The Fire Next Time: Down At The Cross Summary & Analysis

In the summer of his fourteenth year, Baldwin went through what he refers to as a “prolonged religious crisis.” He writes that he discovered God and, therefore, became more intimate with the notion of Hell. Having been raised in a Christian society, he easily accepted God and quickly began to associate religion with safety, an association he believes is common in the United States. Putting this in different terms, Baldwin says that when he turned 14, he became afraid for the first time in his life.

Baldwin feared the evil lurking within as well as the evil all around him. Suddenly he began to regard the “whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue” in a new way—without warning, they now embodied what Baldwin could himself become. They had, after all, been created by the very same circumstances from which Baldwin himself emerged. His friends had started flocking to the streets to drink and do drugs, and his father believed that Baldwin was going to follow them. Meanwhile, girls he had known his entire life—girls who had sung in the church—went through puberty and became alluring. Not entirely unlike the criminals on the Avenue, these girls became “unutterably different and fantastically present.” Because of the way he had been brought up in a Christian household and nation, Baldwin believed his attraction to these girls rendered him evil and depraved, a feeling that was intensified by the fact that the girls appeared to appreciate and encourage the kind of behavior he found so worthy of guilt.

As Baldwin’s peers all careened into adolescence, he noticed that the girls quickly developed a religious sense of right and wrong, whereas the boys slouched into a kind of reticent despair as they acquiesced to the harsh realities of black adulthood. At the time, Baldwin thought that they were letting themselves go, or—in a sense—giving up, resigning to the fact that they would “rise no higher than their fathers.” It became clear that education was futile for them, so the boys started dropping out of school and going to work. Although Baldwin’s father encouraged him to do the same, Baldwin refused to do so, despite the fact that he already understood that even highly educated black men were mostly incapable of succeeding in America.

Slowly but surely, Baldwin’s male friends began to neglect the way they looked, often standing in small clusters in dark hallways, passing around wine or whiskey and hanging out, cursing and fighting and sometimes openly weeping. They were, Baldwin writes, “unable to say what it was that oppressed them, except that they knew it was ‘the man’—the white man.” Helplessly trapped in a cycle of oppression, these boys didn’t have the means to address their own subjugation.

Baldwin recounts his own run-ins with “the man”: once, when he was downtown as a thirteen-year-old, he was crossing the street when a police officer said, “Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?” And another time, when he was ten, two officers frisked him while making remarks about his ancestry and sexual abilities, leaving him flat on his back in an empty parking lot in Harlem.

The church helped Baldwin avoid crime, which all of a sudden presented itself “not as a possibility but as the possibility.” The overwhelming reality seemed to be that nobody could overcome oppression by working and playing by the rules; rather, the ability to inspire fear in others was the only thing that might keep a black person safe. Out of this, Baldwin posits that very few black people care about being accepted by white people. Instead, they merely hope to avoid being beaten down. When white people learn to accept and love themselves, he says, “the Negro problem” will cease to exist because white people will no longer need it.

Though white people may not believe that these are the conditions under which black people really live, Baldwin maintains that it is overwhelmingly clear for someone like him—who has experienced such oppression—that whites do not treat blacks as they would like to be treated themselves. As far back as slavery, when black slaves and servants had to steal from the whites’ homes in order to balance the scales, white people have not lived by the Christian values by which they claim to adhere. When a black person does something—such as steal from a slave master’s house—to make up for this inequality, white people use it to their advantage, holding it up as an example of how whites are ultimately superior.

As such, Baldwin began to see as a teenager that a life of crime would be harder to avoid than he had previously thought. And even while he was so determined to not allow white people to debase him and limit his prospects, he could find no way of effectively avoiding it. He points out that every black boy in his situation eventually reaches this same realization and that, in order to survive, the boy must find a “thing” or “gimmick” in which to invest himself. It does not matter, Baldwin says, what that gimmick is—for him, it was the church.

The point at which a black boy must throw himself into a gimmick coincides with an “awakening” of the “senses,” or a certain coming into oneself. Unfortunately, for African-Americans this is often experienced under negative circumstances, as the very reason a boy must invest himself in something is to avoid the perils of his racial situation. Baldwin bemoans the fact that “the awakening of one’s senses should lead to such a merciless judgment of oneself.” He writes that black people in America are taught early in their lives to hate themselves because white people supposedly hold all the nation’s power and superiority.

