The Fire Next Time, Again
Here is a list of books a (now virtual) New York City book group has read in the past year or so:
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Beloved and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Plague by Albert Camus
It is notable how closely these novels track the situation in the U.S. in 2020 — a year of simultaneous political, economic, racial and health crises. The choice of these books was not especially deliberate, but it does demonstrate how fiction — in this case 20th century fiction — can carry messages, insights and revelations that attest to the persistence of certain issues.
Now the group has read The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, as non-fiction as a book can be. It was published in 1963 and became a bestseller. It is a pairing of two essays, one that is short called “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.” In it Baldwin summarizes his views on a number of race related issues. The piece is clearly a precursor to Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates’ 2015 book Between the World and Me, a letter to his teenage son which deals with the same racial matters as Baldwin and with a similar blend of eloquence and passion.
An aside: when Baldwin was writing, the term in common literary use was Negro. For the past decade or so, it has been African-American. Black, now with a capital B, is the most consistent self-description for the race, emphasizing the contrast with people considered white. The calls for “Black Power” in the 1960s marked the turn from traditional civil rights invocations to a more militant determination to confront bigotry and discrimination.
After reading Toni Morrison’s books for the first time, I recognized the extent to which Black Americans feel a combination of rage at centuries of systematic racism that mocks the declaration that “All men are created equal” and pride in having maintained a strong sense of community and accomplishment for four hundred years.
The second, much longer essay: “Down At The Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind” deals with Baldwin’s relationship to Christianity — he was a teenage preacher — and then segues into his encounter with Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad, culminating in a reflection on the roles of separation by race versus integration. That is, at least to me, the element of his thoughts that seems more relevant in this summer’s turmoil.
With the exception of Donald Trump who so dominates our political discourse now — in 1963, Trump was still in a military boarding school, the closest he came to actual service — the racial themes in The Fire Next Time could be lifted from today’s headlines: white privilege, enforced inequality, oppression and so on. The book’s success in 1963 is similar to the surge in readership this summer of books by Black authors in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd.
One of those books was Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, an epic history of racism in the U.S. which won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2016. In Baldwin and Kendi, there is one strong common element to consider: is assimilation by Blacks into American society a necessary objective? In his encounter with Elijah Muhammad, Baldwin raises the same question that to some degree underlies the Black Lives Matter movement today: what is the goal of ending structural racism?
In Kendi’s view, assimilationism is second only to racism in the way historic discrimination of Black people marks our national narrative. Dating at least to Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement a hundred years ago, the concept of rejecting assimilation has been a significant issue for Black activists, literati and scholars. There is a view that the term “separate but equal” can be interpreted to mean truly separate and truly equal — side by side.
One phenomenon of the past half-century or so is the extent to which Black culture, Black style and Black prowess has been embraced by Americans: music, clothes and street jargon have been adapted widely, especially among the young. The dominance of Black basketball and football stars is set against the continued lack of Black owners and coaches. In the past 30 years, we have had a Black president, two Black Secretaries of State — one of whom was also Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff and both served as National Security Advisers to the President. Our current Democratic Vice-Presidential Candidate chose to attend Howard University and identifies as Black as well as south Asian.
All these prominent personalities have ascended and not merely assimilated. There is a current PBS documentary on the life and career of Vernon Jordan, who has evolved from a civil rights activist to a highly visible corporate lawyer and board member. Henry Lewis Gates of Harvard says of Jordan, he is to Blacks in corporate American what Rosa Parks was to refusing to sit in the back of the bus.
What is striking in Jordan, Gates and Baldwin, among many others, including all those Black superstars taking a knee during the national anthem is the strength of their Black identity. As publisher of both of Jordan’s books, I can attest that he never entered a room in the lofty circles he traveled without noting the number of other Blacks who were not in the wait staff and he remembered that count long after the occasion. They have reached the pinnacles of their fields, accepted by all but not — I suspect — having lost any pride in their Black identity.
The intense renewed interest in The Fire Next Time almost seventy years after it was first published reflects its prescience. It is about today’s fire as much as those of the past, which shows how ingrained these racial issues are in our time also.
