A father is buried in Harlem on the same day his last child is born and the same day the neighbourhood erupts in riot, and the son who will make sense of these convergences is only nineteen. James Baldwin published this collection in 1955, and its essays braid the personal and the political with a cadence borrowed from the pulpit and a clarity borrowed from nowhere but his own relentless sight. Baldwin writes about Harlem, about Paris, about the protest novel, about his father's bitterness, and in every case the subject is the same: what it means to be conscious, Black, and American in a country that demands you be only one of those things at a time. The prose still burns. It has not found a temperature at which to cool.