Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind

The summer he turned fourteen, in a Harlem where the pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had suddenly become a personal menace, James Baldwin fell to the floor before an altar and rose a boy preacher, saved and terrified in the same breath. Down at the Cross is the letter he wrote decades later to explain what the church gave him and what it cost, how faith became his gimmick out of the ghetto and then a mask he had to tear off to keep living.