Baldwin believes that when a black child is scolded, there is a “sudden, uncontrollable note of fear heard in his mother’s or his father’s voice,” especially when the child has transgressed some kind of racial boundary. For example, when Baldwin’s father reprimanded him for believing he could do anything a white boy could do, there was a clear strain of fear that was entirely different from the everyday kind of parental worry a white parent might exhibit. Baldwin says that there are various filters of authority that travel through black parents and reach children. And although the children can’t always exactly pinpoint the knowledge of racial injustice inherent in their parents’ tone, they begin to intuit the power of this nameless, all-encompassing white authority.

Baldwin says that he ignored his father’s fear by telling himself that the man was “very old-fashioned.” Nonetheless, the summer Baldwin joined the church, all of these fears, which had been slowly cultivating throughout his childhood, rose up and confronted him.

Baldwin didn’t join the church that his father preached in. Instead, he allowed his best friend from school to take him to another church one Saturday afternoon, where he met a female pastor in the back room. A respected woman in the community, she sat there in her robes and smiled at him, asking, “Whose little boy are you?” Baldwin was taken aback by the fact that this question was exactly what the pimps and other criminals on the Avenue used to ask when they encouraged him to “hang out” with them. Baldwin reasons that this question probably disarmed him so successfully because he actually did want to belong to somebody. It was inevitable, he thinks, that somebody would claim him that summer. Lucky for him, it was the pastor and not one of the criminals.

As the summer continued, Baldwin grew more and more afraid and felt increasingly guilty. One night, after a sermon, he fell to floor of the church, landing in front of the altar. It was entirely unexpected—he had been singing and clapping and thinking about a play he was writing, and then suddenly he was on the ground staring at the lights overhead and the saints on the church’s high walls. He remembers pain and the feeling that he was yelling up to heaven and receiving no reply, which led to a hopelessness, since the one thing he had invested himself in (religion) refused to acknowledge his experience, just like everybody else. In America, Baldwin writes, even black people refuse to look at one another, because they are always looking up or down, anywhere but at one another (and white people, of course, look in the entirely opposite direction). In this way, it is nearly impossible to have any hope in the idea of communion.

The universe, Baldwin maintains, consists of “other people.” When these people are constantly refusing to look at one another—as is the case for African-Americans—only God is left to turn to. But as he lay on the floor of the church, Baldwin realized that this God—a God he was looking to for salvation and support—was white and, despite the fact that He was supposed to love all of His children, He neglected black people. This was utterly perplexing to Baldwin, and his experience passing out during the church service did nothing to show him evidence of God’s love; when he was finally rejuvenated the next morning, he was told that he was “saved.”

In a way, Baldwin really did feel saved by this experience. Finally, he felt free of all the guilt he had been feeling. It wasn’t until much later in his life that he found himself capable of asking why “human relief” came only as a result of such strange and outdated suffering. He realized then, in later years, that all Christian churches (black or white) revolved around the same tenets: blindness, loneliness, and terror, wherein the first (blindness) made it impossible to fully recognize the existence of the last two. And although he would like to say that the Christian church’s values were faith, hope, and charity, he finds it impossible to believe this.

Despite the fact that he’d been “saved,” Baldwin quickly understood he wouldn’t last long in the church and that, in order to avoid becoming too bored and joining the criminals on the Avenue, he needed to find something within the church to take up his attention and time. In keeping with this—and to challenge his father, who was also a preacher—he decided to become a Young Minister.

The fact that Baldwin was preaching at such a young age gave him an advantage over his father, which he leveraged as much as possible. For the first time, he had a valid excuse to ignore his father as he wrote sermons and prepared for services. Although this power over his father was actually quite frightening to him, he used his newfound freedom extensively, often spending whole days in preparation without interruption. He felt, finally, that he had “immobilized” his father. It wasn’t until much later, though, that he realized he had also immobilized himself.

Being part of the church was an incredibly influential experience for Baldwin, who writes that he has never been able to fully let go of the music and drama and rejoicing. There is, he believes, a distinct sense of community that comes from the religious notion of suffering, and the opportunity to enrapture an entire audience during a sermon remains one of the most exciting experiences of his entire life. When he preached, Baldwin felt that he was taking on the pain and joy of his listeners and that they, in turn, took on his. Consumed entirely by this sensation, Baldwin worked tirelessly as a Young Minister to commune with Jesus, who he thought “knew all the secrets of [his] heart.”

