She was the first child to Roosevelt Naylor and Alberta McAlpin. As Naylor grew up, her father was a transit worker and her mother was a telephone operator. When Naylor was young, her mother encouraged her to read and keep a journal. Even though her mother barely had any education, she loved to read and often worked overtime in the fields as a sharecropper to produce enough money to join a book club. In 1963 she moved to Queens with her family. Five years later Naylor followed in her mother's footsteps and became a Jehovah's Witness, but she left seven years later as ”things weren't getting better, but worse.”