Wednesday August 3, 2022; 9:10 PM EDT
- Reading notes from "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation" by James Baldwin, the short opening essay in The Fire Next Time, which takes its title from the old spiritual, the old hymn:#
- God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water, the fire next time!#
- First paragraph's lesson: Do not let them tell you the name you will be called by.#
- Second paragraph's lesson: The powerful do not want to know who and what, how much and how many, they destroy. Their protestation of innocence is a great crime.#
- Third paragraph: Those who protest their innocence don't know us, even if we have been among them working for generations.#
- Fourth paragraph: When any child such as yourself is born to us, we love that baby hard, "at once and forever, to strengthen you against a loveless world."#
- Fifth paragraph: But the powerful who protest their innocence do not love you, and they set you down in a ghetto knowing that there you may very well be destroyed. These heartless and innocent people "are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it." But to understand this history they will have to face themselves, and see that they are not the people they think they are, nor is this the nation they think it is. Do not be beaten down by them or by the definitions they have for you and your life. Great and difficult things have been done in this country and such things must be done again.#
- Final paragraph: Our country celebrated our freedom many decades too soon.#