The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin (1963)
2025 reads, 1/25:
“You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.”
A necessary read. James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is a short, yet powerful pair of letters written in 1963, one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The first of the two letters, titled “My Dungeon Shook,” is a letter to Baldwin’s 14-year-old nephew, where he shares his experience of being Black in the United States. It’s a primary example of how Black children must learn about race much earlier than their white counterparts, an eye-opening fact I learned from Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
The second letter, “Down at the Cross,” takes up most of the novel. In this letter, not particularly aimed at anyone, he discusses his Harlem upbringing, and the effect of the church on his life and on the Black community. It’s filled with memories, anecdotes, and personal philosophies. I could see how, being published in 1963, this was a shock to the white-dominated literary world, who were either unaware or ignorant of the civil rights movement.
“This is the message that has spread through streets and tenements and prisons, through the narcotics wards, and past the filth and sadism of mental hospitals to a people from whom everything has been taken away, including, most crucially, their sense of their own worth.”
This is my first book of Baldwin’s, so I didn’t know what to expect going in, but his voice is passionate. It comes off the page, and I imagine him speaking clearly and confidently about what he’s writing. There's fury, but it’s not a rant: it’s calculated. And although there is this deep personality in his prose, I learned a lot in these one hundred pages. He recalls primary accounts of historical figures such as Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, and discusses the Nation of Islam. These firsthand accounts of life as a Black man in the early twentieth century are worth more to me than facts from a textbook.
I recommend this wholeheartedly as a necessary read for anyone. We need to open our eyes more often to the world around us, to the experiences of others, whether in the present or the past. I will certainly be reading more of Baldwin’s works from here on forward.
“The fear that I heard in my father’s voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.”