Typescript draft with holograph revisions, Go Tell It on the Mountain

Mountain opens with the 14th birthday of John Grimes, who has, as Baldwin himself did, an overbearing minister stepfather. When John’s sympathetic mother gives him spending money, he embarks on a walk that the young Baldwin often took: from Harlem, down through Central Park, and into Midtown. This typescript presents the moment John passes the Library. 

John, as Baldwin did, often patronizes the 135th Street Branch (now the Schomburg Center), but, also like Baldwin around his age, remains intimidated by the Library’s flagship building: “He loved [42nd] street … for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter.”