Reading James Baldwin: Ayana Mathis - The Fire Next Time

More than sixty years after its original publication, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), comprised of two letters, remains a touchstone in American literature.

In “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” Baldwin speaks to a young generation navigating the country as it’s caught between integration and segregation. In “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” Baldwin examines the circumstances of his youth that led him to the church and the moral realizations that eventually forced him to leave it.

“Baldwin is very aware that he’s often trading in the inarticulable, and that his job, in many ways, is to attempt to articulate things that are not, in fact, articulable,” writes Ayana Mathis. “There’s a lot of Old Testament in Baldwin. This idea that story has to stand in for and communicate the biggest and least communicable aspects of what it is to be a human being—suffering, evil, that we die, jealousy, striving, faith, all of it. And he makes a kind of strange distinction between what belief could do inside of a person, what it could offer them, and what the church could do.”

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Ayana Mathis is the author of two novels: The Twelve Tribes of Hattie and The Unsettled, for which she won the inaugural Gabe Hudson Award. Currently pursuing her Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary, she recently explored the intertwining of faith and American literature in her five-part, New York Times essay series “Imprinted By Belief.”

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Few American writers have marked their era as powerfully as James Baldwin. As distinctive on the page as on the airwaves, his voice is indelibly associated with the demand for racial justice in the United States, a demand that continues to make him one of our most pressing and urgent contemporaries.

To mark Baldwin’s centenary, the Authors Guild Foundation invites you to join a conversation featuring some of our most exciting writers, scholars, and essayists as we gather to celebrate, study, and reflect on the legacy of Baldwin’s life and work.

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The painting of James Baldwin in the graphic above is by Beauford Delaney and reprinted courtesy of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), James Baldwin, c.1945–50, oil on canvasboard, 24 x 18 inches / 61 x 45.7 cm, estate stamp; Private Collection; © Estate of Beauford Delaney, by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

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