Anyone familiar with the fiction and nonfiction of James Baldwin is aware that the formative influence upon his life and career was his stepfather. Baldwin was an illegitimate child; when he was three years old his mother married David Baldwin, a Southerner who had come to New York as part of the large stream of black migration north after the First World War. The elder Baldwin labored in a Long Island factory during the week and preached in Harlem storefront churches on Sundays. As a preacher, he was passionate but hardly successful: his increasingly bitter harangues were off-putting to his congregations, and he descended, over the years, to ever smaller, grimier, and more insignificant houses of worship.

Young Jimmy was never told that David Baldwin was not his real father, a fact that he discovered quite by accident when he was a teenager. He was in effect the eldest Baldwin child in what was to become a large family. David Baldwin was a powerful, brooding presence who cast a pall over the entire family. “He looked to me, as I grew older,” James Baldwin wrote, “like pictures I had seen of African tribal chieftains: he really should have been naked, with war-paint on and barbaric mementos, standing among spears.” He was “the most bitter man I have ever met,” who emanated “absolutely unabating tension. . . . I do not remember, in all those years, that one of his children was ever glad to see him come home.”