Review: Baldwin, The Fire Next TIme (1963)

[truepenny]

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The terrible thing about The Fire Next Time is how much it sounds like Between the World and Me, a book written 50 years later. This is beautifully written, sad and angry and a little wry, about race in America (and the terrible blind "innocence" of white people) and also about religion. Baldwin writes about preaching as a teenager and about meeting Elijah Muhammad, the then-leader of the Nation of Islam, and about a whole bunch of other things, but I think Baldwin's failure to be converted by Elijah Muhammad (a conversion which he both yearns toward and recoils from) is the heart of "Down at the Cross." (I can't help wondering if Louis Farrakhan was one of the serious young men Baldwin describes meeting in Elijah Muhammad's house.) But religion is always in the context of race because it has to be, because Baldwin's whole LIFE is in the context of race. He doesn't have the luxury of pretending otherwise.



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