My friends began to drink and smoke, and embarked-at first avid, then groaning-on their sexual careers. Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way, too. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen nothing had changed.

Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid-afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without. The word “safety” brings us to the real meaning of the word “religious” as we use it. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church-in fact, of our church-and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis.

The fire next door james baldwin