Typescript draft with holograph revisions, Go Tell It on the Mountain

BARRYE BROWN: James Baldwin was a longtime friend of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture given that this was his home library growing up. It was his dying wish to have his papers come to the Schomburg Center.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: Barrye Brown is Curator of Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books at The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

BROWN: What we have here in front of us is a manuscript page of Go Tell It on the Mountain, his first novel, and arguably his most autobiographical novel.

GATES: The page is from the passage where John Grimes, a young teenager—and a fictionalized version of Baldwin himself—passes by The New York Public Library’s flagship 42nd Street building. In real life, Baldwin regularly visited the 135th Street branch—today the Schomburg Center—but like John in the following excerpt, Baldwin found the massive 42nd Street Library as intimidating as it was alluring.  

BROWN: “He loved the street, not for the people or the shops, but for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the public library. A building filled with books, and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter.”

GATES: Part of the reluctance that John—and young Baldwin, himself—felt about going inside the 42nd Street Library probably had a lot to do with just how special, how comfortable he felt in the 135th Street branch.  

BROWN: During that time, the 135th Street branch library was a very unique library location in that it was the only library location that had an integrated staff. So this is the first time for many New Yorkers that they would encounter Black librarians. If you can just imagine yourself in James Baldwin’s position as a child, to come into a library and to really see yourself reflected in the staff, that has to be an amazing experience—and this is an experience that you would not get at the 42nd Street Library. 

GATES: An important teacher eventually introduced Baldwin to the 42nd Street Library and instilled in him an understanding that he, as much as anyone else, belonged there.

BROWN: His teacher teaches him how to conduct research, and before long, the building becomes almost like a second home for him. So these two locations of The New York Public Library greatly shaped the James Baldwin who we know today as one of the greatest and most prophetic writers of the 20th century.