Letter to Jimmy

7. the years of fire

Your essay, “The Fire Next Time,” is published in 1963.

This text calls into question the structure of American society, which is deaf to the claims of minorities. In the same year, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is assassinated as he begins his re-election campaign. This tragedy is a major blow to the progress of civil rights. Kennedy was fighting against racial segregation that was still common in some states, despite the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed it. He offered his support to Martin Luther King, Jr., and had received the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in the White House.

During this time, concerned about not participating in the fate of your country, you leave France temporarily. You are not a simple spectator, and certainly not merely a witness to history. Your voice is now counted among those at the center of the black community. It is your duty, first as a citizen, but also as a writer, who is seen henceforth as the spokesman of the voiceless. You could have uttered as your own the potent words of Aimé Césaire upon returning to his own homeland:

“And behold here I am!”

“Once again this life hobbling before me, no, not this life — this death, this death without sense or pity, this death that falls pathetically short of greatness. .”⁹⁷

Published in the United States in January, The Fire Next Time immediately springs to the top of the bestseller list. Several months later, your rising star lands you on the cover of Time magazine. Your words are closely monitored, and, even before this time, the FBI had opened a file on you (the famous file 100146553). You are not unaware that the FBI is watching you. You discuss it with your friends and family, talking about it more and more, as you fear that one day you will fall victim to a conspiracy, and that your days will end in mystery, like Martin Luther King, Jr., or certain members of the Kennedy clan. The smallest of your movements and activities is carefully recorded, to the point of being ridiculous, if one remembers that national security is at stake. File 100146553, now consultable via Internet, contains for example details such as “The current residence of James Baldwin, the negro writer and playwright, is unknown. He had a romantic visit with Paul Robeson at the Americana Hotel. We report that Baldwin could be a homosexual; everything leads us to believe that he is.”

In 1963 you are racing against the clock.

You undertake a tour of the South, the heart of the “Negro Problem.” During this trip you do not hesitate to return to church, this time to preach another way of loving your neighbor — through tolerance, and the recognition of minority rights. You push the envelope so far as to call upon Robert Kennedy to respond to the police brutality with which a peaceful civil rights protest met in Birmingham, Alabama. Robert Kennedy invites you to speak with him along with other leaders of the black community. Could it have been any other way?

It is finally in August of 1963 that the famous March on Washington occurs. We hear Martin Luther King’s, Jr., unforgettable “I Have a Dream” speech.

Throughout the course of the march, you are in the crowd, not far from Marlon Brando.

•••

With “The Fire Next Time” you pen the most profound, political, and literary text on the subject of black freedom, future and status in America. Despite the initial thundering applause, voices of discord ring out shortly thereafter. Anticipating the fury about to be unleashed against you, Sheldon Binn notes in his review of your essay, “What he has drawn will not sit well even with some whites who count themselves as friends of the Negro. But he has not written this book of two essays to please. [. .] Thus he has written from a heart which has felt a unique kind of hurt and a brain which has desperately sought hope in the face of what often seems to be the merciless logic of despair.”⁹⁸

Because of the threatening tone of your essay, you are accused of stirring up tensions between both sides; furthermore, this book is seen as a partisan act, and your ideas are labeled as extremist. Albert Memmi, who would later write the preface to the French edition of your work, remains perplexed and wonders if you are not making the same demands that Black Muslims make but in more bellicose terms: doing away with whites to leave room for blacks. He asks, “Does Baldwin ask for anything else when he suggests, calmly and level-headedly, that America should cease to consider itself a white nation? Should we also admit after reading his book that we are more afraid than Baldwin himself?”⁹⁹

It is not a question of you pitting yourself against what many call, as your father used to, the “white devil.” You must defuse both sides, rethink integration: “What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color. [. .] Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation who has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains.”¹⁰⁰

“The Fire Next Time” opens the doors to everyone who wishes to understand your definition — if indeed you make one — of the black American as compared to his white countryman. The roar rising from the pages, the upheaval sparked by your ideas, and the crackling of an approaching fire are omens of things to come.

America is no fool: it has heard your message. But can it follow your lead? Is the book you have just written for or against America? Is this a book for your brothers of color, or against them? These questions are reminiscent of those that arose after the publication of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, with the subtle difference that in his text, inhabitants of Martinique confront their colonizers. In order to encourage the latter to heed the book’s message, and indeed so that they understand that Fanon’s work is addressed to their brothers of color, Jean-Paul Sartre writes, “Europeans, open this book, and enter into it. After several steps into the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire. Approach them, and listen; they are discussing the fate in store for your shop counters, and for the men who guard them. They might see you, but they will continue to talk amongst themselves, without even so much as lowering their voices. . In these shadows, from which the sun will rise again, you are the walking dead.”¹⁰¹

By the same token, America can no longer remain blind to the racial issue when it produces writers like you. The Fire Next Time warns of the dangers of the situation, but assures that all is not lost, that it is possible to elude the prophesy delivered in this song written by a slave:

And God gave Noah the rainbow sign

No more water, the fire next time. .

