ST. LOUIS — The composer Terence Blanchard and the librettist Kasi Lemmons, the creators of the new opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” based on the 2014 memoir, were inspired by the book’s wrenching tale of a black boy growing up, the youngest of five brothers, in a segregated rural Louisiana town. And, to their credit, they were not intimidated by it.

The memoir — by Charles Blow, an Opinion columnist for The New York Times — tells of a childhood shaped by cycles of violence, a family life of tough love and chronic turbulence, and the lasting wounds of sexual molestation. Mr. Blow offers an adult’s reflections in a book that often has the quality of a biblical jeremiad.

Mr. Blanchard, an award-winning jazz trumpeter and film score composer, and Ms. Lemmons, a writer, actress and director, found inventive ways to tell Mr. Blow’s story in the present, and on their own terms, something that came through at the premiere of their subtly powerful work by the Opera Theater of St. Louis on Saturday. (This is Mr. Blanchard’s second commission from that company, following “Champion,” in 2013.)

[How opera is grappling with race this summer.]

One simple device was to present Charles as two characters: a young boy called Char’es-Baby (played with endearing awkwardness by Jeremy Denis, a treble) and the 20-year-old Charles, (the charismatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines), who is attending a local college. The opera opens, like the memoir, with Charles in a rage, speeding down a country road at night with murder in mind.