In early 1934, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at Columbia Teachers College took an internship teaching drama and producing student plays at PS 24 in Harlem. Among her young charges at that “dreadful ancient New York schoolhouse,” as she would later recall, was a ten-year-old boy she was astonished to find reading, like her, Dickens. Their conversations quickly made her realize that “here was an exceptional and brilliant boy.”

Her name was Orilla Miller, though he called her Bill. His name was Jimmy, though to the world he would become James Baldwin.

Bill started giving Jimmy more books. He devoured them. Although he would recall that he loved her “absolutely, with a child’s love,” she discussed them with him like a peer. Suddenly, the bookishness and sensitivity that had rendered him strange to others were not only accepted but encouraged, cherished, held in kinship.

His father — a storefront church preacher who preached that white people were the Devil and who banned all books but the Bible from his house — didn’t like it one bit when Bill walked Jimmy home to ask permission to take him to the theater, which was also banned in the Baldwin household. But, like an ice-capped volcano, David Baldwin gave his consent with seething politeness.

“My first conscious calculation as to how to go about defeating the world’s intentions for me,” Baldwin would later write of his first cultural outing with Bill, “began on that Saturday afternoon.”

The defeat was total and triumphant. Baldwin was still in his twenties when his first novel catapulted him into celebrity. The novels and essays that followed established him as one of the most urgent yet enduring literary voices of his century, reverberating with that rare combination of passion and rigor by which writing survives the fads, formulas, and moral fashions of its time to touch the future, to shape it into being.

In the spring of 1963, at the peak of his fame which was also the peak of his heartbreak, that slow-burning acceptance of the dissolution of a great love, Baldwin traveled to Los Angeles for a series of lectures he had committed to give for CORE — the Congress for Racial Equality. There in the crowded hall was Bill, with her husband Evan.

They hadn’t seen each other in seventeen years.

Shyly, she made her way to him through the sea of people after the talk just as his press team was shepherding him onward to another appearance. “But she’s my teacher,” he protested, “don’t you understand? She’s my teacher!” They didn’t, whisking him away before Bill reached him.

Across the infinite abyss of that short distance, she found herself, like everyone, impressed by his intellect and eloquence, but moved by something else — the simple recognition that her dear “sweet boy” had become “a sweet man.”

A few days later, in a lovely mirror-image to the tender letter of gratitude Albert Camus wrote to his childhood teacher shortly after becoming the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, she sent him a letter quoted in Nicholas Boggs’s altogether magnificent biography Baldwin: A Love Story (public library):

May 15, 1963

James,

I want to tell you that the promise of the wonderful child has been fulfilled in the man. I am not referring alone to the development of your writing ability, the incisive use of your intelligence in social commentary. I am referring to the moral you — in the broad sense of one’s individual relationship to man around him. That Evan and I had a small part in your life adds to the value of ours. I also say, thank you, that there is this James Baldwin in America in the year 1963

Two days later, LIFE Magazine published Baldwin’s most personal and passionate interview. In it, he insisted that the emotional and spiritual role of the artist is “is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” This, too, is the role of every great teacher. And of every true friend.