The Rockpile

James Baldwin (1924–1987)
From James Baldwin: Early Novels & Stories

Interesting Links

“Baldwin at a Glance: Harlem—Born and Bred” (National Museum of African American History and Culture)

“Chasing James Baldwin in Switzerland” (Matthew Wilson, UN Today)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Harlem,” Ann Petry
• “Tall Tale Blue Over Mobile Bay in Harlem,” Albert Murray
• “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” Ernest Hemingway
• “New Haven, 1920,” Thornton Wilder

Buy the book
James Baldwin: Early Novels & Stories
Go Tell It on the Mountain | Giovanni’s Room | Another Country | Going to Meet the Man | 970 pages
List price: $45.00
Web store price: $30.00

“Harlem Tenement in Summer,” 1939, photograph by Sid Grossman for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

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“He was righteous in the pulpit and a monster in the house,” James Baldwin told Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch during an interview in 1969. “I’ve hated a few people, but actually I’ve hated only one person, and that was my father.”

James Baldwin was referring to David Baldwin, his stepfather. Born in the early 1860s, the elder Baldwin had moved to Harlem from New Orleans in 1919 with his mother and his youngest son after his first wife had died. Around the same time, Emma Berdis Jones, a native of Deals Island, Maryland, arrived in Harlem, and she gave birth to James Arthur Jones on August 2, 1924. (James never learned the identity of his biological father.) It’s not known how David and Emma met. He was in his sixties, and she was 26, and despite the vast difference in their ages, they married in 1927. A preacher in a small storefront church, David Baldwin earned his living at a bottling factory, and it was never enough to make ends meet as the couple had eight more children—three boys and five girls, with the youngest born the day he died in 1943.

James Baldwin described to Auchincloss and Lynch the “strange role” he played in his family:

He didn’t like me. But he’d had a terrible time, too. And of course, I was not his son. I was a bastard. What he wanted for his children was what in fact I became. I was the brightest boy in the house because I was the eldest, and because I loved my mother and I really loved those kids. And I was necessary: I changed all the diapers and I knew where the kids were, and I could take some of the pressures off my mother and in a way stand between him and her—which is a strange role to play. I had to learn to stand up to my father, and, in learning that, I became precisely what he wanted his other children to become, and he couldn’t take that, and I couldn’t either maybe.

Soon after his father’s death, Baldwin—now a 19-year-old high school graduate—began to write his debut novel, which he called “Crying Holy” and “In My Father’s House” before eventually settling on Go Tell It on the Mountain. He worked on it intermittently for nearly nine years, and it was published in May 1953. The story revolves around the fraught relationship between a teenager and his stepfather—a preacher and laborer much like David Baldwin. Yet the month before the book was published, Baldwin denied any autobiographical connection at all:

I had been carrying [it] about with me since the day of my father's funeral. My father's funeral does not appear in the novel—had nothing whatever to do with it—and by this time my father had nothing to do with it, either. There's a great misapprehension abroad to the effect that writers take people out of life and put them into books, but nothing could be further from the truth.

James Campbell, in his biography of Baldwin, reprints this excerpt and, reminding us of the “folly of taking an author at his word when speaking about his own work,” points out that many years later Baldwin told TV Guide that the novel “comes out of the tension between a particular father and a particular son. No matter that he was not my biological father.” Similarly, three years before his death Baldwin pithily admitted in an interview that “it was really about me and my father.”

There are, of course, countless differences between the life Baldwin lived and the novel he wrote, and Campbell concludes that while Go Tell It on a Mountain “retains its integrity as a work of fiction, it is informed by deep autobiographical feeling.” Baldwin himself best drew the distinction in yet another interview, this one with Jewell Handy Gresham-Nemiroff in 1976:

[My first novel] concerns itself with John, his father and mother and the church people. The point of the book, in a way, is what experiences shaped his aunt, his father, his mother. All of these lives were shaping John’s life. His choices are defined by things that have happened to other people, not him. Not yet. In short, he’s walking into his ancestors’ lives and experiences. Obviously at some point in my life that was my situation. And in order for me to assess and surmount it I had to face it. That’s why you write any book, in a sense, to clarify something. Not merely for yourself. What I have to assume is that if it happened to me it happened to someone else. You have to trust your own experience, which is all that connects you to anyone else.

“The Rockpile” was an early version of an episode in the first part of the novel. In 1965, when Baldwin published his first (and only) story collection, Going to Meet the Man, he dusted off the draft, polished it into a story, and included it as the opening selection. We present it below as our Story of the Week selection.

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Across the street from their house, in an empty lot between two houses, stood the rockpile. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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