The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
James, baldwin The fire next time my dungeon shook. Let it to my nephew On the 100th anniversary of the emancipation. Dear James, I have begun this letter five times. Turn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother like him. You are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody, with a very definite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you're soft. You may be like your father in this. I don't know. But certainly both you and your father resemble him very much physically. Well, he is dead. He never saw you and he had a terrible life. He was defeated long before he died because at the bottom of his heart he really believed what the white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy. I am sure that your father has told you something about all that. Neither you nor your father exhibit any tendency towards holiness. You really are of another era. Part of what happened when the ***** left the land and came into what the late E franklin Frazier called the cities of destruction. You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a ***. I tell you this because I love you and please don't you ever forget it. I have known both of you all your lives have carried your daddy in my arms and on my shoulders kissed and spanked him, watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that far back. If you've loved anybody that long. 1st as an infant then as a child, then there's a man. You gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face. For behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him laugh. And I see a seller. Your father does not remember any house, he does not remember. I hear in his present laughter, his laughter as a child, let him curse. I remember him falling down the cellar steps and howling. And I remember with pain, his tears, which my hand or your grandmother's so easily wiped away. But no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and his speech and in his songs. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know which is much worse. And this is the crime of which I accused my country and my countrymen in which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. one can be. Indeed, one must strive to become tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death. For this is what most of mankind has been best at since we've heard of man. But remember, most of mankind is not all of mankind, but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.