarter or two dimes.”
Baldwin’s decision not to include the more explicit passages in the published version of the essay could have been for any number of reasons—he may have found it disrupted the flow of its overarching argument, the editor may have jettisoned it, or he may have questioned the veracity of his own memories. Indeed, just a few pages before narrating this sequence of events in the unpublished manuscript, he had also written about how “fantasy and memory are powerfully connected in our dreams,” so that it was “very difficult to be certain of the distinction between fantasy and a dream—or a memory.” And as he explained in an interview late in his life as to why he never wrote an autobiography: “I don’t trust my memory.” And while with few exceptions his essays are guided by and structured through personal anecdotes and reflections on his life that sometimes stretch back to his earliest years, they often come with the caveat of his recognition of the unreliability of his own recollections.
In one of his later works, for example, No Name in the Street, published in 1972, he would write: “Much, much, much has been blotted out, coming back only lately in bewildering and untrustworthy flashes.” These memories include two key events that took place when he was four or five years old. In the first, his father’s son from a prior marriage, Sam, who was eight years older than Baldwin, rescued Baldwin from nearly drowning during a trip to the beach at Coney Island: he “slung me over his shoulder like a piece of meat, or a much beloved child,” Baldwin would recall, “and strode up out of the sea with me, with me!” Sam despised his father, and soon left the house for good, only to return to Baldwin’s life momentarily years later for David Baldwin’s funeral, so this moment marked him: “He had saved me, after all, and I learned something about the terror and the loneliness and depth and the height of love.” Yet the second event, which also happened when “I must have been about five,” held no such redemptive potential, Baldwin adds, as this was when “my father had me circumcised, a terrifying event which I scarcely remember at all.”
Yet around the same time these words appeared in print, in the same unpublished manuscript in which he was writing about the stairwell encounter, he was doing his best to recall the reason why this operation had taken place when he was so relatively old. He asserts that it happened at his father’s insistence, and that “the scar I carry still looks as if my foreskin had been hacked off with a broken bottle,” a reminder of what he calls a “devastating punishment.” After speculating that “perhaps the man my mother married, whose son I was not, wanted to make certain that I would never have any children,” he even wonders whether his same-sex desires were in part an outcome of needing “to discover if others had been wounded as I had been,” as he put it. In any case, as he concludes, “this does not, to my mind, cover quite enough ground, and yet again, I find myself handicapped by the willful infirmity of my memory.”
***
Whatever the gaps and distortions endemic to the act of remembrance, of which he was so painstakingly aware, it is clear that in the aftermath of his troubling encounter with the man in the stairwell the young Baldwin descended more deeply into personal crisis. In addition to never running an errand for a stranger ever again, he insisted on wearing long pants thereafter, even in the heat of the summer. The next step was a paradoxical one. In his effort to distance himself from what the man symbolized about his own desires, he allowed himself to grow even closer to Arthur, fully embracing not just his family but also the tenets of their devout Christianity, which demonized his true feelings for his friend and thus made them all the more impossible to countenance.
One day Arthur took Baldwin to the neighborhood church where his family worshipped. There were no services that day and the church, a large space occupying the entire second floor of a building, was empty. It was officially called Mount Calvary Pentecostal Faith Church, but it was better known in Harlem as Mother Horn’s church. Arthur led Baldwin into a back room to meet the pastor, Mother Horn herself. As Baldwin later recalled: “There she sat, in her robes, smiling, an extremely proud and handsome woman, with Africa, Europe, and the America of the American Indians blended in her face. She was perhaps forty or fifty at this time, and in our world a very celebrated woman.” Unlike his father, who was always struggling to find a congregation and a space to preach in, she had this enormous church and a famously devoted following. She also had a warmth his father so clearly did not. Before Arthur could even introduce them she looked down at him with a smile.
“Whose little boy are you?” she asked. As he was desperate for love and acceptance, his response was as swift as it was heartfelt.
“Why, yours,” he replied.
The pull of Arthur’s company and the promise of salvation offered by Mother Horn’s church was irresistible. Arthur’s parents embraced Baldwin, calling him by his nickname, “Baldy,” as their home became a respite from the drudgery of changing his siblings’ diapers and ducking his father’s constant criticism. They referred to him as their adopted son, forming what he came to call a “second family” that began to rival what he had built with Bill Miller and her husband; in fact, it would soon eclipse it.
