The Fire Next Time
Updated: Aug 8
Where would we be without James Baldwin, without The Fire Next Time? Where would the United States be—with its burgeoning oligarchs, its ruling class, its defenders of the status quo, its bigoted, if not outright racist, Silent Majority, its MAGAheads fighting tooth and claw to make America great again for the few over the many, its seemingly average citizens who seem to find common cause, if not celebration, in the politics of divisiveness, in normalizing the degradation, dehumanization, and demonization of others—if everyone read this book, if everyone could see the world through the eyes of the marginalized, the dispossessed, the despised? We would be a country transformed. Alas, in the wake of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” and Black Lives Matter and “I can’t breathe” and the obligatory backlash of All Lives Matter and Executive Order 13950 and the radicalization of school boards and the banning of books and the panoply of laws drafted to narrow what could be taught (and therefore what could be learned), somewhere between shockingly little and not nearly enough has changed in the 60-plus years since Baldwin wrote these essays.
Sadly, those who would stand to gain the most from reading The Fire Next Time are likely the last to find it. But so long as it can be found, those who would will, and those who do cannot help but be changed. And the rest, the reactionaries who oppose it because that’s what reactionaries do, oppose it not because they understand what it is or what it is about but what it represents. They do not want the lights turned on, for, with the lights on, they might be forced to see themselves for who they are—and who they are not. So they obfuscate, misdirect, and lie so incessantly that nobody knows what’s real and what isn’t, who’s to blame and who isn’t. I will tell you now, those who point the stiffest fingers, raise the largest stinks, and “flood the zone,” as we have so colloquially whitewashed the practice of lying with a gall and a regularity and an impunity that Nixon could only have dreamed of, are not to be trusted. They do not want what’s best for you. They want what’s best for them and are banking on turning your fears into anger, into hatred, into retribution. Into permission.
James Baldwin isn’t having any of that. Despite the America of his youth and the America at the time of its writing—on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, one hundred years in which it could also be said that somewhere between shockingly little and not nearly enough had changed—The Fire Next Time isn’t filled with anger or hatred or retribution. No, it is filled with the idea that we, as people, as a society, as a country, can only be as good as the least of us; that if we don’t all rise then we all fall; that if I can’t lift you up, perhaps you can lift me; that change comes from within, not without; that we must challenge what we have been taught and what we have learned; that, to quote a prose poem I wrote almost exactly three years ago in response to a newspaper article titled “An Anti-Vaxxer Dies of Covid. Do You Empathize?,” “We must look each other in the eye and acknowledge our common humanity.” In short, it is filled with love.
It is also filled with an astonishing number of passages not simply worthy of quoting, but worthy of absorbing, of internalizing, of creating a worldview from, of building a life around. And what a life we could all have if only we could free ourselves of the racial injustice that has haunted this country since before it was founded. Despite an America that went to war with itself to abolish slavery, that marched from Selma to Montgomery not once but thrice, that marched on Washington, that desegregated schools, that ended Jim Crow, that protested the killings of George Floyd and Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and Eric Garner and Michael Brown and too many others, it can feel as though we have scarcely made any progress at all. One might argue that we peaked in 1964–65 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and have been trying to claw back equality, or what has passed for legislative equality, ever since. I could go on (after all, reactionaries haven’t stopped at the racial divide), but, for both our sakes, I won’t.
Baldwin wasn’t without hope and neither should we be. As he writes to his nephew at the conclusion of the first essay, “My Dungeon Shook,” “You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free.” Think about those words: We cannot be free until they are free. It doesn’t matter who the “we” are and who the “they” are: None of us can be free until all of us are free. Near the conclusion of the second essay, “Down at the Cross,” Baldwin writes, “And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we … do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.” It was true then and a hundred years before then and perhaps since the dawn of humanity, and it is true now. But if we’re going to see where we’re going, we have to leave the lights on; if we’re going to get anywhere, we can’t do it alone; and if we’re going to effect change, we must put people over punditry, people over politics, and people over power. If it were easy, Baldwin wouldn’t have given us another 40 years to get there.
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