Baldwin marks the slow disintegration of his faith as coinciding with his blossoming interest in literature. After a year of preaching, he started reading Dostoevsky while attending a mostly Jewish high school. The fact that he was constantly around Jews meant that he was spending the majority of his time with people who his religion believed were “beyond any hope of salvation.” In trying to convince them of Christianity’s truth, he showed them pamphlets—in response, they merely pointed out that the Gospels were written long after Christ’s death, an observation that encouraged Baldwin to read his texts more closely, realizing that the authors of the Bible were simply men who—like Baldwin himself in the throes of preparing a sermon—were likely to attribute their passionate imaginations to divine inspiration. Moreover, Baldwin realized, these men were white.

Once, after Baldwin’s best friend—who was Jewish—came over to his house, his father asked whether or not the boy was “saved.” When Baldwin told his father that his friend was Jewish, his father slapped him across the face. In that moment, Baldwin felt “all the hatred and all the fear” rising in him, manifesting itself in a “merciless resolve” to kill his father before his father could kill him. He suddenly felt that all his preaching and religious rejoicing had changed nothing at all about his relationship with his father. After all, why should he take pride in the fact that his best friend was going to languish in Hell, as his father seemed to want? This encouraged him to consider the Holocaust in Germany, and he realized that the Jewish people were indeed still persecuted and that his best friend could well have been one of the many who died in the travesty.

Responding to his father’s slap, Baldwin said: “He’s a better Christian than you are,” and left the house. From that point on, the tension between him and his father was more out in the open, and this was a relief.

Over time, Baldwin’s restlessness in the church began to show. Because he didn’t feel truly saved, it started to take considerable strength to refrain from cursing the congregation and telling them to trade in their religion for more tangible forms of hope, such as community organizing and striking. He no longer felt that he could teach children in Sunday school about the beneficence of a gentle savior, for this was like telling them they must accept their low station in life. Indeed, Baldwin found that there was no love in the church, as the congregations looked up to ministers who were primarily interested in money. Not only that, but religion seemed only to hide “hatred and self-hatred and despair,” and any existing goodwill failed to move beyond church services and make its way into the community. Rather than loving everybody, Christianity appeared to implore its followers to only love like-minded people.

Meditating on the divisive nature of Christianity, Baldwin points out that, just as white people believe that black people are descended from Ham and are therefore destined to eternal slavery, black Christians believe white people are the descendants of Cain, a greedy killer.

Nonetheless, Baldwin admits that the Christian church that he eventually left did indeed embody a rare joy and resilience. He wonders if perhaps everybody—the “pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children”—were unified by oppression, and thus were sometimes able to achieve something like love. This kind of unity is exactly what the United States needs, he argues. What stands in the way of this are “attitudes” that are chiefly historical—racist attitudes that have nothing to do with the present but that make it impossible to understand the nature of America’s racial struggle. Based on these destructive historical attitudes, white people refuse to understand the experience of black people, therefore making it impossible for them to fully understand themselves.

Focusing his attention more specifically on the history of Christianity, Baldwin illustrates the fact that the church has long been an agent of oppression, as early missionaries spreading the religion used Christian ideology to justify conquering other nations. These missionaries believed that conquest was an intrinsically good and pious endeavor; he calls this the “sanctification of power.” As such, the spreading of the Gospel acted as an excuse for domination and the imposition of authority on nonwhite nations. Given this aggressive history, Baldwin argues that whoever seeks morality ought to remove him- or herself from the church. If God isn’t capable of bringing people together unequivocally and granting freedom to everybody, then there is no use for Him.

At this point, Baldwin trains his focus on another religious group: the Nation of Islam. He writes that he had heard much about its leader, Elijah Muhammad, but had never paid the movement very much attention because he found its message all too familiar. Often in Harlem on Saturday nights he had come upon crowds listening to Muslims speak about white people. Soon, though, he began to listen more carefully because of the way police officers regarded such crowds: they were afraid, and this was something he’d never seen before. They stood idly by while speakers from the Nation of Islam held forth in front of large crowds, who were captivated and seemingly inspired. Baldwin saw that these speeches brought black people together and instilled in them something that looked like hope.