One night toward the end of that hot summer Baldwin underwent a dramatic religious conversion. As Mother Horn concluded her raucous sermon, “one moment I was on my feet, singing and clapping,” he recalled, and then “with no transition, no sensation of falling, I was on my back, with the lights beating down into my face and all the vertical saints above me.” The “anguish” that filled him “could not be described,” as it moved in him like “one of those floods that devastate countries, tearing everything down.” He was yelling up to heaven from the threshing floor before the altar, as if possessed, writhing with the congregation standing over him, crying, singing, and praying. It felt like an eternity. He wrestled with the idea that if God’s love was so great, if he loved all his children, why did he cast his family into the abyss of poverty? Why did he cast all Black people into the abyss? Baldwin had no answer, but when morning broke, as the congregants raised him up from the floor, it was over. They told him he was “saved.” “Well, indeed, I was, in a way,” he later wrote, “for I was utterly drained and exhausted, and released, for the first time, from all my guilty torment.”
Now he was officially a member of Mother Horn’s tabernacle, joining Arthur and his family. It was a rejection of the street life of Lenox Avenue; of his father’s conviction that he was holier than his son; and, perhaps most powerfully, it was a repudiation of his shameful feelings for his friend who had brought him to the church in the first place—a desire he hoped would be erased by the experience but was in fact preserved and even heightened by it. Later, in Go Tell It on the Mountain, he recaptured the submerged dynamics of his conversion by bringing its strong undercurrent of eroticism to the fore: “In his heart there was a sudden yearning tenderness for holy Elisha,” he writes, “desire, sharp and awful as a reflecting knife, to usurp the body of Elisha and lie where Elisha lay; to speak in tongues, as Elisha spoke, and, with that authority to confound his father.” He goes on: “As he cursed his father, as he loved Elisha, he had, even then, been weeping; he had already passed this moment, was already under the power, had been struck, and was going down.” But it would be years before Baldwin could understand and transmute his experience into these words. For now, he was Mother Horn’s little boy.
This religious transformation spelled the end of his relationship with Bill Miller, at least for the foreseeable future. By now Miller had taken a temporary job as a governess for a wealthy family, and she and Evan had moved down to Twelfth Street. Baldwin’s mother sent him there to pick up some clothes and dishes she had offered the family, and upon his arrival he told Miller he had been “saved.” As he recalled in a letter he wrote to her almost two decades later, having to tell her that this meant he couldn’t read as much as he used to, or go to movies or the theater with her, “was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do in my life till then and I’ll never forget, as I stumbled out of the house, your last words to me. Which were: ‘I’ve lost a lot of respect for you.’ ” They would not see each other for many years.
Back at home in Harlem, Baldwin’s youngest and favorite brother, seven-year- old David, went looking for Baldwin’s collection of movie programs and the modeling clay they played with together. But they had disappeared, replaced by a Bible. Baldwin told him that now that he was “saved” he didn’t have as much time to spend with him or their siblings. Meanwhile, his father could no longer lord his greater devotion to God over him. They were on more equal ground. His admonitions and imperatives—“Cease studying,” “get a job”—held far less weight than in the past.
Instead of seeking employment Baldwin continued his education. Countee Cullen had pushed him to apply to the well-respected magnet high school in the Bedford Park area of the Bronx, DeWitt Clinton, of which he was an alum. Thus in the fall of 1938, for the first time Baldwin began to attend a school outside his Harlem neighborhood. The long subway ride to school felt like an escape to another world, and not necessarily a welcoming one. The sprawling, parklike campus, with its traditional Gothic school building, could not have been more different from his previous schools in Harlem. It was also predominantly white, mostly Jewish, with less than a handful of other Black students. Once again it was all boys, only accentuating his difference from his supposed peers.
Returning to Harlem after school meant returning to his father, to his ever-increasing number of siblings, his overworked mother. Along with his younger brothers, Baldwin would meet his mother at the subway exit at midnight to walk her home from her job as a housekeeper. Usually the children had not eaten yet. They would stop off at a grocery store and go home and the hungry children would eat late dinners. The burden of caring for his younger siblings in his mother’s absence continued to fall on Baldwin’s shoulders. Indeed, it wouldn’t be too long before he would have to take on an after-school job at a sweatshop downtown to help his family make ends meet. He was living under conditions the vast majority of his new classmates could never fathom, including the few Black ones. For the first time, as he devoted more of his energy to Bible study and continued to wrestle with his repressed feelings for Arthur, his grades suffered mightily. And no wonder—the life of the mind and imagination that had sustained him throughout his childhood had been sacrificed for the spirit of a God he wasn’t truly sure he believed in.
