Black Star
Part 3 of "James Baldwin: American Prophet"
(In this short Part 3 of “James Baldwin: American Prophet,” we explore how Baldwin recasts black Americans as essential protagonists in the American story, and how the fire next time could either condemn us or redeem us. Can be read on its own, but I recommend reading Part 1, “James Baldwin’s American Religion,” and Part 2, “Contingency and Courage.”)
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Black Star
A pragmatic myth must give us a role to play in the story; and Baldwin, who in seemingly all his childhood memories is busy writing plays, grounds his American myth with a new starring role: black Americans. Against a white background that tells young black children that only white children are heroes, Baldwin radically reimagines the American story for his nephew with a black star.1 He believes that the unique struggle of the African-American past “yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful.”2 Black people are protagonists of the American story3 because they have suffered and learned from suffering, because they provide an essential perspective from the minoritarian viewpoint outside the blinding myths of white America, and because they represent American democracy’s deepest contradictions. Thus, the black man “is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or dark as his.”4
But would it not be understandable if blacks chose to draw dark curtains on this wretched American story? “Hence the question: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”5 If achieving America and saving white people rests on black shoulders, that’s asking a hell of a lot from an oppressed group. Yet Baldwin accepts this, and encourages his nephew to bear it as well: “The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them.”6 For Baldwin knows that only by saving others can we be saved; because we share our fate, we must change it— together. Though it seems impossible to imagine an America that truly transcends race, Baldwin encourages us to feel “emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.”7
Black Americans could bring the fire of Old Testament judgement down upon America; or, as Baldwin wishes, they could bring a transformational fire of redemption.8 “Try to imagine,” says Baldwin to his nephew and us, “how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame.”9 Black Americans carry the embers of this prophetic vision of a democratic sky, a truly polytheistic and unifying theater of humanity. They are the stars burning, the curtain on America down or up, the dawn that rises with the fire next time. Baldwin hopes that black Americans will choose to be heroes in the Christian way— not the hero that kills the enemy, but the hero that saves them.
The fire next time is, always, us. Perhaps we can burn so brightly together in the liberty of love that the flames feel like water, a great and final grace. Perhaps every wound will sing itself whole; the past healed, not carried— transformed, unwounded, a new world— an unextinguished ember of who we could become.
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Or, more accurately, he creates a story in which both whites and blacks are essential, equal, different, irreplaceable heroes in the American story. But of course, raising blacks to the level of equal protagonist is the radical act that requires his focus.
The Fire Next Time 343
And by extension, for Baldwin, the story of the West: “if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro,” Ibid 340
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid 293
Ibid 346
As T.S. Eliot writes in “Little Gidding”:
“The dove descending breaks the air /
With flames of incandescent terror /
Of which the tongues declare /
The one discharge from sin and error /
The only hope, or else despair, /
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre /
To be redeemed from fire by fire.”
(In T.S. Eliot Collected Poems 1909-1962, pg. 207)
The fire can either be hell or love.
The Fire Next Time 294