It was 1996 and I was a junior in college, taking a class on James Baldwin in which we were reading pretty much everything he’d ever written: his groundbreaking novels, his controversial plays, his searing and celebrated essays. Everything, that is, except for one book my professor mentioned in passing—a children’s book, originally published in the UK in 1976 but now out of print, entitled Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood . I looked it up in the index of David Leeming’s then recently published Baldwin biography and found a scant paragraph or two, including a reference to an obscure French artist, Yoran Cazac, who had apparently illustrated the book. Leeming referred to Baldwin’s relationship with him as a “friendship,” but the sentences that followed suggested there was more

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