James Baldwin was about 10 when he first read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. The character in the novel that most spoke to him was not the virtuous aristocrat Charles Darnay or Sydney Carton, the dissolute lawyer turned hero, but Thérèse Defarge, a woman brimming with hate, sitting in the shadow of the guillotine, knitting as the heads rolled.
“I recognised that unrelenting hatred,” Baldwin later wrote in his book-length essay The Devil Finds Work, “for it was all up and down my streets”. Those streets were the streets of Harlem, and the hatred was born out of the racism and poverty that encased the lives of those who lived there.