At the same time, during this period Baldwin had also been spending a fair amount of time at the home of a couple from church whom he was “very fond of [that] I will call the Robinsons,” as he would later write. They lived in a basement apartment in Harlem a few blocks from his home, and since she was ill and spent most of her time in bed, he continued, and since her husband was not religious and rarely at home, his father made sure to tell him that “people were talking about me and Mrs. Robinson.” Baldwin found this “ridiculous.” He may have liked her, he wrote, but he was “in love with him: Uncle Hank,” as he called him, and whom he described as a “tall, thin, beautiful ginger-bread colored man, with light-house teeth, a very beacon of a smile,” adding that he would have gladly “crawled through miles of barbed wire simply to be held against his chest.” Clearly, their attachment was a complex one, and it would come to inform Baldwin’s later published writing in significant ways.
At this juncture, however, trying to live with these kinds of contradictions surely made him fear his father was right, that he was not just strange but something far worse: depraved. His solution was a simple and, in the beginning at least, effective one. He would become even more devout than Arthur, who never cursed, smoked, danced, or went to the movies. He would pray and study the Bible with Arthur, but also on his own, for hours and hours. After the Moores had a falling-out with Mother Horn, he followed them to their new church, Fireside Pentecostal, headed by its deep-voiced pastor, Theophilus Sobers. It was at his storefront church that, entranced by the beating of the tambourines, the clapping, and the pounding feet, Baldwin decided that if he couldn’t follow his dream and become a writer, then he must find another path to distinguish himself. He decided to tell his mother.
“Mama,” he said one day, “there’s nothing I want to do more than be a preacher.”
She was shocked. It was uncommon to preach so young. But she also sensed there was sincerity in his words. She couldn’t have known her son was actually using the church, in part, to mask the deep confusion caused by his burgeoning sexual desires. Or that he was also trying to usurp his father at his own game, as he later admitted: “I don’t doubt that I also intended to best my father on his own ground.” He started going to church several nights a week after school, arriving at eight in the evening and staying until eleven. Instead of doing his homework he studied the Bible even more intently and spent hours praying to God. He was failing some of his classes but he hardly cared, as he had a higher purpose now. He’d found he had a gift for quoting from the Bible and spinning its teachings into sermons, throwing “all my anguish and terror” into them, as he later wrote, so that he was able to deliver his words with the kind of passion, fervor, and conviction that it required. “The salvation I was preaching to others was fueled by the hope of my own,” he wrote. At first, he spoke once a week on Young Ministers’ Night, the youngest member to do so. Then sometimes on Saturday afternoons. Then even on some Sundays. The music and the drama of the church and the power of the pulpit was intoxicating. As he admitted later in his life, “Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, ‘the Word’—when the church and I were one.”
Before long he became “Brother Baldwin,” a revered child preacher at a number of Black Pentecostal churches in the neighborhood. His gambit had worked. He was a much bigger draw than his father, whose congregation had dwindled so much the Moores had taken to calling him a minister without a church. But by the start of his second year at DeWitt Clinton High School, changes were afoot. He would walk through its hallways and look at the poster on the door of one teacher’s book-stuffed office: “Draw and Write for the Magpie.” Baldwin did not like this teacher, Mrs. Whalen, a gray-haired, round woman who wore tweed suits and a charm bracelet and pink glasses. But he missed his days as editor in chief of his junior high school paper, The Douglass Pilot. One day he timidly dropped a piece of paper with a poem he’d written into the basket in the library for contributors to the school literary magazine, Magpie. Soon enough Mrs. Whalen sent for Baldwin to come to her office. She wanted him to join the staff of the magazine. Even if he found her demeanor stuffy and stern, yet again a teacher had recognized his talent and stepped in to help guide him at a crucial juncture.
It was in the Magpie offices in the school’s tower that he made lasting friendships with a group of boys, all Jewish, that completely changed the course of his teenage years: Richard Avedon, who would grow up to become the famed photographer; Sol Stein, who would become a publisher; and Emile Capouya, who soon became Baldwin’s best friend and later grew up to serve as literary editor at The Nation. It was a revelation to be in the company of boys his age who loved literature as much as he did. They would spend hours in the tower planning the next issue but also discussing politics and culture. The magazine’s faculty advisor, a man named Wilmer Stone, a white southerner who promoted socialism in his classes, also took an interest in Baldwin’s development and introduced him to radical politics.
As Baldwin began to read and write again in earnest, a seemingly unresolvable conflict was on the horizon. He was hiding his love of literature from his church and his congregation. He was hiding his church from his school friends. And he was beginning to suspect not only that the church was hypocritical, with its judgmental superiority, but that he was being a hypocrite, too.