“The Fire Next Time” concludes with this scriptural prediction, from the very Bible that you know like the back of your hand.

And what if America did not listen? What would happen?

“Well, if this is so, 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.”¹⁰²

These declarations are not unlike those of Malcolm X, who advocates obtaining rights by “whatever means necessary.” Herein lies the point of convergence that Albert Memmi points out in his introduction to your work.

•••

In his time, your colleague W.E.B. Du Bois asserted that the problem of the twentieth century was one between whites and blacks. “The Fire Next Time” tempers this assertion by declaring that, “. . the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion,”¹⁰³ though nevertheless the racial question remains vital in the United States, in these years of fire.

In Blues for Mister Charlie, you borrow from a racist news item that would have serious political reverberations. On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, a black adolescent, is murdered. A month later, his murderers are acquitted in court after a sham trial; America is even more shocked that the criminals admit their evil deed as soon as they are released from custody. The hasty verdict legitimizes the battle for civil rights that has been waged for many years already. What murder could therefore better represent the state of race relations?

The fourteen-year-old Chicago native has come with his cousin to spend his vacation with his great-uncle in Money, Mississippi — home to William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Elvis Presley, but also to a segregationist and Ku Klux Klan stronghold — Emmett Till is kidnapped in the middle of the night by Roy Bryant, a grocer, and his half brother, J.W. Milam. They beat Emmett to death before throwing his body, completely disfigured, into the Tallahatchie River, a heavy weight tied to his neck with a piece of barbed wire. A fisherman discovers the body several days later. Although the motives for the murder vary depending on the testimony — Roy Bryant’s wife maintains for example that the adolescent may have been disrespectful and might have spoken indecent words — was the punishment” administered to the young black boy by the husband and brother-in-law proportionate to the alleged provocation? Regardless of the answer, the fact remains that a human being has been killed. There was a crime. The motives are clearly racist.

Disregarding the pressures put upon her by the authorities, the mother of the boy demands that his casket remain open during the ceremony, so that everyone can comprehend the barbaric nature of the act that killed him.

The outrage generated by this heinous crime sparks an investigation by Medgar Evers and Amzie Moore, two members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They disguise themselves as farmers, in order to obtain evidence that might shed light on the death of the child. Their research led to the discovery of other black people murdered in the area, also lynched, then thrown into the river.

Then there was the trial. One must, no matter what, have faith in the country’s justice system.

The jury? Do not hold your breath: it is composed of twelve white men. These men acquit Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam after deliberations lasting just under an hour. One member of the jury, no doubt happy with the outcome, confesses upon exiting that he and his colleagues had to take a good “soda break” in order to reach a deliberation time that would be passable in the court of public opinion.

The verdict spreads unrest throughout America. The whole world is watching. What image will the country project of itself at a time when the international political context is the Cold War, and totalitarianism and attacks on individual liberties are more often than not attributed to the Soviet bloc, the world’s other superpower, who is now carefully eyeing Washington’s response? In any event, the sluggishness and awkwardness of the American administration at the time are bitterly criticized. Yet again America preaches freedom, railing against countries the world over for their barbarianism, while unable to fight against the most flagrant civil rights abuses within its own borders.¹⁰⁴

Blues for Mister Charlie uses these facts to set the scene for the murder of a young black musician, Richard, by a white grocery store owner, Lyle Britten.

Is this play inspired by anger, or written with a desire for revenge? To the contrary, you insert a brotherly message into the text through the character of the victim’s father, a staunch defender of civil rights, and whose friendship with a liberal white man aims to head off any hasty judgment or generalizations.

You dedicate the book to the civil rights activist Medgar Evers, a native of Mississippi, murdered that year, in 1963, five months after the publication of “The Fire Next Time.” This leader of the Civil Rights Movement fought tirelessly for the black cause. A patriot, too, he took part in the Normandy landings. The University of Mississippi, still segregated at this time, closed their doors to him all the same when he applied to study law there. Somewhat ironically, this same institution would be the first to admit a man of color, James Meredith, one year after the assassination of the black leader.

History will remember, too, that Medgar Evers was killed on June 12, 1963. Was the date inconsequential? No. Evers was assassinated several hours after President Kennedy’s televised speech in which he expressed his support for the Civil Rights Movement.

Blues for Mister Charlie received mixed reviews. You are criticized, as with The Fire Next Time, for fueling hatred toward whites, even though the heavily criticized play advocates tolerance and integration. At the time of its publication, the critic Walter Meserve sharply attacks your work as a playwright: “[Baldwin tries to] use theatre as a pulpit for his ideas. Mainly his plays are thesis plays — talky, over-written and clichéd dialogue and some stereotypes, preachy and argumentative.”¹⁰⁵