Clearer, however, is that it represents the artistic culmination of Baldwin and Cazac’s multilayered relationship, a collaboration that resulted, in Baldwin’s words, in a literary-artistic “celebration of the self-esteem of black children.” This statement doubtless resonated darkly for Baldwin, who had told a French journalist in 1974 that “I never had a childhood. In its lack of linear narrative, refusal to conform to standard English, and the sometimes wild, distorted art that accompanies it, Little Man, Little Man seems distinctly Modernist in sensibility for all that it still appears, at first glance, to be an ordinary children’s book. Little Man, Little Man defies conventional expectations for both children’s and adult’s literature, functioning, ultimately, as a liminal work that straddles the borders of both genres. WT, illustrated by Yoran Cazac from Little Man, Little Man, 2018 click to enlarge “When you gonna write a book about MeeeeEEE?” One day, Tejan claims in the foreword to a lovely new edition of Little Man, Little Man-published last year at the urging of Baldwin scholar Nicholas Boggs, who co-edited the book-he caught his uncle by the arm.
Tejan and his sister, Aisha, liked to spy on the events they had learned that their uncle was not simply popular in the neighborhood, but, as the siblings would boast to their friends and schoolmates, he was “an Author,” with a capital “A” that betokened Baldwin’s celebrity. At the time, Baldwin was spending most of his days in a residence in the southern French village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, so whenever he made the transatlantic trip to drop by his American family’s home, friends, kin, and strangers would simply appear at the door like moths to a lantern, seeking an audience with the great writer, and soon the apartment’s air would be thick with the sound of voices and music and sweet-pungent with the scent of whiskeys and wines. A few years earlier, his little nephew, Tejan, had asked Baldwin-Uncle Jimmy-to write a book about him on one of Baldwin’s visits to New York to see Tejan’s family at 137 West 71st Street. In 1976, James Baldwin released what is perhaps his most novel-and most often forgotten-book: Little Man, Little Man, a curious, hybrid-genre composition without precedent in his body of work. Illustration by Yoran Cazac, from James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, 2018
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