Singed Innocence: Baldwin, Delaney, and the Problematic Black Child

This chapter, by Robert F. Reid-Pharr, focuses on Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976), written by James Baldwin and illustrated by Yoran Cazac. Cazac worked with a brûlage (burning) painting technique, and in Little Man, Little Man this interest in fire is demonstrated in the brightness of the drawing; the focus on sun imagery; the continual representation of the act of seeing/not seeing; and repeated references to furnaces. The furnace is an image often utilized in African American literary culture, showing up in Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Baldwin’s Another Country. The chapter ponders how African Americans have obsessively returned to images of flame and burning in efforts to name “the self” as an inexplicable identity of a people stretched across time, space, ideology, and culture.