There is no American truth teller like James Baldwin. I always come away from his writing–whether fiction or nonfiction–changed. I don’t know how he could hold so much clear-eyed rage and pain alongside so much love and dignity. He never spared anyone from the truth, even himself. His book The Fire Next Time is a short book with only two essays, but he packs so much into them.
The first essay is a letter to his nephew, called “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.” At the end of the letter, Baldwin writes: “You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.” Baldwin spends the letter talking about the suffering of Black people under white power, but also brings hope to his nephew by pointing out the love and strength of his family roots. Baldwin tells his nephew, “ You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.” He points out the cruelty and hatred Black people endure, and spares no one in his denunciation of white supremacy. But he also points out to his nephew, “It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental legacy.” This letter is quintessential Baldwin–he lays out the realities of the world, but he also centers love. He manages to be both hopeless and hopeful.
The second piece revolves around Baldwin’s relationship to religion, a meeting with Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, and the terrible interdependency of Black and white people, even as others turn from it. This interdependency is not a concession to a kumbaya form of connection. Rather, it points out that American whites are not free from their own constructions, that they too are trapped in their cruel, superficial, power-worshiping ways. This is not a sympathetic read–Baldwin is very clear that the delusions whites live under directly feeds into their vicious treatment of Black men and women. But Baldwin does tie Black and white fates together. He says: “A bill is coming in that America is not prepared to pay….for the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusions–and the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion.”
After meeting with Muhammad, he rejects the notion of Black supremacy. He says: “In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation…to create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task: there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white.” He points out white people have been advocating this very separation for generations, but does not subscribe to the Nation of Islam’s desire to break off or that all white people are devils. Baldwin admits that he has love and trust for a few white people in his life, which shows how deep his heart goes, given the role white people have played in his and his people’s lives. Later on he writes:
I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace–not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
Baldwin is also a deeply American writer. He understands the unique society we have, and the uniqueness of American Blacks’ experiences in this country. Dismayingly, he might be writing about today’s world. He wrote these essays in the early sixties, but when I read the below, I recognized the times we are still living in:
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure.
In Baldwin’s eyes, the only way forward is a clear-eyed understanding of reality, of what lies beneath that is true and difficult, to shed delusions. He is the absolute practitioner of this way of being and his great humanity and insight were a gift to the world.
