Thursday, Nov. 14, 1963 University Daily Kansan
Page 3
'Our Origins Contain the Key to All We Become
them. Like other writers he has his enthusiasms, and you may not care for discussions of the film "Carmen Jones," or the 1956 Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists in Paris, or André Gide, or Ingmar Bergman, or Norman Mailer. All three of the books of essays are good. The most recent is "The Fire Next Time," and it exploded nationally with the impact of a "1984" or "Modern Man Is Obsolete."
"The Fire Next Time" had two essays, one originally in the New Yorker, called "Letter from a Region in My Mind," and one originally in The Progressive, a letter to his nephew on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. It is the New Yorker piece that so shook up thoughtful American readers.
"I have spent a long time thinking about that man. I never saw him again. I cannot describe the look which passed between us, as I asked him for directions, but it made me think, at once, of Shakespeare's 'the oldest have borne most.' It made me think of the blues: 'Now, when a woman gets the blues, Lord, she hangs her head and cries. But when a man gets the blues, Lord, he grabs a train and rides.'
One of the best Baldwin passages concerns the author's visit to the South, which he says northern Negroes view as "the old country." In Atlanta he was directed by an old man to his first segregated bus, and this is what he wrote:
"It was borne in on me, suddenly, just why these men had so often been grabbing freight trains as the evening sun went down. And it was, perhaps, because I was getting on a segregated bus, and wondering how Negroes had borne this and other indignities for so long, that this man so struck me. . . . my eyes would never see the hell his eyes had seen. And this hell was, simply, that he had never in his life owned anything, not his wife, not his house, not his child, which could not, at any instant, be taken from him by the power of white people."
James Baldwin never condemns merely the South, for he says Jim Crow comes in many varieties, that Birmingham may be bad but that Johannesburg, South Africa, is worse, "and Buchenwald was one of the worst things that ever happened in the history of the world." With angry yet troubled words he tells of Negroes in the armed forces, called "nigger" and given the most menial work, of the whites in World War II who spread stories abroad that the Negro was subhuman, of the German prisoners of war who received better treatment than Negro soldiers.
Perhaps the most impressive sections of "The Fire Next Time," to our topical minds, are those dealing with the Black Muslim movement, a militant organization we have all read about, which says, in effect, to hell with the white man. Baldwin tells of the leader, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who predicts the white man's rule will end in 10 to 15 years, and who wants a block of southern states for his organization. Baldwin does not approve of the Muslims, but he understands them, and so, he suggests, must all Americans.
What Baldwin asks for, and what perhaps other Negroes are asking for, is simply "to be treated like men. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement
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Baldwin, is a warning, one that rolls out like a warning from an Old Testament prophet, the ones the boy preacher Baldwin quoted many years ago:
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utterly impenetrable." The Negro does not want merely to have the right to consume "over-cooked hamburgers and tasteless coffee at various sleazy counters. He wants the "liberation of the entire country from its crippling attitudes and habits."
"A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. . . If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
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So we watch the sit-ins, and read about them, and the episodes at southern universities, and some Americans ask about the Supreme Court decision of 1954. which Baldwin says wouldn't have come about had it not been for the competition of the cold war and the liberation of Africa then in progress. Simple love or justice would have brought the decision much earlier, he says. And he quotes the youth who says, "At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we
"If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: 'God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!'"
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Free the white man at the same time you free the black man, says Baldwin. And if the white man doesn't free himself, what then? The violence is building up, violence which fills the churches, pool halls and bars. If that violence ever "erupts outward in a more direct fashion, Harlem and its citizens are likely to vanish in an apocalyptic flood."
And what we get finally, from
The Baldwin books are full of warnings and possible prophecies. We see how explosions build up in a ghetto to the point where youths tear up everything they see. We see why there is resentment at being forced into a restricted area, and why housing projects designed for one race never really become a home for anyone.
can get a lousy cup of coffee."
809 Mass.
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