He was not a young man when we were growing up and he had already suffered many kinds of ruin; in his outrageously demanding and protective way he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced, like him; and all these things sometimes showed in his face when he tried, never to my knowledge with any success, to establish contact with any of us. which best explains why baldwin chooses the word “menaced”? to illustrate the trickery the children perpetrate to emphasize the cruelty the children endure to suggest that the discrimination is imagined to prove that the children are frequently bothered