James Baldwin’s Harlem Through a Child’s Eyes / Gabrielle Bellot. In: New York Review of Books January 3, 2019

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. 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. 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.
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. 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. “Uncle Jimmy!” he yelled repeatedly. “When you gonna write a book about MeeeeEEE?”
To  everyone’s surprise, Baldwin finally did just that, crafting a remarkable book that follows a young boy named TJ—a stand-in for Tejan—through Harlem, along with a boy called WT and a bespectacled girl nicknamed Blinky. The book was illustrated with beautiful watercolors by the French artist Yoran Cazac, one of the men Baldwin was closest to in France, and was written in a childlike version of black American vernacular. Subtitled “A Story of Childhood,” the American edition described it as a “children’s book for adults and an adults’ book for children,” making explicit its extraordinary multiplicity: for kids and yet not for them, not unlike the way that Gabriel García Márquez’s best-known short stories, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” and “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” are both subtitled “tales for children” in spite of their at-times-dense referentiality.
The ambiguity was well-earned. 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. 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. 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. I was born dead.” In a way, then, this story—both lighthearted and tinged with suggestions of violence—is also, perhaps, a missive from Baldwin to his younger self, describing a vision of childhood in the future that, while murky, is starrier than the one Baldwin had. ... [mehr] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/01/03/james-baldwins-harlem-through-a-childs-eyes/