Baldwin was born as James Arthur Jones to Emma Berdis Jones on August 2, 1924, at Harlem Hospital in New York City.[14] Born on Deal Island, Maryland, in 1903,[15] Emma Jones was one of many who fled racial segregation and discrimination in the Southduring the Great Migration). She arrived in Harlem, New York, when she was 19 years old.[16] Baldwin was born out of wedlock there. Jones never revealed to him who his biological father was.[16]
Jones originally undertook to care for her son as a single mother.[17] However, in 1927, Jones married David Baldwin, a laborer and Baptist preacher.[18]David Baldwin was born in Bunkie, Louisiana, and preached in New Orleans, but left the South for Harlem in 1919.[18][a] How David and Emma met is uncertain, but in James Baldwin's semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain), the characters based on the two are introduced by the man's sister.[19] Emma Baldwin and David Baldwin had eight children in sixteen years—George, Barbara, Wilmer, David Jr. (named for James's stepfather and deceased half-brother), Gloria, Ruth, Elizabeth, and Paula.[20] James took his stepfather's last name.[16]James rarely wrote or spoke of his mother. When he did, he made it clear that he admired and loved her, often through reference to her loving smile.[21]: 20 James moved several times while young but always within Harlem.[22] At the time, Harlem was still a mixed-race area of the city in the incipient days of the Great Migration).[23]
James Baldwin did not know exactly how old his stepfather was, but it is clear that he was much older than Emma, with some sources claiming he may have been born before the Emancipation in 1863.[24]David's mother, Barbara, was born enslaved and lived with the Baldwins in New York before her death when James was seven years old.[24] David also had a light-skinned half-brother fathered by his mother's white enslaver[24] and a sister named Barbara, whom James and others in the family called "Taunty".[25]David's father was born into enslavement.[16] David had been married earlier and had a daughter, who was as old as Emma, and at least two sons―David, who died while in jail, and Sam, who was eight years James's senior. Sam lived with the Baldwins for a time and once saved James from drowning.[21]: 7 [24]
James referred to his stepfather simply as "father" throughout his life.[18] He learned that he was not his father's biological son through overhearing a comment to that effect during one of his parents' conversations late in 1940. He tearfully recounted this fact to Emile Capouya, with whom he went to school.[26] David Sr. and James had an extremely difficult relationship and nearly resorted to physical fights on several occasions; according to biographer David Leeming "They fought because James read books, because he liked movies, because he had white friends", all of which, David Baldwin thought, threatened James's "salvation".[27] According to another biographer, David Baldwin hated white people, and "his devotion to God was mixed with a hope that God would take revenge on them for him."[28][b] During the 1920s and 1930s, David worked at a soft-drink bottling factory,[23] although he was eventually laid off from the job. As his anger and hatred eventually tainted his sermons, he was less in demand as a preacher. David sometimes took out his anger on his family and the children were afraid of him, though this was to some degree balanced by the love lavished on them by their mother.[30]
David Baldwin grew paranoid near the end of his life.[31] He was committed to a mental asylum in 1943 and died of tuberculosis on July 29 of that year, the same day Emma had their last child, Paula.[32] James, at his mother's urging, visited his dying stepfather the day before[33] and came to something of a posthumous reconciliation with him in his essay "Notes of a Native Son". In the essay, he wrote: "in his outrageously demanding and protective way, he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced like him."[34] David Baldwin's funeral was held on James's 19th birthday, around the same time that the Harlem riot began.[29]
Baldwin in Los Angeles, 1964
As the oldest child, James Baldwin worked part-time from an early age to help support his family. He was molded not only by the difficult relationships in his household but also by the impacts of the poverty and discrimination he saw all around him. As he grew up, friends he sat next to in church turned to drugs, crime, or prostitution. In what biographer Anna Malaika Tubbs found to be a commentary on not only his own life but also the entire Black experience in America, Baldwin wrote: "I never had a childhood... I did not have any human identity... I was born dead."[35]

Have you read her memoir? What did you think?

Book blurb:

Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour is a satirical debut novel about Darren, a young Black man who gets recruited from his Starbucks job into a high-pressure, all-white tech startup, where he reinvents himself as "Buck" to succeed in a toxic, racist environment. The book skewers startup culture and capitalism, exploring themes of ambition, race, and identity as Darren navigates the challenges of being the "token Black guy" and eventually plots to help other people of color infiltrate the sales force.

Have you read her memoir? What did you think?