The Fires This Time: Hughes, Baldwin, Coates, and the Uncertain Path Ahead

Through the smoke and gasoline of the literal fires that raged through cities like Washington, DC, and Atlanta as a result of the civil unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s May 25th 2020 murder at the literal knee of state-sanctioned legal justice, and through the similar apocalyptic scenes that have hit Minneapolis (in 2020 and 2026) and Los Angeles in the midst of an occupation by federal agents, we hear voices and see faces. The revolution is being televised. Truth is out there, hiding in plain sight.

How do we see our way through the fire? We keep records through video, music, and taking to the streets. We remember the words of the late Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “I Am Somebody,” itself an affirmation adapted from a 1950’s poem by Rev. William Holmes Borders, Sr. In this speech, popularized first during in a 1972 appearance on “Sesame Street” with dramatic flourish and power, Jackson empowered his audience to understand that they will exist, persist, and carry on in spite of everything:

I may have made mistakes, But I am Somebody.

My clothes are different, My face is different,

My hair is different, But I am Somebody.

I am black, Brown, or white.

I speak a different language, But I must be respected,

Protected, Never rejected.

Consider Langston Hughes, the Missouri native poet, novelist, playwright, and columnist whose lifespan (1901-1967) was most active through his dominance of the Harlem Renaissance. Sages of the past never leave us so long as their work is read and understood. We remember Harlem (1951), whose opening question about the fate of a deferred dream is immediately answered in the next two lines:

“Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?”

We know “I, Too” (1926), with its extended metaphor of the “darker brother” being sent to eat in the kitchen and its gentle suggestion that such an exile soon will change:

“Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes”

We might not remember “Warning” (1949) as well as the first two because it’s deceptively quiet and calm. He opens with “Negroes” and describes his people as “sweet, docile, meek, humble, kind.” Visions of compliancy and obedience probably lull the listener into a sense of security, perhaps the time considered for those who want to “Make America Great Again.” The mood shifts, though, and the meaning of the poem’s title becomes clear: “Beware the day / They change their mind!” It’s a brief poem in which the placement of each word in all ten lines matters. This is the mandate for all great poets, but it’s still surprisingly powerful how Hughes closes the poem, how he imbues unpredictable power and strength and retributive justice to a “Gentle Breeze:”

“Beware the hour

It uproots trees!”

There are no fires in these poems from Langston Hughes, no incendiary flames laying waste to everything in their path. Hughes was a different poet. His work went down easy and safely found a place in most high school and freshman college English curriculums because they gave off the impression of security. The same wasn’t always said about James Baldwin. In his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, two epistolary essays, “My Dungeon Shook-Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and “Down at The Cross- Letter from a Region of My Mind,” spoke to conditions that have been constant in the lives of his people and this country:

“To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”

It’s a brief letter, a tight essay of six paragraphs that acts like a poem in that nothing is wasted.

He writes: “Please try to remember that what they [white people] believe…does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.” It’s a thoughtful way to frame their argument, in keeping with Baldwin’s Fundamentalist Christian upbringing to “forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Earlier, he makes things clearer:

“But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence that constitutes the crime…This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.”

It’s a devastating and blunt summation of fate in 1963 that speaks through the smoke and fire of today’s civil unrest. The pain he is experiencing is ingrained in the fabric of American culture. Echoes of Baldwin’s epistolary form here can be seen in the content and form of Ta-Nehishi Coates’s 2015 book Between The World and Me, where Coates writes a letter to his teenaged son about the state of the world as it’s now become.

"The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all."

The second essay in Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is more religious and more personal, an exploration of Christianity in the Black community and Baldwin’s conclusion that Black Muslims have made a “black God” to counterbalance the “white God” of his childhood. It’s in the appropriation of an a couplet from the Gospel standard “Oh, Mary Don’t You Weep” as his title that Baldwin perfectly embraces the safe comfort of that music while targeting its revolutionary implications:

“God gave Noah the Rainbow sign/No more water, the fire next time!”

We have been flooded so many times in our past. COVID-19 took approximately 1,233,841 of our siblings, mothers, fathers, children, cousins, partners. It was a brutal wave of social isolation and swirls of fear. We rode it through the first half of the decade and pretended to feel better when it was over. The darkness of our time now could be blamed on many factors: we don’t read enough, we don’t remember the past, we don’t accept how everything and everybody is connected. In short, we don’t understand that the fires this time could have been prevented. We also don’t want to think that this wave of illness and fear we’ve been riding for the past six years is just one slice of a bigger current. The ocean is an endless, beautiful, unrelenting body of water. Hang on to your lifeboat and don’t lose focus.