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The Fire Next Time

by John Scalzi, 1963

Published: 2022.04.27

Home > Book Reviews > James Baldwin > The Fire Next Time

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry.

★★★ (of 5)

 

This book is a collection of two essays, one much longer than the other, both previously published in periodicals. According to Wikipedia: “Critics greeted the book enthusiastically; it is considered, by some, as one of the most influential books about race relations in the 1960s.” In the Goodreads description: “The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement.” Also, Goodreads says, these essays “exhort Americans... to attack the terrible legacy of racism.” These sentences made me wonder whether I was reading the same book as other people.

The first essay, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter To My Nephew On The One Hundredth Anniversary Of The Emancipation”, is indeed written as if it was a letter to Baldwin’s nephew (who was also named James) — I don’t know whether it was actually a letter to anyone. It’s only eight pages long. It does indeed describe racism, and how the U.S. has treated Black people:

“You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason... 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.”

—page 7

But at no point did it strike me as an exhortation. In fact, the only thing Baldwin seemed to be doing was laying down some thoughts that had swirled in his head for some time, thoughts that were well-enough put together. The only course of action encouraged in this essay, that I could find, was when he begged of his nephew to not hate white people. (“You must accept them and accept them with love.”) Baldwin explains that white people, most of them, are “trapped in a history which they do not understand”, and refers to them as “innocent” victims of their own delusions. I could not bring myself to agree with this framing, especially having known and conversed with outright white supremacists, but I think I understand where Baldwin was coming from — that much of the identity of white Americans was (is) wrapped around the erroneous theory that “white people” or “western civilization” was somehow inherently superior to other kinds of civilizations and peoples. To be disabused of these false facts “profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.”

Baldwin concludes that the 100th celebration of Black freedom came “one hundred years too soon” and “We cannot be free until they [white people] are free.”

The second essay is “Down At The Cross: Letter From A Region In My Mind”, and it is far more meandering, far less organized than the first one. Perhaps for those reasons, it also felt less sharp or poignant. In my reading, it was roughly divided into three nearly unrelated sections. First is Baldwin recalling the religious experiences of his adolescence (his father was a preacher, but a mean one, and Baldwin found some relief by going to a different church and becoming a preacher in his own right). After about 30 pages of these recollections — which he often interrupts with explanations or clarifications — he abruptly switches, without transistion, to the third section: thoughts about Elijah Muhammad, then the leader of the Nation of Islam. Baldwin disagreed with Muhammad on a great many things, including the nature of white people. (In the book, Baldwin says Muhammad told him white people weren’t actually human, but sub-devils, created by the Devil with special permission from Allah, and would soon be wiped from the Earth so that the original people, Black people, could take their rightful place again. Baldwin had a great number of white friends.) After 30+ pages of this, Baldwin meanders through quite a few thoughts provoked by his religious memories and his experience of conversing with Muhammad, not all of which are clear.

Some of the thoughts are clear, and well-stated, like this one: “I... must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them.” (He explains that white people degraded themselves by the oppression they wrought, and the same degradation would apply to Black people who turned the tables.) Also: “I could also see that the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make that vengeance inevitable.”

But again, this essay didn’t seem to be a call to arms nor a manifesto of any sort, as I’d been led to believe. If anything, it was a man coming to grips with the reality of his world and trying to explain how he grew into those conclusions and observations.

I think my favorite part of the book was the scene of having dinner with Muhammad, which Baldwin recalled clearly and in great detail. I felt the atmosphere of the evening, the varying emotions of the characters, and the respectful ways in which Baldwin and Muhammad disagreed with each other about the solution to “the Negro problem”.

The whole thing concludes with Baldwin believing “we are at the center of the arc”, at which point “Whatever goes up must come down” — referring of course to the point in history at which “the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks”, if they will, can “end the racial nightmare... and change the history of the world.” Again, though, it never sounds as if he is the one calling for an uprising, just that he has observed that such an uprising is imminent and inescapable. It is similar to the difference between me saying “I think we’re on the brink of a second Civil War” and me saying “we should start a second Civil War”.

 

Conclusion

After the high praise I’d seen for this book, and all the breathtaking ways I had seen it described, I was left feeling flat and confused. All throughout, I kept thinking: “Soon we’ll get to the good part, the part that everyone oohs and aahs about.” But it never happened. And, yes, I have to account for “it was the 1960s!” and I’m reading it in the 2020s. Yet I didn’t need that excuse when I read W.E.B. DuBois’s book written sixty years earlier. Perhaps DuBois wrote with a clarity of purpose and vision, without distraction by the desire to appear erudite, while Baldwin had been influenced by his intellectual jet set — this would explain the often laborious prose and strained sentence construction.

Whatever the case, my feeling afterward is identical to my feeling after reading Ellison’s Invisible Man — it simply didn’t live up to the hype.

 





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