Black children in America often don’t have the luxury of a childhood. The skin they are born into is already weighted by the expectations and prejudices of a society either unwilling or incapable of reckoning with its ugly history around that skin.

According to one 2017 study from Georgetown University law school’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, black girls, as young as 5 years old, are seen as “less innocent and less in need of protection” than their white counterparts; while another 2017 study, from the American Psychiatric Association, in attempting to explain the continued targeting of black men by the police, found that black boys are seen as larger and more intimidating than white boys of the same age and size. Coupled with a recent study published in the journal Contemporary Educational Psychology that new teachers enter into their professions with biases against black students, and it becomes evident that black childhood is, and always has been, under attack in America.

“I never had a childhood. I was born dead,” James Baldwin told a French journalist in 1974, in the middle of working on his first, and only, children’s book, Little Man, Little Man. Having grown up black and poor in Harlem, Baldwin was all too aware of the privileges and opportunities denied to him but afforded to the white and the affluent. He was also acutely aware of the strength, the resilience, and the boundless joy required to survive such a childhood, and he saw those qualities in his nieces and nephews. So when his four-year-old nephew TJ asked his famous uncle, “When are you going to write a book about me?” he responded with Little Man, Little Man.

Published in 1976, critics and audiences didn’t know what to make of Baldwin’s “story of childhood,” which was originally billed as “a child’s story for adults.” Set in his beloved Harlem, Little Man, Little Man follows a day in the life of four-year-old TJ and his slightly older friends WT and Blinky, through the epic adventures of an urban childhood: going to the corner store, dancing to the music drifting out of windows on his block, playing ball in the streets, and interacting with his colorful array of neighbors. But there’s a sinister undertone to their lives that preclude any of childhood’s innocence.

TJ is so afraid that his parents will leave him—he’s about the only kid he knows who has both his parents at home—that it keeps him up at night. His block is populated by boys, not much older than him, who “go up to the roof or they go behind the stairs and they shoot that dope in

their veins and they come out and sit on the stoop and look like they gone to sleep.” His neighbor Miss Lee is young and pretty, but she’s got a bad drinking problem that almost causes serious harm to both him and WT. These characters and incidents, as witnessed from the point of view, and rendered in the voice, of a child are deceptively dark, and TJ and his friends are aware of this.They know what dope is; they notice the change in demeanor of the grown-ups in their lives. But just as this darkness threatens to overcome them, that boundless joy is always around the corner:

He more scared than he ever been before, and he don’t know why. Blinky’s glasses just shining like diamonds. Blinky look hard at WT and finally she say, just like she older than time, “You better start to walking, little man.”

Then, she start moving, dancing to the music. She putting on a show for WT, really, she want to make him smile.

TJ watching WT. Pretty soon, Blinky do something to the music to make Mr Man laugh. Then, Miss Lee laugh, and Mr Man put one arm around her shoulder. WT still just lying there, and watching. But then, TJ think Shucks, and he start into doing his African strut and WT just crack up.

They share in the tragedies of their lives, so they, too, can and must delight in the moments when laughter comes freely and easily.

Baldwin thought it behooved all Americans, even children, to disavow themselves of any idea of innocence as it only kept them from confronting, head-on, the evils of racism. And so in writing Little Man, Little Man, he feared treating children, both his audience and his characters, like, well, children.

“The one thing a child cannot bear is to be talked down to, to be patronized, to be talked to in baby talk,” he said in 1979, addressing a group of students. “So what I tried to do was put myself inside the minds of the kids in my story, trying to remember what I myself was like when I was a kid, and the way I sounded, and the way TJ sounds.”

Still, there’s a modicum of innocence in the way Baldwin’s young characters see themselves and each other. Just as Go Tell It on the Mountain hinted at its teenage protagonist’s burgeoning homosexuality, Little Man, Little Man both plays into gender norms and sees beyond them, as TJ’s understanding of gender is still developing. It’s okay to refer to WT, TJ’s big brother figure, as “beautiful really” because TJ hasn’t learned that black men don’t call other black men beautiful—in 1976 or now. And he’s truly confused by Blinky because she defies what he’s been told it means to be a girl:

One thing TJ understand about Blinky. She don’t like nothing that wears dresses. She don’t hardly never wear a dress herself. She always in blue jeans. Look like she do everything she can to be a boy. But she ain’t no boy. Blinky is a girl. But she don’t like girls.

Dismissed as a footnote in Baldwin’s mighty canon, Little Man, Little Man is now getting the attention it was denied when it first appeared over 40 years ago, and like much of Baldwin’s work, it feels oddly right on time. America is far more interested in the lives of its black folk than ever before—proof alone in those studies previously cited. If this country is ever to reckon with how racism has shaped its culture then its people should begin by listening to James Baldwin. And in the case of Little Man, Little Man, the younger the better.