He began his first novel, about himself and his father, around the time he left the church, at seventeen. Baldwin had also sought refuge in the church, becoming a boy preacher when he was fourteen, but had soon realized that he was hiding from everything he wanted and feared he could never achieve. Devastation was all around: his contemporaries, out on Lenox Avenue, were steadily going to jail or else were on “the needle.” His father, a factory worker and a preacher-“he was righteous in the pulpit,” Baldwin said, “and a monster in the house”-had died insane, poisoned with racial bitterness.
There was, of course, no shortage of reasons for a young black man to leave the country in 1948. His father was dead by then, and his mother had eight younger children whom it tortured him to be deserting he didn’t have the courage to tell her he was going until the afternoon he left. He was barely out of his teens when he left his Harlem home for Greenwich Village, in the early forties, and he had escaped altogether at twenty-four, in 1948, buying a one-way ticket to Paris, with no intention of coming back. Of the many things that the wandering writer hoped to find-friends, rest, peace of mind-his single overwhelming need, his only real hope of salvation, was to finish the book.īaldwin had been fleeing from place to place for much of his adult life. His suitcase contained the manuscript of a long and ambitious novel that he had been working on for years, and that had already brought him to the brink of suicide. He desperately needed to be taken care of, Cezzar said or, in the more dramatic terms that Baldwin used throughout his life, to be saved. It soon became clear that Baldwin was in terrible shape: exhausted, in poor health, worried that he was losing sight of his aims both as a writer and as a man.
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