If we hope to gain several(prenominal) measure of insight into the wholeness of identity that would eventually settle 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 golf-club children of a strict Baptist preacher, Baldwin lived a childhood that stifled unmarried 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 sizeable 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 thorniness and anger regarding the treatment of blacks in white America, particularly when blacks were fluent negroes and only a step removed from niggers, was not engendered and reinforce without validity. Nonetheless, his father did not possess the big, world-absorbing perception of his son, a man who would come to realize individual pain is a oecumenical that connects all human beings. Nor did he realize that while he hated the white man's oppression, he, in order to get revenge, adopt the same oppressive egocentric views. His internalized identity adopted the "white" American dream as the route to black success. What he did not realize is that the "white" American dream did not include blacks: "I had not know my father very well. We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of mulish pride. When he was dead I realized that I had barely ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a grand time I began to wish I had. It seems to be usual of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the
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