Baldwin first published “Notes of a Native Son” in Harper’s Magazine in November 1955. The essay is a personal reflection on Baldwin’s relationship with his father. He begins the essay noting the constellation of events surrounding his father’s death. On the same day his father died, Baldwin’s youngest sibling was born. Just prior to these events, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century had broken out in Detroit. Moments after his father’s funeral, another riot broke out in Harlem. The day of his father’s funeral, and the Harlem riot, was also Baldwin’s nineteenth birthday. This confluence of death and birth, of tearing down and growing up, of violent futility, eternal rebirth, and apocalyptic vision shape Baldwin’s mourning of his father, which is at once a meditation on his own life.

Baldwin writes that he did not know his father very well; after his father’s death, he realized that he had hardly ever spoken to him. He revisits his father’s personal history: his birth in New Orleans, migration North along with thousands of other Southern Blacks in 1919, and the various churches where he served as minister in New York. He describes his father as having lived and died in “an intolerable bitterness of spirit” that drove a wedge between his father and almost every other person in his life, and that eventually drove him to his grave (129).