I Grew Up Around James Baldwin. My Mom Always Laughed at One Thing About Him.

Nicole Crooks, a 52‑year‑old writer and community worker based in Miami, looks back on a childhood shaped by movement, militancy, and an almost casual proximity to Black intellectual and political giants. Though she spent her early years crisscrossing the East Coast, it was Amherst, Massachusetts — a place she once took for granted — that became a Black cultural crossroads in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where James Baldwin, Shirley Chisholm, and Toni Cade Bambara appeared not as distant legends, but as adults in her everyday orbit. In this oral history, she recalls how their presence, humor, and tenderness helped affirm her sense of self and possibility long before she fully understood the power of the rooms she was in.

This account has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I was born in a place called Johnson City, Tennessee, but we never lived there, and very few people have heard of it actually. I moved around as a child, in a couple of different spaces within Virginia, and at 5 years old we moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, for my mom in terms of school. I spent a good amount of time in Amherst, which is a story in and of itself that’s still really unfolding for me. Every time I think about it now as an adult, I think of how much I took it for granted, because it was just every day for me as a child. Even though it was in the Northeast, it was also a hub during my coming of age in the late ’70s and early ’80s of the literary and social justice Black who’s who in literature and social justice and politics, so that exposure there was very interesting.

I’m going to name three for you. One was James Baldwin in the New Africa House. He was always there, so we would see him there. My mom talked about the fact that he could not dance — like, thank goodness he was as prolific a writer as he was, because she was like, “That brother could not dance.” I remember him being just so unbothered. I was so taken by him, because even as a little child, I was like, “Yo, I want to be like that.” He doesn’t care, he says what he says, what he feels. When most of the adults in my world were a bit uptight — they were always stressed over something — he was just unbothered.

I grew up with my mother as a very strict vegetarian; she watched everything that we ate, no sugar, nothing good. I thought that a popsicle was a frozen banana, and I was very upset once I went to a friend’s house and they told me and showed me what a popsicle was. I remember this one time we were at my Auntie Ori’s house — I think she was a resident director at Hampshire College — and often they had gatherings at different people’s houses. This particular one, I was in the room with the kids and the adults were out in front, and Shirley Chisholm was there. I was trying to slip into the kitchen because they had all the good snacks — the juice, the lemonade, all the stuff that I couldn’t have. As I was easing in, she came up to me and leaned into me and went to cradle my face.

I always flinched because I had big cheeks — I still do — so every time somebody came near my face, I associated that with pain because they would squeeze my cheeks. But I still remember the gentleness of the way that she cradled my face, and she just spoke life into me. She told me that I was going to grow up and that I was going to be very, very special, very important, and for me to always know that. It was her words and her gaze that kind of grabbed me. I remember that feeling.

The last one I’ll share is one that brought me joy. I was in this space and we were just kind of chilling — I don’t even remember whose house we were at — but we were in the living room on the couch, and Toni Cade Bambara started telling me this story. Basically it was Goldilocks. The way that she did it was so funny to me because she was positioning Goldilocks as a criminal. When she was telling the story, oh my gosh, it was so funny to me as a little girl, and I just fell out. My stomach was hurting because I was laughing so hard.