From God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, edited by Hilton Als, which was published in March by Dancing Foxes Press and the Brooklyn Museum.

I met James Baldwin when I was about nineteen years old. I was a servant in a household. He came to that house as a party guest the night Richard Nixon was elected. I didn’t know who he was. I was just really someone off the boat. I had arrived two or three years earlier. I was still a West Indian then, and I didn’t understand anything about America. I always…