James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time"
I was hankering to read this after finishing a book of letters between Hunter Thompson and Oscar Acosta who made repeated references to how “Whitey was gonna burn if enough people read this book.” Since I’m all for burning whitey, I picked it up for myself.
I don’t see how Hunter and Oscar got that idea. Baldwin to me comes off as “tired” rather than “angry” and the most interesting part of the book came from a meeting with Baldwin by the Honorable Elijiah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, who Baldwin thinks are manipulative and ill-informed.
A lot of people seem to think that way, though they all mostly say so in hindsight, so I wonder just what it is about Elijiah that makes such ardent followers, if only for a little while.
In the meantime, this is a combination of a quick biography and social commentary that’s a quick read, though it did threaten to put me to sleep more than a few times. He writes well, but it almost comes off as timid, and I like my race relation commentators to be full of fire and pissed off, so this really didn’t do much for me. I really think it’s more on those lines of things that people are “supposed” to read.
Well, I did, can I go now? I got some muthafuckin’ crackers to burn.
