When I read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, I concentrated on the first several pages that described the limits of someone like him, who was born in Harlem. Only after he discovered God and felt safe was he able to see he changes in the people around him, their limits and the limits that he was expected to be confined by. “Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way, too.” (p.831) He says, “I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances…” (p.831) and the chances that he would grow up to be a pimp or a racketeer was high. And it wasn’t only the people born in Harlem that was limited. The boys and girls that grew up on the Avenue were also expected to grow a certain way: “In the same way that the girls were destined to gain as much weight as their mothers, the boys, it was clear, would rise no higher than their fathers.” (p.833) They may change and grow but never higher than their parents. And then African Americans as a whole, “lost and unable to say what it was that oppressed them, except that they knew it was ‘the man’ — the white man. And there seemed to be no way whatever to remove this cloud that stood between them and the sun, between them and love and life and power, and between them and whatever it was that they wanted.” (p.833)
I was surprised that he saw all of this when he was 14. What teenager can seriously see the limits that society places on him/her and thinks about how to surpass them? Baldwin says that he couldn’t discover a reason why he shouldn’t become a criminal, a member of the Avenue or his father but he also says, “I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was, and limit me that way, and polish me off that way…” (p.835) He was able to assess his own capabilities and accept that he really had none. The whole page on 837 describes his fears and the fears of the people around him and how he concluded that he would have to one day face his fears. If he could reason, analyze and think all of these ideas and theories as a teenager, I’m not surprised that he changed so many other lives as he grew up.
