Thoughts on Little Man, Little Man by James Baldwin

By Rachel Amaru, Co-founder of Good Trouble For Kids

When I learned that this book had been republished, I immediately ordered it for my own personal library. As you will see, it both is a children’s book, and it is not a children’s book. Like Antoine de St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, or C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it is a book about children, but perhaps its true intent is to open the eyes of adults living in the world around them. The full title includes the words a story of Childhood, and that is what it is. It is a story of the Harlem that Baldwin loved: the streets, the people, the music, the joy, and also the agony. As Baldwin says in Raoul Peck’s extraordinary documentary, I Am Not Your Negro (transcript by Vintage International 2017; available for viewing on Netflix), when talking about his return to the US from France:

“I missed Harlem Sunday mornings

and fried chicken and biscuits,

I missed the music,

I missed the style –

that style possessed by no other people in the world.

I missed the way the dark face closes,

the way dark eyes watch,

and the way, when a dark face opens,

a light seems to go everywhere.

I missed, in short, my connections,

missed the life which had produced me

and nourished me and paid for me.

Now, though I was a stranger,

I was home.”

Or, as he put it in The Fire Next Time:

“In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us — pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children — bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so we within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love.”

Baldwin stood witness to all of the complexities of Black life in so many of his essays and novels. Like Toni Morrison, he wanted to portray Black lives in all their fullness, and he did not duck from sharing it true. He also wasn’t shy of sharing the gritty realities of poor Black lives, but as Little Man, Little Man illustrates, he insisted that one also recognize Black beauty and joy.

Our vision at Good Trouble For Kids is to use children’s books as a platform for dense and rich discussions that spur cultural dialogue about race — a virtual literary and art salon. As the introduction by Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody makes clear, one of Baldwin’s points was to make Harlem beautiful, to recognize it as the place his family — and he — called home. As they write, Baldwin is “asking readers to revalue and find beauty in what has been routinely cast aside as marginal, irrelevant, and even ugly by dominant culture — namely the lives and landscapes of urban black children” (xix). This is why we chose this book. It truly honors the mission of Good Trouble For Kids by an author with tremendous power to offer us a “way of seeing the world as we are not usually taught to see it.” (xix).

Good Trouble For Kids wants to see the children’s literary canon change in radical ways. We want to see it diversified, desegregated, and for BIPOC children to see themselves reflected in the literature they read — and in very complex ways — and for them to know that Black authors want to write about their lives, that their lives most assuredly deserve to be written about, and perhaps, even, to inspire children to one day write their own stories.

As can be seen from my write-up on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, I am a die-hard fan. And I love what Baldwin does in Little Man, Little Man. In some ways, it is quite experimental. I actually wrote down all the bold-faced sentences to try and see if they fit together separately in some way (I unfortunately could not come up with anything in particular). They do strike me, however, as lines of poetry on the page. Music all up and down this street, TJ runs it every day. What a great first line. (But truthfully, there is so much of Baldwin’s writing that reminds me of poetry. Consider how he describes TJ’s mama: “Her skin the color of peaches and brown sugar.” What an evocative line!)

Maybe the bolded lines are messages: WT got a brother older than him and he sit on the stoop like that a whole lot of times. Look at the picture (24). There is so much going on in that boy’s face. And we, the adults either reading this book alongside our children, or aloud to them, we know Baldwin is issuing a warning. Baldwin’s children aren’t depicted as innocent. They know that some of their brothers “go up to the roof or they go behind the stairs and they shoot that dope in their veins and they come out and sit on the stoop and look like they gone to sleep” (22). There is a deep sadness in their growing awareness of the lure of drugs, even with all they don’t fully understand. And there are echoes of Baldwin’s perfect short story, “Sonny’s Blues” (1957).

I think Little Man, Little Man is meant to be a lesson to adults. It reminds us just how much children witness, how much they actually see and take in. It is too easy to think they are oblivious, but Baldwin insists on showing that this is not true. They see Miss Lee’s alcoholism, they recognize the smell of weed, they have an awareness of what is and is not right in the world. The section beginning with This street long. It real long. (pp. 12–17) contains a message about the police, about entrapment, about a deep and justified level of paranoia that extends even to children.

But even with all the dangers of the street, and the anxieties of childhood, Baldwin emphasizes, as in so much of what he writes, love. He depicts TJ’s dad passing on Black pride (“I want you to be proud of your people”), much as Baldwin does in his letter to his nephew James in the first essay of The Fire Next Time, “My Dungeon Shook”: “Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go,” and near the end of that letter, “You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer.” That was written in 1963, and Little Man, Little Man was originally published in 1976. Baldwin’s children care for one another (WT says “You hurt yourself, man?” on page 19, and then again on p. 76 “You hurt man, You hurt?”). Both times Baldwin makes reference to WT being grown-up, or “like a real old man.” Really, what WT is, is an old soul — a child fully aware of how dangerous the world is, and fully alive in it. And ultimately, the adults — Mr. Man and Miss Lee — albeit dysfunctional in their own ways, rise to the occasion and take care of the children (and each other), and the book ends on this note: WT watching/ witnessing all that is happening around them (with adults surmising the complicated dynamic between Mr. Man and Miss Lee, including his knowledge that she is responsible for a child having been hurt); Mr. Man putting his arm around Miss Lee — a physical act of forgiveness; and laughter — Mr. Man’s, Miss Lee’s, and WT’s. That laughter is Baldwin reminding us to never forget Black joy.

Originally published on Good Trouble For Kids and Story Remedy