The Fire Next Time

by James Baldwin

A YouTube video of the 1965 Cambridge debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr. was suggested by one of our book club members to enhance the reading of our next month’s book selection, Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Indeed a good suggestion. Whether viewed before or after reading the book, it is an hour well spent. You will most likely enjoy the ministerial eloquence at Baldwin’s best and will not be surprised that the Cambridge crowd would be swept away. But listen carefully to the entire debate. It is more than just a passionate litany. And you will find his open-minded observations even more apparent in the book.

The book is introduced with a poignant letter to a nephew titled “My Dungeon Shook.” It sets the theme for, in my case, a white reader who must uneasily imagine receiving such a letter when they were a child of fifteen sent from a parent or relative. But how many black children must get such counselling from their elders is sobering. What follows is the main piece of the book, another letter--to the reader perhaps--titled “Down At The Cross.” I was quickly struck by how even though the book was written well over 50 years ago, sadly there was little dated about it. It could have plausibly been published today.

The essay-letter was autobiographical. Although he could not resist keeping his narrative flavored with his intellectual belief system that he had at 40 years old, the chronological structure explored his explorations and observations honestly. And I think his staying true to that transparency, even as an activist, makes him the remarkable writer that he is.

Baldwin was not afraid to admit when his motivations were for simple expediency. Though passionate in his beliefs, his passions never seemed to cloud his observations, both of himself and others. Coming of age in Harlem was a frightening time for him. I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid--afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without….without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. He admitted that a common strategy for young blacks to avoid this new menacing world is to find a “gimmick”--any gimmick. And for him, he was drawn to the church: And, by an unforeseeable paradox, it was my career in the church that turned out, precisely, to be my gimmick.

Baldwin hardly seemed to recognize the mainstream black church--and church in general--as anything more than a sham during his entire involvement in that venue. But his next exploration into the Nation of Islam movement reveals how open minded and critical thinking he ultimately was. His meeting with Elijah Muhammad began with genuine attraction and gave the leader every benefit of the doubt. His description of the meeting in Chicago stirs him to assert and further clarify his own established beliefs. Yet when pressed by Elijah in their conversation to join his movement, he was not willing to fight one racism with another: ...and I told Elijah that I did not care if white and black people married and that I had many white friends. I would have no choice, if it came to it, but to perish with them...

His critique of the Nation of Islam probably strikes me the most in this essay as to Baldwin’s broad-minded objectivity. But the essay as a whole is very much the same as well. I seem to recall watching Baldwin on a television interview where he made a memorable comment to his interlocutor, something to the effect of “I trust the question more than the answer.” (I’ve yet to find proof of him making that statement and can only trust my memory. However Eugene Ionesco backs me up having said, “It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” )

The power of The Fire Next Time is the amazing and inspiring blend of passion and honesty. The two often do not play well and Baldwin sees to it that they do.

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