In a sense, it can be said of James Baldwin that he was born in a manger, although his actual entrance into this world occurred, on August 2, 1924, within an obstetrical ward of Harlem Hospital. While he was still too young to go to school, browsing through a large family Bible he could hardly hold securely, Baldwin discovered that his mother had married his father (whom he now realized was his stepfather) in 1927. Deprivation seemed to rule his early life. The Baldwins lived on Park Avenue, but at the wrong end, and there were, in time, eight other children. James Baldwin was the oldest of them all.
Baldwin's mother, Emma Berdis Jones Baldwin, had advanced, willingly or not, on the great metropolis of New York, from the tiny town of Deals Island, Maryland. Between childbirths, she worked as a domestic. Her husband, David, came from New Orleans. He worked at a bottling plant. There was little money in the household, and most of the responsibility for childcare fell to Baldwin himself. He seems to have given of his time ungrudgingly, and the influence of this youthful stewardship of his half-brothers and half-sisters on his adult sense of social responsibility probably should not be underestimated. But between him and his stepfather a gulf, filled with bitter, implacable animosity, always existed. Langston Hughes' aversion to his father may have been no greater than the antagonism that, in effect, kept Baldwin and his stepfather constantly at each other's throat.
Baldwin's intellectual precocity quickly evinced itself. His appearance exposed him to the ridicule of his schoolmates: He was small, with bulging eyes. But he scored 122 on the IQ test he took in high school, however much he may have been unhappily affected by emotional stress and an environment that differed from that of the white and the affluent. He began to write at an early age. Some of his first compositions were verse, although he was to eschew poetry once he grew up. At both his junior high school, named after Frederick Douglass (and with Countee Cullen on its faculty), and at the then-highly esteemed De Witt Clinton High School (something of a Boston Latin School in the Bronx), he wrote and edited for school publications. Like Richard Wright, he never went to college.
Immediately after graduation, he worked in New Jersey near Princeton, unloading freight from boxcars after it became apparent he lacked the size and muscle to lay railroad track. After his stepfather was committed to a state mental institution on Long Island, Baldwin visited him only once, just before his stepfather's death. For the next five years, in Greenwich Village, Baldwin worked for a living and wrote, doing both full-time. He authored such brevities as reviews for the Nation, the New Leader, Commentary, and the Partisan Review. Richard Wright, not yet an expatriate, contrived for him the grant of a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Award. In 1948, with money from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, he bought a one-way plane ticket to Paris, arriving with forty dollars in his pocket.
Although he could not have known it, his desperate years would soon be over. Once, as a boy, ranging from his squalid Harlem neighborhood, he had climbed a hill in Central Park to view the glorious masonry of midtown Manhattan and dream of belonging to that world of might and opulence. In a Swiss retreat, a chalet owned by the parents of his friend, Lucien Happersberger, and located in a little mountain village of six hundred inhabitants, Loeche-les-Bains, he finally completed a novel, Go Tell It on the
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