His experience tells the tale in staccato clarity. He opens the longer essay with the story of his experiences as a youth in Harlem when he 'fled into the church' out of the despair of his existence. To end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.' Baldwin pleads: 'If we-and I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious black, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others-do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, Is entitled 'Down at the Cross, a Letter from a Region of My Mind.' It appeared last year in The New Yorker. One is a short 'Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation' which originally appeared in The Progressive in Madison, Wis. It is taken from a prophecy recreated from the Bible in a song of a slave: One possibility is grim, as the book's title suggests. The ferment of the present and the possibilities of the future. He has fashioned his plea to America out of the past he has know, from Thus he has written from a heart which has felt a unique kind of hurt and a brain which has desperately sought hope in face of what often seems to be the merciless logic of despair.

'The brutality with which Negroes are treated in this country simply cannot be overstated, however unwilling white men may be to hear it,' he writes. But he has not written this book of two essays to please. What he has drawn will not sit well with even some whites who count themselves as friends of the Negro. He has pictured white America as seen through the eyes of a Negro. Baldwin has fashioned such a transformation. Out of his own pain and despair and hope, Mr. The listener can be transformed, as far as words will take him, into the skin On another and higher level, it can be related so the listener becomes virtually part of the experience, intensely feels the hurt and pain and despair, and yes, even the hope. On one level it can be related so the listener becomes more or less curious, mildly interested and intellectually aware of what he is hearing. But if the actuality cannot be known, it can be related. Only James Meredith knows what it really means to be James Meredith. Of fear or the misery of humiliation unless one has lived it. Baldwin is skillful, one can never really know the corrosion of hate, the taste No matter the skill of the writer, and Mr. Ou must put yourself in the skin of a black man.' writes James Baldwin as he seeks to translate what it means to be a Negro in whiteĪmerica so that a white man can understand it.ĭespite the inherent difficulties of such a task, his translation in latest book, 'The Fire Next Time,' is masterful.

The fire next time book