Early Life
When Baldwin was an infant, his mother, Emma Berdis Jones, divorced his father because of drug abuse and moved to Harlem, New York, where she married a preacher, David Baldwin. The family was very poor. James spent much time caring for his several younger brothers and sisters. At age ten, he was beaten by a gang of police officers. His adoptive father, whom James in essays called simply his father, appears to have treated James—versus James's siblings—with singular harshness.
His stepfather died of tuberculosis in summer of 1943 soon before James turned 19. The day of the funeral was James's 19th birthday, his father's last child was born, and Harlem rioted, the portrait opening his essay "Notes of a Native Son". The quest to answer or explain familial and social repudiation—and attain a sense of self both coherent and benevolent—became a motif in Baldwin's writing.
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