These speeches revolved around what the Nation of Islam believed was both historical and religious proof that all white people are cursed devils whose end is near. According to their doctrine, this information had been passed down to Elijah Muhammad by Allah, who told him that white power would end in ten to fifteen years. Although Baldwin doesn’t believe this himself, he makes a point of stating that this thinking is no more ludicrous than the white Christian belief that all black people are destined to slavery because they descended from Ham. And in any case, the Nation of Islam speeches he witnessed in Harlem did not spend much time discussing theology, since black people didn’t need convincing that white people treated them badly; the audience was simply happy to have religious evidence that they had been mistreated for many years and that this was soon going to end.

Baldwin wonders why the massive audiences at these Nation of Islam speeches were suddenly willing to indulge this line of thinking. After all, he remarks, the theology was not new, nor was the sentiment. Nonetheless, Elijah somehow succeeded in bringing people together in a way that the Christian church was unable to do. Responding to his own question, he suggests that time has rendered black people more willing and able to accept these ideas. Back when the Christian church went into black countries and subjugated the people living there, it was impossible to believe in a black God. Since that time, though, the Christian church has shown itself to be morally corrupt time and again.

Evoking the Holocaust once again, Baldwin demonstrates the injured moral positioning of the Christian church, since Germany was a Christian nation. “The fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority,” he writes. And though Christians of other nations were utterly confounded and surprised by Germany’s violence against humanity, Baldwin argues that it was much less astounding to black people.

Baldwin examines the station of black Americans during World War II, illustrating the injustice of the fact that black men went to fight for their country and returned to still be treated as subhuman. This leads him into a personal story about a time he and two friends were denied alcohol at an airport bar. Even though all three men were over thirty, the bartender refused to serve them because they “looked too young.” When they called the manager over, involuntarily drawing the entire bar’s attention, they were finally given their drinks. Afterward, they unwillingly engaged in conversation with a naïve white man. When one of Baldwin’s friends—a military veteran—told the man that the fight they had been having in the bar was, in fact, his responsibility too, the man replied, “I lost my conscience a long time ago,” and left the bar. This kind of person is typical in America, and though Baldwin hated such people several years ago, now he pities them in order to avoid despising them.

Baldwin returns to his examination of the Nation of Islam. He considers Malcolm X—the movement’s second in command—and his idea that white people value violence insofar as it advances their own glory and rule. As soon as black people try to stand up for their rights, though, the idea of violence is perceived as senseless and brutal. Baldwin finds himself unable to call this theory untrue, though he disagrees with where this kind of thinking leads, as it essentially condones violence. Still, though, he admits that “things are as bad as the Muslims say they are,” even if he disagrees with the Nation of Islam’s black vs. white colorism that so closely recalls the racist underpinnings of the Christian church.

Arriving at Elijah Muhammad’s mansion—which doubled as the movement’s headquarters—Baldwin felt nervous. He was late, he was unsure how he felt about the Nation of Islam, and he knew that he couldn’t smoke or drink once inside the mansion. He writes that, by the time he reached the house, he felt “as deserving of a scolding as a schoolboy.”

Upon entering the mansion, Baldwin’s reservations deepened. Everyone present—and there was a sizeable group—treated him with respect, which he read as an indication that they expected something from him. Elijah was not in the room, and when he finally appeared, Baldwin noted the joy that surrounded this smiling figure who playfully teased the women present and greeted his disciples with laughter and conversation before turning to Baldwin with a smile that transported him back to the moment when the pastor had asked, “Whose little boy are you?” It was clear to him then that Elijah had the ability to draw people toward him, inviting them to unload their troubles onto him. Elijah reminded Baldwin of his father, if he and his father had been friends.

Having seen him on a television program, Elijah told Baldwin that it seemed to him that Baldwin was not yet brainwashed and was trying to become himself, which Baldwin hesitantly agreed with, though he privately supposes that this meant two different things to Elijah and to him.

The dinner was filled with talk about power and about the “white devils.” Elijah told Baldwin that the reason Baldwin didn’t think all white people were devils was because he had spent too much time with them and was too “exposed to white teaching.” Baldwin outlines Elijah’s mission to “return ‘the so-called Negro’ to Islam, to separate the chosen of Allah from this doomed nation.” According to the Nation of Islam, there was a time long, long ago when black people thrived on earth before white people even existed. After some time, though, the devil invented white people, and Allah conceded that these white devils could rule the world for a set amount of time. Now, though, according to the Nation of Islam, that time was coming to an end, and since there was nothing virtuous about white people, there was no true hope or use for their continued existence.

