From the Bookshelf of Diversity in All Forms!…

The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin

Start date: February 1, 2020

Finish date: February 29, 2020

Discussion: Monthly Bonus Reads

Why we're reading this: February Bonus Read- Black History Month

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
[close] February Bonus Read- Black History Month

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 73 topics — 889 comments total

Monthly Bonus Reads

The Autobiography of Malcolm X (February 2023)
By Mariah Roze · 2 posts · 18 views

last updated May 17, 2023 10:35AM

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide (March 2023)
By Mariah Roze · 2 posts · 11 views

last updated Mar 06, 2023 08:42AM

showing 2 of 2 topics view all »

What Members Thought

Nov 10, 2014 Cheryl rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, literary-essays, mesmerizing, afro-american

A warm rush starts from the pit of my being and moves to my enflamed fingertips as I consider Baldwin's commentary. His fire ignites mine; it ignites any reader who traverses these thoughts set aflame by prosaic finesse and passionate renderings. Coincidentally, I had this opened at the same time I read Maya Angelou's The Heart of a Woman, where I came across James Baldwin, or "Jim," sharing a taxi with Maya Angelou and her former husband, during the heat of the literary movement of the late 195 A warm rush starts from the pit of my being and moves to my enflamed fingertips as I consider Baldwin's commentary. His fire ignites mine; it ignites any reader who traverses these thoughts set aflame by prosaic finesse and passionate renderings. Coincidentally, I had this opened at the same time I read Maya Angelou's The Heart of a Woman, where I came across James Baldwin, or "Jim," sharing a taxi with Maya Angelou and her former husband, during the heat of the literary movement of the late 1950s to 1960s. It's an unexplainable feeling, to come across a classic-great at the onset of his or her career, when he or she is an unknown writer and social activist; when James Baldwin is merely a quiet onlooker in a crowd of human rights protesters, an onlooker who saves his fire for next time.

Watch out for the quiet ones, for their words burn like blistered wounds:

He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne.

In one sitting, I read and became glued to this book. This is narrative that begins with a letter of admonishment: "Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation." It is memoir. It is commentary. It is literary essay. It is palpable pain, palatable reading, and preponderance of racial and social progress.

It is fire.

One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one's situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long.

Read if your heart can lift, weigh, and carry these layers.
Read if through the elucidation of social wrongs, you are educated about humanity.
Read if you can stomach fingering the beauty and mire of this befuddling American fabric.
Read so you appreciate Baldwin's perspective, and the African-American trajectory.
Read so you feel the fire this time. ...more

70 likes · Like · see review

Feb 18, 2021 Jaclyn~she lives! catching up on reviews~ rated it it was amazing

Shelves: american-history, genre-non-fiction, country-usa, authors-bipoc, antiracism

The Fire Next time is as relevant, important and urgent today as it was in the sixties. This should be required reading for everyone, and in today's climate I would urge anyone to pick this up and read it. Baldwin's message could save lives. Please read this.

This is my second time reading something by Baldwin – the first time being in my college sophomore english literature class, when we studied Sonny's Blues – and I am eager to read more of his work. Baldwin is a master of language. My book The Fire Next time is as relevant, important and urgent today as it was in the sixties. This should be required reading for everyone, and in today's climate I would urge anyone to pick this up and read it. Baldwin's message could save lives. Please read this.

This is my second time reading something by Baldwin – the first time being in my college sophomore english literature class, when we studied Sonny's Blues – and I am eager to read more of his work. Baldwin is a master of language. My book is marked up, with hardly a page going by that isn't highlighted. These letters look both at Baldwins past and his hopes for the future. It is a call to end hatred and to love one another.

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

With this last quote Baldwin sends the message home, if humanity does not get it right this time, we won't be bathed in water this time, we will quite literally burn. From our own malice, from our own hatred, we will bring about destruction. We will destroy each other.

"One has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk – eviction, imprisonment, torture, death. 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 delusion – and the value placed on the color of the skin is always and forever a delusion."

"color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality."

"we cannot be free until they are free."

"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."

"They understood that they must act as God’s decoys, saving the souls of the boys for Jesus and binding the bodies of the boys in marriage. For this was the beginning of our burning time, and “It is better,” said St. Paul––who elsewhere, with a most unusual and stunning exactness, described himself as a “wretched man” –– “to marry than to burn.” And I began to feel in the boys a curious, wary, bewildered despair, as though they were now settling in for the long, hard winter of life."

“sometimes weeping: lost, and unable to say what it was that oppressed them, except that they knew it was "the man” – the white man. And there seemed to be no way whatever to remove this cloud that stood between them and the sun, between them and love and life and power, between them and whatever it was they wanted."

“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."

"One would never defeat one's circumstances by working and saving ones pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies."

"And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were merely another means of holding Negroes in subjection."

"I had been well conditioned by the world in which I grew up, so I did not yet dare take the idea of becoming a writer seriously."

"Everything inflamed me, and that was bad enough, but I myself had also become a source of fire and temptation."

"Whatever these people saw in me merely confirmed my sense of my depravity."

"Someone would have taken me over; one doesn’t, in harlem, long remain standing on the auction block."

"And if His love was so great, and if He loved all His children, why were we, the blacks, cast down so far? Why? In spite of all I said thereafter, I found no answer."

“To commune with Jesus, my dearest friend, who would never fail me, who knew all the secrets of my heart. Perhaps He did, but I didn’t, and the bargain we struck, actually, down there at the foot of the cross, was that He would never let me find out."

"I was already, without quite admitting it to myself, terribly involved with the effort of putting words on paper."

"When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?"

"and they didn’t even read; depressed populations don’t have the time or energy to spare. the affluent population, which should have been their help, didn’t as far as could be discovered, read either – they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn; in order to learn new attitudes."

"one has been perishing here so long!"

"to accept one’s past – ones history – is not the same as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it."

"the glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another –or others– always has been and always will be a recipe for murder."

"whoever debases others debases himself"

"I am far from convinced that being released from the african witch doctor was worthwhile if i am now – in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life – expected to become dependent on the american psychiatrist." ...more

23 likes · Like · see review

Feb 25, 2019 Puck rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: people-of-colour, classics, nonfiction, favorites-2019

"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

4 stars. Wow, when people say Baldwin's words are magic, they aren't lying. These essays are my first introduction to Baldwin, and while I didn't fully understood all the topics he addressed, I definitely felt the power of his words. The copy of my book is now full with underlined sentences.

The first essay, “My Dungeon Shook”, is a short and touching letter to his nephew, but “Down at the Cross" carri ...more

17 likes · Like · see review

Apr 10, 2020 Megan rated it it was amazing

passionate, poetic, thoughtful, brilliant, heartbreaking and hopeful examination of race, white supremacy, growing up black and the healing and self-examination the US needs to do in order to grow as a nation.

2 likes · Like · see review

Jun 25, 2018 Frank García rated it really liked it

Always loved Baldwin. Great text that pushes back on integration politics of the civil rights era. Probs one of best lines I have ever read: “Why would I want to integrate into a burning house?”

Like · see review