His first published piece for Magpie, in the spring of 1940, lays bare the contradictions of this period of his adolescence. Entitled “Peace on Earth,” it tells the story of a boy named John, an obvious precursor to the eventual protagonist of Go Tell It on the Mountain and an idealized surrogate for Baldwin himself. He is described thus: “Johnny not only possesses salvation, but he is also a minister. He is friendly, lovable, and Christ-like. We call him the ‘Little Minister.’ ” John is part of a group of young soldiers and the story extols his faith despite a needless war. His desire for the other boys is sublimated into his love of God: “Peace like a river. Joy like a flood. I will be with him—always— always— even to the end of the world.” Certainly homosocial if not downright homoerotic, this story shows the young writer beginning to comprehend, unconsciously or not, the paradoxical power language holds. It could not only unlock secrets but also encase them, in allegories and in metaphors, concealing and revealing truths simultaneously.
The only person with whom he discussed his ambivalence about the church was Emile, who was sympathetic. Baldwin even brought him to his house in Harlem one day. After he left, Baldwin’s father asked him the question he asked of everyone.
“Is he saved?”
“No,” Baldwin said matter-of-factly. “He’s Jewish.”
His father slammed him across the face with the palm of his hand; this was far from the first time something like this had happened. But this time, his cheek burning, Baldwin shot back, “He’s a better Christian than you.”
With this latest act of violence, as Baldwin would write, “everything flooded back—all the hatred, all the fear, and the depth of the merciless resolve to kill my father rather than allow my father to kill me—and I knew that all those sermons and tears and all that repentance and rejoicing had changed nothing.”
It may have been after this argument with his father, or certainly one very similar to it, that the fifteen-year- old Baldwin ran out of the house in anger and headlong into another life-changing encounter. “The night of that battle with my father,” he would later write, he walked through a snowstorm until he found himself at Broadway and Ninety-Sixth Street, where he saw “the city stretching endlessly beyond.” Realizing he could not make it all the way downtown, he started heading back home, the last place in the world he wanted to be. It was minutes later, after he walked by Mother Horn’s church on Lenox Avenue and turned onto 133rd Street, that he started to hear footsteps behind him. Mid-block, he came upon a church that was having a revival meeting, describing how “their lights spilled across the snow and their voices and their tambourines filled the air.” This was a place of worship he was not allowed to enter, he explained, “since they differed from us in some crucial dogmatic point, but the footsteps remained behind me so I thought to find sanctuary in the church.”
It was full of people singing, dancing, and shouting, many of them overflowing into the aisles. As Baldwin waited for one of the ushers to seat him, a woman bumped into him by mistake and almost knocked him off-balance, so he placed his hand on the back of a pew to steady himself. In doing so, he wrote, “I put my hand on another hand. I do not know how I knew it. But I knew at once that his hand was the hand of the man who had been following me.” Baldwin turned around, and the man was looking right at him.
Decades after this moment, in that same 1985 essay, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” in which he briefly recalled his experience with the stranger in the stairwell, he would also offer a summary of the importance of the relationship he developed with the man who had followed him into the church that night, whose name was Billy: “[This] Harlem racketeer, a man of about thirty-eight, fell in love with me, and I will be grateful to that man until the day I die,” he would write, explaining how he shared his poetry with him, because there wasn’t anybody else in his Harlem neighborhood to show it to. He then wonders
what on earth his friends could have been thinking, confronted with stingy-brimmed, mustachioed, razor-toting Poppa and skinny, pop-eyed Me when he walked me into various shady joints, I drinking ginger ale, he drinking brandy. I think I was supposed to be his nephew, some nonsense like that, though he was Spanish and Irish, with curly black hair. But I knew that he was showing me off and wanted his friends to be happy for him—which, indeed, if the way they treated me can be taken as a barometer, they were. They seemed to feel that this was his business—that he would be in trouble if it became their business.
“And though I loved him, too—in my way, a boy’s way,” Baldwin concluded, “I was mightily tormented, for I was still a child evangelist. Lord. My soul looks back and wonders.” Indeed, amid all this confusion and pain, how could he possibly find a way to reconcile the many contradictions of his relentless aspirations and desires? But then one day as they exited their English class at DeWitt Clinton, his friend Emile told him about a man he’d met in the Village. A “wonderful man,” he said. A painter. A Negro. Someone he thought he should meet, too. His name was Beauford Delaney.
Copyright © 2025 by Nicholas Boggs
