James Baldwin - The Fire Next Time

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, FEBRUARY 1993

Copyright1962, 1963 by James Baldwin
Copyright renewed 1990, 1991 by Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by The Dial Press, New York, in 1963.

Down at the Cross originally appeared in The New Yorker under the title Letter from a Region in My Mind.

My Dungeon Shook originally appeared in The Progressive, Madison, Wisconsin.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baldwin, James, 1924
The fire next time / James Baldwin.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-8041-4972-3
1. Afro-Americans. 2. United StatesRace relations. 3. Black Muslims. I. Title.
E185.61.B195 1993
305.896073dc20 92-50566

Cover design by Marc J. Cohen
Photography: Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos

v3.1

for James
James
Luc James

God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water, the fire next time!

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, moodywith 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 dont 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. I am sure that your father has told you something about all that. Neither you nor your father exhibit any tendency towards holiness: you really are of another era, part of what happened when the Negro left the land and came into what the late E. Franklin Frazier called the cities of destruction. You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this because I love you, and please dont you ever forget it.

I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I dont know if youve known anybody from that far back; if youve loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your fathers face, for behind your fathers face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember him falling down the cellar steps, and howling, and I remember, with pain, his tears, which my hand or your grandmothers so easily wiped away. But no ones hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. (I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, No! This is not true! How bitter you are!but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions under which you were born, for I was there. Your countrymen were not there, and havent made it yet. Your grandmother was also there, and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. I suggest that the innocents check with her. She isnt hard to find. Your countrymen dont know that she exists, either, though she has been working for them all their lives.)

Well, you were born, here you came, something like fifteen years ago; and though your father and mother and grandmother, looking about the streets through which they were carrying you, staring at the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavyhearted, yet they were not. For here you were, Big James, named for meyou were a big baby, I was nothere you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you. It looked bad that day, too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your childrens children.

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. 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. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying, You exaggerate. They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no ones word for anything, including minebut trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words