Baldwin, James (1924–1987)

James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, on August 2, 1924. He was the eldest of nine children. His stepfather, a hard and cruel man, was a storefront preacher. A voracious reader as a child, Baldwin published his first story at the age of 12 in a church newspaper. At the early age of 14, he became a preacher in a Pentecostal church in Harlem, but in his late teens, he converted from the love of religion back to his first love, literature. Baldwin's literary genius would take him all over the world, but he was always rooted in the influences of his childhood. The influences on his writing style included the rhythms and rhetoric of the King James Bible and the store-front church. Family, race, and sexuality would become his topics of choice. His writings were influential in informing a large white audience about growing up black in America.

The year that Baldwin was born was also the year of the Detroit race riots of 1924, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. The day of his stepfather's funeral, on Baldwin's 19th birthday, a race riot broke out in Harlem as well. Indeed, as they drove to the graveyard, Baldwin later wrote, injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around them. As a black man in America, Baldwin seemed destined to confront race, and he approached it with the evangelical fervor of his youth. He had been a child preacher, [Page 215]and he still believed in the possibility of mass conversion regarding race in America.

Baldwin's rage toward racism was fueled by a job he had in a defense plant in New Jersey during the war. It was there that he felt the sting of segregation at the bars, diners, and bowling alleys that were closed to him. He insisted on going to these places even though he knew he would be refused service. He felt compelled to suffer the rejection and force whites to tell him they would not serve him.

Baldwin began writing full-time in 1943 and, although publishers rejected his work, his book reviews and essays helped garner him the prestigious Rosenwald Fellowship in 1948. Baldwin's difficult relationship with his stepfather, his confusion with his sexual orientation, the suicide of a friend, and the ever-present strain of racism in America drove him to move to Paris in 1948. It was in Europe that Baldwin finished Go Tell It on the Mountain; this novel garnered him fame when it was published in 1953. In this and subsequent works, Baldwin fused autobiographical material with a keen analysis of prejudice and social injustice. In his book Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature, Colm Toíbín says that Baldwin was both freed and cornered by his heritage. He was freed from being a dandy and freed into finding a subject. Then he was cornered into being a spokesman or an exile.

Baldwin was always conscious of his otherness and wrote about it often. In an essay, “Stranger in the Village” (1953), he describes traveling to a small Swiss village. The children call him a nigger in Swedish, and he realizes that American beliefs originated right there in Europe. He had not escaped racism at all by going to Europe; he had only found its roots.

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