It was 1996 and I was a junior in college, taking a class on James Baldwin in which we were reading pretty much everything he’d ever written: his groundbreaking novels, his controversial plays, his searing and celebrated essays. Everything, that is, except for one book my professor mentioned in passing—a children’s book, originally published in the UK in 1976 but now out of print, entitled Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. I looked it up in the index of David Leeming’s then recently published Baldwin biography and found a scant paragraph or two, including a reference to an obscure French artist, Yoran Cazac, who had apparently illustrated the book. Leeming referred to Baldwin’s relationship with him as a “friendship,” but the sentences that followed suggested there was more to the story: “Yoran was not a solution to Baldwin’s need for a full and lasting relationship. He was committed to his marriage and his children and spent most of his time in Italy.”
Leeming’s other bits of information only piqued my interest further: “When Baldwin went to Italy to stand as godfather to Yoran’s third child on Easter Sunday, he must have been reminded of another friend, another marriage, and another baptism of another godchild in Switzerland in 1952. He was to dedicate If Beale Street Could Talk to Yoran, as he had dedicated Giovanni’s Room to Lucien.”
I knew “Lucien” was Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss man Baldwin had called the love of his life; and Baldwin’s classic gay novel Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956, was the first of his books I’d read, way back in the ninth grade. I’d borrowed my twin sister’s copy and pored over it in the secrecy of my bedroom, simultaneously thrilled and terrified by its exploration of a tortured love affair in Paris between David, a closeted American, and his Italian lover, Giovanni. I had hidden it beneath my mattress, afraid someone in my family would see it in my possession and suspect that I was gay, too—a reality I hadn’t yet been able to admit to myself.
Now, in college, as I recovered from the ending of my own secret relationship with another college student, my first with another man, I was finally in the process of coming out—and Baldwin was my North Star. How had he survived his own heartbreaks and wrestled with his own identity as a man who loved other men? And what role had this played in his journey to becoming a writer? For this was what I, too, hoped to become.
Illustrations © Yoran Cazac (Beatrice Cazac) from James Baldwin, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, illus. Yoran Cazac, eds. Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody (Duke University Press, 2018). Used with Permission of Beatrice Cazac.
Soon enough, I was heading to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which I’d been told had a copy of Little Man, Little Man. Something electric passed through me when I held the book for the first time, not unlike how I’d felt when I first flipped through the pages of Giovanni’s Room. Yes, with its large type and colorful illustrations, it looked like a children’s book, but its jacket flap described it as a “children’s book for adults.” Instead of author and illustrator photos, Cazac had drawn an image of himself painting Baldwin, both men smiling at each other and Baldwin smoking a cigarette.
