The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin is a model for me at present.

When i was young, i was a very patient person, perhaps absurdly so. I also believed deeply in the ability of our current social systems to be tweaked some in order to function well for all. That is, i had faith in Reform.

And then my world began to open up. As i learned more about more radical politics, i became combative, stubborn, and impatient. To be quite fair, i think there is a place for these: we are confronted daily by horrors and indignities that should not be and /must/ not continue. Of course some of the people who come into radical politics are angry, impatient, and looking for a fight! We want to change the world! We want to save lives, save souls, save those things that make us human, that make our lives ones worth living; and we want to propagate Life in the world, over the politics of Death and Control that dominate this present world.

But… i dunno. The hate and rage that i hold in my heart are eating me. I have always said that i would rather die than let those who run this world destroy the soft and beautiful things in me; and yet i hold on to so much Bitterness that i worry i'm destroying those things myself.

So… Baldwin was a meaningful read for that part of me seeking its kinder, more patient, more subtle self again.

What has particularly stayed in my mind since reading this book is Baldwin's description of his meeting with Elijah Muhammad: the way that Muhammad was blunt, controlling, surrounded by yes-men, spoke categorically of those he felt to be his enemies, presented himself in effect as an omnipotent prophet (an exaggeration, to be sure; but he had the confidence of those most brutal of self-assured religious zealots) and all those other small cruelties that are part of nationalist organizations, nationalist leaders. Baldwin, in contrast, thought carefully about his peers and enemies, about race; he was subtle, humble, recognized the complexity of the situation, the lack of easy answers; but /also/ the need for /fundamental, systemic change/. Which is to say: he was both. Here, he recognizes the need for a New World to be born; but he also recognizes that this is a project larger than one strongman, one personality, one person's answers. He does /not/ present himself as a prophet, yet his story rings prophetically with what the nation of Islam would become.

I wish to be humble again, even as i wish for a new world. Indeed, the latter likely cannot be achieved in any real sense without the former. A recommended read for those who dream of cooperation and a better world.

1) "Dear James: I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody—with a very definite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you are soft. You may be like your grandfather in this, I don't know, but certainly both you and your father resemble him very much physically. Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy."

2) "Just before and then during the Second World War, many of my friends fled into the service, all to be changed there, and rarely for the better, many to be ruined, and many to die. Others fled to other states and cities—that is, to other ghettos. Some went on wine or whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And others, like me, fled into the church. For the wages of sin were visible everywhere, in every wine-stained and urine-splashed hallway, in every clanging ambulance bell, in every scar on the faces of the pimps and their whores, in every helpless, newborn baby being brought into this danger, in every knife and pistol fight on the Avenue, and in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six, suddenly gone mad, the children parcelled out here and there; an indestructible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by a slow, agonizing death in a terrible small room; someone's bright son blown into eternity by his own hand; another turned robber and carried off to jail. It was a summer of dreadful speculations and discoveries, of which these were not the worst."

3) "White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed."

4) "They themselves [the other ministers] did know the score, and they knew that the odds were in their favor, And, really, I knew it, too. I was even lonelier and more vulnerable than I had been before. And the blood of the Lamb had not cleansed me in any way whatever. I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born. Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike."

5) "If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him."

6) "When a white man faces a black man, especially if the black man is helpless, terrible things are revealed. I know. I have been carried into precinct basements often enough, and I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true."

7) "Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And this is also why the presence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction."

8) "There is absolutely no reason to suppose that white people are better equipped to frame the laws by which I am to be governed than I am. It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores."