Baldwin's first essay collection includes the title piece, written after his father's death on the day of his son's birth, the day of the Harlem riot, and it moves between personal grief and public fury with devastating control. Baldwin was thirty, already an expatriate in Paris, and the prose has the rhythm of the Black church and the precision of Henry James. He writes about being Black in America, about Harriet Beecher Stowe, about the movies, about hate and love and how they cannot be separated. The essays are short. They hit like fists wrapped in velvet. Baldwin became the witness his country needed.