James Baldwin, perhaps it is easiest to do so if we start at a time when that identity was more segmented and at odds with itself. James Baldwin, like many children born in the 1920s, experienced an austere, religious environment growing up. The eldest of nine children of a strict Baptist preacher, Baldwin lived a childhood that stifled individual development. In his father’s house as well as from his father’s pulpit James learned there was one way of doing things, the black, God-worshiping, and, therefore, the good way, and, anything else was pure evil. Encompassed within this evil, in fact to his father the cause of most of it, particularly where the black man was concerned, was the white man. Certainly, his father’s bitterness and anger regarding the treatment of blacks in white America, particularly when blacks were still negroes and only a step removed from niggers, was not engendered and reinforced without validity. Nonetheless, his father did not possess
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