In time Baldwin was to understand that his “ugliness” was his stepfather’s problem, that his stepfather’s “intolerable bitterness of spirit” was the result of his frustrations, that his need to humiliate those closest to him was, in fact, a reflection of the hatred David Baldwin felt towards himself as a black man: “It had something to do with his blackness, I think—he was very black—with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful.” And “he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really
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