The Fire Next Time is a 1963 non-fiction book by James Baldwin. It contains two essays: "My Dungeon Shook — Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation" and "Down at the Cross — Letter from a Region of My Mind". The first essay, written in the form of a letter to Baldwin's 14-year-old nephew, discusses the central role of race in American history. The second essay, which takes up the majority of the book, deals with the relations between race and religion, focusing in particular on Baldwin's experiences with the Christian church as a youth, as well as the Islamic ideas of others in Harlem. The book's two essays were first published in American magazines in late 1962: "Letter from a Region of My Mind" in The New Yorker and "My Dungeon Shook" in The Progressive. They were then combined and published in book form by Dial Press in 1963, and in Britain by Penguin Books in 1964. Critics greeted the book enthusiastically. It is considered, by some, one of the most influential books about race relations in the 1960s. It was released in an audiobook format in 2008, narrated by Jesse L. Martin. The book's title comes from a couplet in "Mary Don't You Weep", a Negro spiritual: God gave Noah the rainbow sign No more water, the fire next time
Content
The book includes two essays that were written in the 1960s during a time of segregation between White and Black Americans.
My Dungeon Shook
The first essay, titled "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation", is a letter to Baldwin’s nephew, in which he compares his nephew to the men in their family including Baldwin’s brother and father. He tells his nephew about America’s ability to destroy Black men and challenges his nephew to convert his anger due to mistreatment as a Black man into having a passionate and broad outlook on the Negro experience.
Down at the Cross
The second essay, titled "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in my Mind", addresses the detriment of Christianity on the Black community and how Baldwin’s journey of being a teen pastor to completely pulling away from the church because it felt like a repression of his full experience of humanity. He then recounts his dinner with Elijah Muhammad where Muhammad educated Baldwin on the Nation of Islam in hopes to get him to join that movement. In this section Baldwin describes how Black Muslims have made a "black god" to avoid the oppression of a "white god" that Christianity has established within the Black community.
Responses
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall wrote an article that focused on the civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, building on Baldwin's work. Baldwin's piece examined the issue of racism mainly in his area of Harlem, New York, and Hall emphasized that the racial issue they confronted in America was not a sectional but a national problem. Another article that expands on Baldwin's new religious view was written by Jon Nilson, a theology professor. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin focused on how Christianity was corrupted. Observing that Baldwin challenged the Catholic Church, Nilson said that when Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, it almost seemed like The Fire Next Time had come true. In December 2016, Can I Get a Witness? The Gospel of James Baldwin, a 2016 musical theatrical tribute to Baldwin by the musician Meshell Ndegeocello and based on The Fire Next Time was premiered at the Harlem Stage in Harlem. In July 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an article in The Atlantic as a modernized version of Baldwin's letter to his nephew called "Letter to My Son", and later published an entire book called Between the World and Me that talks about the current state of the Black experience in America. The title was alluded to in Max Hastings' book America, 1968: The Fire This Time.
