The Fire Next Time

As you read these lines, February has come around again to celebrate the triumph of hope over despair, light over darkness and love over hate, and to remind us all of the otherworldly love that led the Maker and Redeemer of men to the mother of all lynching trees, and the all-so-worldly hate that put so many others on their own.  In case you have not yet caught on, we are marking Black History Month.

In the early 1960’s, James Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time, a disturbing but masterful work that now rightfully occupies its honored place among the classics of American literature. The book draws its title from the post-flood Biblical prophecy, which is brilliantly summarized in a line from a song by a slave, which reads: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!”  The essence of the evocation seems to be that if you refuse to “let justice run down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24), then you are left to take your lesson from the fire, the fire that will surely follow, the “fire next time!”  And, that to put out that “fire” will require no small amount of candor, humility, generosity of spirit, and gobs and gobs of love, which is the only true pathway to forgiveness. 

Before bringing this blog to a close, I leave you with you an excerpt from the book’s “Dear James” letter which Baldwin directs to his teenage nephew and namesake, and to the rest of us who read along:

“…But these [White] men are your brothers.  And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means:  that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.  For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.  It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and damned rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.  You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer.  One of them said, “The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”

“…We cannot be free until they are free.”