"Letter from a Region in My Mind"/"Down at the Cross"
James Baldwin; first published in the NEW YORKER, reprinted in THE FIRE NEXT TIME
Sixty years ago, two essays by James Baldwin were combined into a slim volume and published by Dial Press as The Fire Next Time (1963).[1] My copy of the book is a first-edition hardcover that belonged to one of my brothers; I first opened it, randomly, to this passage:
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
Many years later, those two illuminated sentences—along with all of Baldwin’s lucid, masterfully wrought contemplations on race, love, civil rights, music, film, art, and literature—served as an entry point for my own exploration of the genre.
Essays such as those in The Fire Next Time, which appear first in a periodical and are later collected or anthologized, are characterized by timelessness, a relevance apart from the cultural and historical contexts in which they are produced. But such essays are also significant because they preserve specific moments in time, which is to say, they safeguard History (which itself is contained by—and unfinished because of—Time). Often these essays read as prescient messages sent from the shores of History. And in retrospect, we can see that white Americans failed to heed Baldwin’s call to “change the history of world” from the essay’s final paragraph:
“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 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. 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!”
Jump ahead to Now: slavery still exists, genocides continue, people are still being murdered because of their skin color, gender, belief system, or sexual orientation, and the Earth and its inhabitants are drowning in floods, raped and forcibly relocated for resources, parched with drought, and choking on smoke. The fire—literally and figuratively—is here, and we are burning.
Brief Notes on the Original Publication
“Letter from a Region in My Mind” was published in the New Yorker on November 17, 1962. The eighty-six page essay’s fifty columns of text are shuffled between 208 columns of advertisements. There are 128 ads sandwiching the essay, beckoning readers to purchase luxury goods, apparel, accessories, Christmas cards, cameras, and flashlights; subscribe to two periodicals (The Philadelphia Bulletin and Businessweek[2]); travel abroad; visit department stores and boutiques; attend horse races and musical performances; and listen to recordings. People depicted in the ads are white and mostly male, reflecting the magazine’s predominantly white (and male) readership.
Looking at the placement of Baldwin’s essay, one ad in particular gives me pause. It appears on page 122, asking readers to
“Imagine! 23 Days in South Africa for $455*”
The ad copy provides the itinerary: during those three-plus weeks, travelers will visit gold and diamond mines and ostrich farms, ascend Table Mountain by cable car, stay in Indian Ocean resorts along the “lovely Garden Route,” watch Bantu dances, and photograph wild animals in Kruger National Park.
Less than a month after the publication of this issue of the New Yorker, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Chief Albert Lutuli (a South African activist) issued an appeal for action against apartheid. I wonder how many New Yorker readers knew not only of this appeal, but also about the United Nations resolution—passed less than two weeks before the issue’s publication—to impose sanctions on South Africa in an effort to end apartheid. How many read the essay, saw the ad, knew about the sanctions, but booked anyway a twenty-three-day vacation in South Africa? How many went on these excursions, visiting the mines or watching Bantu dances and ignoring the suffering of Black South Africans who were enduring one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet? How many readers saw that ad and noted the indifference with which it was placed, not to mention the indifference with which it was sold?
I’ll never find answers to those questions, but, to the right of the advertisement, in the column of text belonging to Baldwin’s essay and this passage, I do locate a kind of response to the fact of such an advertisement, almost as if Baldwin were speaking back to it:
“[…] the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other—not to Africa and certainly not to Islam. The paradox—and a fearful paradox it is—is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. How can the American Negro’s past be used? The unprecedented price demanded—and at this embattled hour of the world’s history—is the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars.”
[1] The essays “Letter from a Region in My Mind” and “A Letter to My Nephew” originally appeared, respectively, in November and December of 1962 in The New Yorker and The Progressive. They were retitled in The Fire Next Time as, respectively, “Down at the Cross” and “My Dungeon Shook.”
[2] The Philadelphia Bulletin was a daily evening newspaper, in circulation between 1847-1982. The Business Week debuted in September 1929, weeks before the crash of the U.S. stock exchange. Its name was later changed to BusinessWeek. In late 2009, Bloomberg L.P. bought the magazine and changed its name to Bloomberg Businessweek.
Excellent reminder of Baldwin's insight and prescience.