At 14, he found himself writhing on his church’s floor, experiencing a pain “like one of those floods that devastate counties, tearing everything down.” He became a child preacher reveling in his congregation’s exclamatory community (“Amen!” “Yes, Lord!”) until he realized that preaching was his revenge against his stepfather and hell his church’s revenge against the world. The national reckoning that we now know as “The Fire Next Time” begins with Baldwin’s salvation. “Privately,” Baldwin wrote, “we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster.” “Write me, quickly, please, the morale is wildly fluctuating, I’m always afraid, and I’m pregnant with some strange monster.”įifty-five years ago last month, The New Yorker published Baldwin’s astonishing essay about the United States teetering on a precipice. In stints in Turkey and Switzerland he kept rewriting an essay he was calling “Down at the Cross” and sending his agent anguished letters. He entered adulthood “unable to imagine that anyone could possibly be in love with an ugly boy like me.”īaldwin’s essays grapple with ugliness. A wide smile spreads over his face.īaldwin grew up being told by his stepfather that he was “the ugliest boy he had ever seen.” When David Baldwin, a preacher, announced his hatred for his stepson’s “frog-eyes,” Jimmy was hurt for his mother. After he sits down among the students, Baldwin’s head swivels in surprise as they rise in a standing ovation. at Cambridge University, and students are crowded onto the floor.īaldwin speaks in poised, impassioned paragraphs and concludes that Western civilization will either be opened for all to enter or demolished by those excluded. There’s a small moment in “I Am Not Your Negro,” the documentary from earlier this year about James Baldwin, that sticks.
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