American Protest Literature

r JAMES BALQWIN My Dungeon Shook

1962

In 1963

, the writer James Baldwin (192~-1987~ was heralde_d as a 20~h-century Frederick Douglass and the voice of African Americans. His book The Fire Next Time hit the bestseller lists and he began to advise President Kennedy, as Douglass had President Lincoln. Bu while Baldwin called the writer a "disturber of the peace" and was active in the ci~il righ~ movement, he rejected the term "spokesman," explaining that to be the "representative of some thirteen million people," like fellow protest artist Richard Wright, was a "false re. sponsibility ... and impossible."

Instead Baldwin believed that he had to "excavate and recreate history," and that this meant recreating his own experience. There had been no language for the "horrors of the American Negro's life," he said-the "privacy of his experience" had been denied- and so Baldwin wrote confessional autobiography. The Fire Next Time is a highly personal call to intimacy and love. He asks blacks and whites to create America's· consciousness "like lovers" in order to "end the racial nightmare." The love he proposes is mystical, and he writes as prophet throughout, in the tradition of David Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eugene Debs and Martin Luther King, Jr. He offers a narrative of conversion, like Upton Sinclair in The Jungle (1906) and John Steinbeck at the end of The Grapes of Wral

h (1939)-though while Steinbeck secularizes religious experience, Baldwin sanctifies soci- ety. Art is spiritual expression, divinity is more important than doctrine, and self-will a

nd God's will are intertwined.

As th

e nation's conscience Baldwin holds up what he calls "the rainbow sign," his vi- sion of a harmoniously blended society. This vision of interdependence means, as he put it in 1961, that "one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own : in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself." In the book's first part, "My Dungeon Shook," Baldwin uses the letter form to bridge the distance between self and other. It ~ug_g~sts a continuing involvement from a place of racial exile in America, and asks each 1nd1v1dual reader to become the letter' dd B ldwin's paS

t s a ressee. The letter also connects a and present selves. It is addressed to his n h the same age B Id . , . ep ew and namesake who was as a win s autobiographical self in th . ' b t •tis also a

letter to his younger self-f e o~en,ng of the book's second part; u 1 rom James to Jimmy.

Further reading: David Leeming, James 8

. . the fire (1989). aldw,n (1994); Horace Porter, Stea/mg

James Baldwin I My Dungeon Shook

ar Jarnes: . De begun this Jetter five times and torn it up five times I k .

1 have • eep seemg your h ich is also the face of your father and my brother Like h' face, w . · 1m, you are

h d ark vulnerable, moody-with a very definite tendency to d toUg , 1 soun truc-

t because you want no one to think you are soft You may b l'k ulen · e I e your grandfather in this, I don't ~now, but certa'.nly both you and your father re- semble him very much physICally. Well, he 1s 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 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 to- wards holiness: you really are of another era, part of what happened when the late E. Franklin Frazier called "the cities of destruction." You can only be de- stroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this because I love you, and please don't 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 and watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that far back; if you've loved any- body that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as 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 cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child . Let him curse and I re- member 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 in 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 accuse my coun- try and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor hiS tory will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of th~u- sands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, m- d d d h

·1 h1·cal concerning destruc- ee one must strive to become, tough an P I osop .

tion and death for this is what most of mankind has been best at smce we h ' f ki d is not all of mankind.) ave heard of man . (But remember: most o man n . B . f d t tion should also be mno-ut It is not permissible that the authors o evas a cent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

• d well-meaning people, your Now my dear namesake these mnocent an

' ' der conditions not very far re- countrymen have caused you to be born un

' h I Dickens in the London of more moved from those described for us by C ar es

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'beration I THE LITERATURE Civil Rights and Black L1

(I hear the chorus of the innocents screa . h dred years ago. . . rn1ng ,, than a un are'"-but I am wntmg this letter t , No1

1 H w bitter you · o Yo This is not true. 0 t how to handle them, for most of thern d u, to try

thing abou o n to tell you some . I know the conditions, under which You 0t Yet

th t you exist. Were b really know a t ymen were not there, and haven't made ·t 0m,

h e Your coun r I Yet " for I was t er · h e and no one has ever accused her of be· · •0ur

h was also t er , ing b·tt grandmot er . ts check with her. She isn't hard to find. You I er.1

est that the mnocen r country sugg h t she exists either, though she has been working f · men don't know t a , or thelll all their Jives.) h ' l' k

born here you came, somet mg I e fourteen years I •

f ther and mother and grandmother, looking about th though your a . e streets h h·ch they were carrying you, stanng at the walls into Whi· h throug w I c they

b ht You had every reason to be heavyhearted, yet they were not Fo h roug , . · r ere you were, Big James, named for me-you were a big baby, I was not-here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks to- day, for you. It looked bad that day, too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children's children .

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it in- tended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born, and faced the future that you faced be- cause you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were ex- pected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could do it and whom you could marry. I know that your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying, "You exaggerate." They do not know Har· tern, and 1 do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine- but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, _there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols _of your hfe have bee d J'b h t white

n e I erately constructed to make you believe w a people say about yo Pl well as

h u. ease try to remember that what they believe, as W at they do and . ·ty but to the · . h cause you to endure, does not testify to your infenon the

1r m umanity d f h ugh storm whi h an ear. Please try to be clear, dear James, t o h nes

c rages about your youthful head today, about the reality whiC

James Baldwin I M y Dungeon Shook

Ords acceptance and integration. There is d the w no reason fo IJellin 'k white people and there is no basis whate f r you to try to

e h e ver or their i IJecofll . that they must accept you. The really terr'bl . mpertinent

puon i e thmg old b assufll ust accept them. And I mean that very ser·

1 ' uddy, is ~m

that Y d ccept them with love. For these innocent · must accept an a people have

tlJefll y are in effect, still trapped in a history which th no other e The ' . ey do not d

hOP · d until they understand 1t, they cannot be relea d f . un er. ct· an se rom 1t The h stan , )ieve for so many years, and for innumerable reaso h . y ave

ad to be ns, t at black men 11 . . r to white men. Many of them, indeed, know bette b

infeno r, ut, as you will are people find it very difficult to act on what they kno -.- . d'scover, . . . w. ,o act 1s to be 1

. t d and to be committed 1s to be m danger. In this case th d . cornrn1t e , . . . . ' e anger, m

. ds of most white Amencans, 1s the loss of identity Try t . . the rnin . · 0 1magme how ou would feel if you woke u~ one mornmg to find the sun shining and all the

Y fl me You would be fnghtened because it is out of the order f stars a a · . . . . o nature. AnY upheaval in t~e umvers~ 1s ternfymg because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of ones own reahty. Well, the black man has funetioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations . You, don't be afraid. r said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never be- ing allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, de- feated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers-your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from real- ity and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time 1 th

ought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off. You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of

freedom f fl they are free. one hundred years too soon. We cannot be ree un 1 Goct ble

ss You, James, and Godspeed.

Your uncle, James

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