Baldwin, James (1924–1987)

Family Background and Early Influences

James Baldwin was born in a Harlem hospital in 1924, son of the unmarried Berdis Jones. After her marriage to David Baldwin and the subsequent birth of eight siblings, James and his family continued to live in New York City, and the children attended its public schools. Baldwin's love of solitary reading and his first writing efforts—the tender shoots of a major literary talent—appeared during his Harlem childhood. As a Baldwin son, he made his home in his family's apartment; as a son of the human social world, he found a home in the public library on 135th Street.

Baldwin's stepfather worked as a laborer and a preacher, and his influence on young James was powerful and decidedly ambiguous. Many of Baldwin's literary works are shaped by the fractious, fear-filled love between them. His own family and early experiences are inextricable in his prose from their symbolic counterpoints in the larger society. Thus, suffering and difficulty linked to his stepfather were transmuted into the pain of never quite belonging in the world. The thematic power of his actual and symbolic “illegitimacy” runs through many of his major works, particularly Go Tell It on the Mountain, Nobody Knows My Name, and No Name in the Street.

Formation of Artistic Identity

James Baldwin faced a host of terrifying challenges as he grew into his relationship with the larger human world. His experience as the somewhat-outcast son in the Baldwin family awakened in him a thirst for belonging that was never to be satisfied, even as it galvanized the emotional and artistic energy sustaining him and driving his work forward. He began to preach the Christian gospel as an adolescent, bringing the conflict with his stepfather to a contest on more or less equal footing (even as the senior Baldwin was losing his grip on sanity) and developing his signature facility with speech and oral witnessing.

Around the same time, several school-based mentors, both White and Black, provided extremely significant guidance and support to young James (Jimmy) and were pivotal elements fostering his intellectual and artistic development. From these mentors, [Page 128]Baldwin learned a love for language in the form of theater, classic drama, and fiction. A formative experiential influence on his art and his confidence in being an artist was an Orson Welles Works Progress Administration (WPA) production of Macbeth with an all-Black cast. His longing, like that of his literary model, Henry James, to be recognized as a playwright owes much to that early encounter with drama. Indeed, in the final weeks of his life, Baldwin labored over revisions to his play, The Welcome Table. Between Macbeth and The Welcome Table, Baldwin was to find a thicket of success and betrayal only partly assuaged by his self-imposed exile in France beginning in the late 1940s.

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