The Fire Next Time is a 1963 book comprised of two essays:
MY DUNGEON SHOOK: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation, Baldwin is writing to James, his nephew and namesake.
DOWN AT THE CROSS: Letter from a Region in My Mind
Sadly, Baldwin’s autobiographical themes are timely for the 21st century. He talks of the self-loathing taught to Black Americans and whether Whites should be paragons for how Blacks should live. He focuses much of his essays on religion and how it can sow seeds for concepts that are not necessarily desirable for learning to love your neighbor.
In much the same manner that Isabel Wilkerson explores race in her book Caste, James Baldwin did this a few decades earlier. He discusses the concept that race is political, not biological and that the “Negro” only exists in the United States of America. Baldwin also talks about the Third Reich, Germany making obsolete any notion that Christianity was all-powerful. He makes it clear that what happened to Jews in Germany could happen to Blacks in America.
Baldwin talks about being the stepson of a northern pentecostal minister and how that affected his upbringing and thinking. Much of the books’ two essays focus on religion, and attention is given to Elijah Mohammed, who was able to convert drunkards and junkies in a way that Christians were unable. In considering different viewpoints, Baldwin didn’t want to start his own country or religion. He was more conciliatory. He wanted everybody to get along. He emphasizes that writers, poets, and artists had the moral authority to point out the world’s lack of justice. Amidst his themes of imprisonment, prejudice, and fear, he pleads with Whites to deal with his people as men, not victims. He despises pity parties and wants to believe that the future is hopeful.
Some memorable quotes:
“Negroes in this country—and Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking, exist in any other—are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. This world is white and they are black.” (p. 25). Kindle Edition.
“To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.” (p. 27). Kindle Edition.
“White Christians have also forgotten several elementary historical details. They have forgotten that the religion that is now identified with their virtue and their power—“God is on our side,” says Dr. Verwoerd—came out of a rocky piece of
ground in what is now known as the Middle East before color was invented, and that in order for the Christian church to be established, Christ had to be put to death, by Rome, and that the real architect of the Christian church was not the disreputable, sunbaked Hebrew who gave it his name but the mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous St. Paul.” (p. 43-44). Kindle Edition.
“Negroes were brought here in chains long before the Irish ever thought of leaving Ireland; what manner of consolation is it to be told that emigrants arriving here—voluntarily—long after you did have risen far above you?” (p. 60). Kindle Edition.
