I got hold of a brilliant book 'The Fire Next Time' authored by James Baldwin in 1963, which contains two essays:

(i)     "My Dungeon Shook”- “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” originally appeared in The Progressive Madison, Wisconsin.

(ii)      “Down at the Cross”, which originally appeared in The New Yorker under the title “Letter from a Region in My Mind”.

The title of the book comes from a couplet in "Mary Don't You Weep" –

God gave Noah the rainbow sign;

No more water, the fire next time.

I just can’t resist from sharing few quotes from the book, which tear you apart. There are many more in the book, one can sense the undercurrents.

-    How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?

-    It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

-   If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.

-    People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior. And this human truth has an especially grinding force here, where identity is almost impossible to achieve and people are perpetually attempting to find their feet on the shifting sands of status.

-    Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.

-    An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

-    But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not-safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope-the entire possibility- of freedom disappears.

-    Your grandmother was also there……………Your countrymen don't know that she exists, either, though she has been working for them all their lives.

-   ….The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set for ever………… for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you…..And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love…….

-    A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

-   And if His (Gods) love was so great, and if He loved all His children, why were we cast down so far? Why?................. And the passion with which we loved the Lord was a measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted and, in the end, hated almost all strangers, always, and avoided and despised ourselves.