The Fire Next Time

The opening letter to his nephew, “My Dungeon Shook”, was a pretty heart warming one. He was definitely aiming to both shield and arm his nephew from the fallacy of the crafting of the United States. I found it hard for him to ask for his nephew to keep love in his heart on the heels of the founding of the country. This is during a time where police were more than eager to beat up and kill Black people. Baldwin found the courage – this is what I have to gather from his language – to inform his nephew that his life is his own and not what then-society would define it to be. I wrestled with this but I understand what he was going for. He did not want his nephew’s heart to be both afraid and hardened at such a young age. I do appreciate that he was honest about the danger that white people have found themselves in. But as I’ve noted in my copy, he’s better than me because I could never. The following letter read more like the summation of a few journal entries from his life. From his encounters with his father to Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, I found the way he kept weaving between these experiences to be telling. He was aiming to show how the cyclic state of Black people were trapped in a need to find guidance. This same seeking of guidance was also building to a climax (of many forms). His early experiences of the block (as I’ll define it from my own experience) remind me of a lighter experience of what I’ve seen in Brooklyn growing up and what my parents vigilantly shielded me from. The way that his community seemed on the verge of constant decay countering the vibrancy he felt when he got more engaged in the ministry of his church showed how the importance of a community in building self-esteem. However, if the community itself is built on lies or misdirection, that self-esteem will immediately buckle under the lack of integrity being poured into people, which it was clear to Baldwin. That lack of integrity wasn’t something that ailed him (at least not heavily) because he was able to use that courage to stand up to his father’s constant disrespect (though futile). He states, “neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough”. This statements echoes the fear of the state of nonviolence of Black people in America and something he was teasing at throughout this book. It came to be more clear when he finally saw Elijah after being invited to his home. Another point that rings to this day is Baldwin’s notice of the fact that many Black people in America do not have the space to read. At the time, I’d imagine literacy rates were a lot lower than we were today for Black people, which, again, I can’t imagine is any higher. He says, “And they didn’t even read; depressed populations don’t have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have been their help, didn’t, as far as could be discovered, read, either – they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes”. This reads as an indictment of the upper-middle class Black folks who tend to educate themselves but use it solely for class mobility and decor. This is a trait that remains true to this day. He had a fear of being associated with radicals, which is ironic given how radical his content could have been considered during his time. I guess he merely saw himself as existing in his truest self. Something I found compelling was his general rejection of European-centric ideals in his saying of the following: “I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now – in order to support the moral contradictions and spiritual aridity of my life – expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse. The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power – and no one holds power forever”. This came to be interesting given his inherently sympathy for white people – he saw them as merely misguided and lost in their own humanity. That makes me believe that he also saw it possible for a reckoning of their souls and identities to be possible when it came to the time for some sort of revolution. I’d like to believe that but to close it as he did, the next time Black people revolt, there will definitely be fire.

1) "Dear James: I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody—with a very definite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you are soft. You may be like your grandfather in this, I don't know, but certainly both you and your father resemble him very much physically. Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy."

2) "Just before and then during the Second World War, many of my friends fled into the service, all to be changed there, and rarely for the better, many to be ruined, and many to die. Others fled to other states and cities—that is, to other ghettos. Some went on wine or whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And others, like me, fled into the church. For the wages of sin were visible everywhere, in every wine-stained and urine-splashed hallway, in every clanging ambulance bell, in every scar on the faces of the pimps and their whores, in every helpless, newborn baby being brought into this danger, in every knife and pistol fight on the Avenue, and in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six, suddenly gone mad, the children parcelled out here and there; an indestructible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by a slow, agonizing death in a terrible small room; someone's bright son blown into eternity by his own hand; another turned robber and carried off to jail. It was a summer of dreadful speculations and discoveries, of which these were not the worst."

3) "White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed."

4) "They themselves [the other ministers] did know the score, and they knew that the odds were in their favor, And, really, I knew it, too. I was even lonelier and more vulnerable than I had been before. And the blood of the Lamb had not cleansed me in any way whatever. I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born. Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike."

5) "If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him."

6) "When a white man faces a black man, especially if the black man is helpless, terrible things are revealed. I know. I have been carried into precinct basements often enough, and I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true."

7) "Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And this is also why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction."

8) "There is absolutely no reason to suppose that white people are better equipped to frame the laws by which I am to be governed than I am. It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores."

Baldwin's airing of the dirty laundry of our American family is no less discomfiting for all that it was written more than 50 years ago. "White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as 'tokenism.' For hard example, white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose, in spite of the mountain of evidence that has accumulated to the contrary, that this was proof of a change of heart." How else to view the Obama presidency today, in 2017, but as cast in the shadow of that ever-growing mountain?

Not gonna lie: this was a challenge to my understanding. Baldwin's style is rooted in Black American Christian pastoral oratory, and though I don't think he depends on Christian theology, I do think there is an implicitly Christian ethics -- one that centers around a particular conception of "love" -- which made his analysis hard for me to comprehend. Or it may be that as a white liberal I am reluctant to see my face in the mirror he holds up.

"All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."

For those interested in the Civil Rights era, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time is a concise read into the debate between whether black nonviolence (bi-racial cooperation) or black nationalism (represented by Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam) was more effective for bringing about racial equality in the United States. Baldwin makes an impassioned appeal for the value of nonviolence and cooperation and insists that the "American Negro" is a product of his particular history in the United States. Unlike Nation of Islam pundits, Baldwin believes that the African-American cannot exist in another nation but most work instead to effect change in the United States.

This is also an eye-opening account of how black ghettos, the police, and white spinelessness and overt hostility toward blacks have all conspired to make crime "not a possibility but the possibility" (21) for black men who could "never defeat one's circumstances." Or that led black men and women toward "other ghettos . . . on wine or whiskey or the needle . . . [or had] fled into the church" (20). Baldwin's writing still have important implications and resonances today and remind us that we are not far removed from the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s—indeed, we are still trying to accomplish the goals initially staked out by Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others.