" The world of literature came knock-knock-knocking on James Baldwin’s door early: Reading and rereading Uncle Tom’s Cabin before he was ten. Discovering the novels of Charles Dickens at around the same time. The Schomburg Library on 135th Street, which he seemed to haunt when not baby-sitting his siblings. Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he would study with Countee Cullen (“ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!”), by then the author of two volumes of poetry. Surely, for Baldwin, already the idea of being a writer, for a black man, was a tangible, possible thing. "

― James Baldwin , The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings