Baldwin’s childhood and his relationship with his father impacts the way he navigates love and loss. The manner in which he describes being fearful of his father is quite disturbing especially when one realizes that this should be the first relationship with a man that he experiences love with, even if it is familial love. In the first few paragraphs of Take Me to the Water he states that his father had him circumcised at the age of age, a terrifying event for him. He doesn’t remember much about this traumatic event but he does remember “tugging at my mother’s skirts and staring up into her face, it was because I was so terrified of the man we called my father” (353). Further, “I have written both too much and too little about this man, whom I did not understand till he was past understanding” (354). Baldwin’s purpose for writing has always seemed personal. Many of the personal accounts we have read have a connection back to his relationship with his father and trying to understand masculinity from his closest connection to it. Most of what he understands about his father is rooted in violence, specifically domestic violence. Baldwin states, “It did not take me long, nor did the children, as they came tumbling into this world, take long to discover that our mother paid an immense price for standing between us and our father. He had ways of making her suffer quite beyond our kin, and so we soon learned to depend on each other and became a kind of wordless conspiracy to protect her” (354). Viewing Baldwin’s writing as a means of protecting reveals that it could really only protect him, not his loved ones. He states, “The guilt of the survivor is a real guilt–as I was now to discover. In a way that I may never be able to make real for my countrymen, or myself, the fact that I had “made it” –that is, had been seen on television…” (359). Baldwin’s writing was able to take him further away from the trauma of his past and the violence of his father, which could have been really difficult for him to grasp. His closeness with his friends, MLK and Malcolm X, who were both assassinated could have also affected his perception on the permanence of his own life and what it meant for his writing to be permanent.