![]() ![]() He said this to the journalist the same year he published what I consider his masterwork, If Beale Street Could Talk, a late novel about black Americans in love, systemic racism, and the injustice of the prison system. ![]() The experience of the black child, he would write in that same decade in a famous piece for The New York Times, was feared by white Americans, so black children had to be kept in the night-dungeon of ignorance and simplicity, feared for their experience of-and refusal to “repudiate his experience” of-the iniquity and inequity of the world. ![]() If childhood is often characterized (somewhat idealistically) in literature as a move from youthful innocence to adult experience, Baldwin appeared to be indicating that he had moved abruptly, sharply from one to another. “I was born dead.” The dark sentiment seemed to reflect Baldwin’s own despair over his childhood his family was poor, his parents were restrictive, he felt torturously out of place in the narrow world of church and school his parents wished him to occupy, and he learnt, from early on, that his blackness made him both invisible to white Americans in certain situations and monstrously, dangerously present in others. ![]() “I had no childhood,” James Baldwin informed a French journalist in 1974. ![]()
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