Yet again, Baldwin notes that there is nothing new about this sort of thinking: it is merely a reversal of white Christian ideology. And since the African-American experience has so long been denied visibility—because white people are reluctant to admit the travesties they’ve committed—it is difficult to say where the root of such racial problems lies. Why shouldn’t it be possible then, Baldwin asks, that humanity began with perfect black people, especially since this mirrors the line of thinking advanced by white people about themselves?

While having dinner with Elijah and his disciples, Baldwin found himself telling Elijah that he gave up religion for a reason and that he was, above all else, a writer. Elijah encouraged him to think about religion more often, but did not push too hard. It seemed to Baldwin in this moment that, though he wasn’t ready to accept the Nation of Islam’s doctrines, Elijah and his disciples were confident that he would eventually come around to joining them. This gave Baldwin the feeling that he was once again a teenager in his father’s home.

At one point, Elijah made the claim that no set of people were ever fully respected without having possessed their own land. Baldwin couldn’t disagree with this, thinking that everybody other than African Americans has a nation. Only “the so-called American Negro” is “trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundred years.”

Baldwin hypothetically considers what would happen if black people were able to claim the “six or seven” states the Nation of Islam believes America owes them by way of reparation for slavery, ultimately deciding that this redistribution of land would alienate white people and maroon them between nonwhite nations. He writes that, if he were Muslim, he would certainly strive for this and wouldn’t hesitate to do what he could to realize the vision, since, ultimately, there would be nothing to lose—if he “perished” in the process, so be it; “One has been perishing here so long!”

Further investigating the idea of separatism, Baldwin considers the notion of black pride, an attitude he says was once helplessly shouted into the void, unheard because of white oppression and ignorance. “Yes, I’m black, goddamnit, and I’m beautiful!” people used to declare to no avail. But now (during the Cold War), black really has become beautiful in the white eye, though not for the right reasons. Instead of gaining social currency due to love, blackness gained attention during the Cold War as a result of fear, since America was eager to stop the USSR from spreading communism to various African nations. Of course, the United States’s pandering to non-American blacks was the ultimate insult to African-Americans still kept under the oppressive societal dictates of a post-slavery nation.

Leaving Elijah’s mansion, Baldwin felt as though he had failed some sort of test. Standing outside with the leader and looking out upon the troubled streets of South Chicago, he wished he could show Elijah love and support.

In a car provided by the Nation of Islam to take him to his next destination—to have drinks with several white friends—Baldwin continued the night’s conversation with a young dark man who insisted that African-Americans could prosper in an independently black nation because of the fact that they account for approximately twenty billion dollars’ worth of America’s economy. Baldwin countered by noting that this twenty billion dollars depends on the entirety of the United States’s economy; in other words, it is relative to and dependent upon the current marketplace. What would happen, he wanted to know, when African-Americans removed themselves from this economy? The driver seemed annoyed and rather stumped by this line of thinking, and Baldwin backed off, though he wanted to say that the boy’s frame of reference would have to shift if this sort of change were to take place.

Although Baldwin was quickly able to identify the flaws in his driver’s logic, he admits that he understands why the young man indulged such thinking. He sees that the boy depended on a dream of sorts, a reliance on the unity of the Nation of Islam—and who could hold this against him?

Although he is considerate of what might lead people of the Nation of Islam to think in such optimistic—and perhaps even unrealistic terms—Baldwin expresses that he wishes the Muslims had started a movement that could inspire disenfranchised African-Americans to seek change by way of concrete action. In order to change their situation, Baldwin maintains that black people have to recognize and accept the fact that “the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse.”

Baldwin takes up the question of where the Nation of Islam receives its money from, a topic shrouded in mystery. Though he confesses to not knowing much on the subject, he says he wouldn’t be surprised if certain affluent racists donated to the cause because they liked the idea of keeping blacks and whites separate. One thing he knows for sure is that the chief of the American Nazi party donated twenty dollars at a recent Nation of Islam rally, and he and Malcolm X came to the conclusion that, in terms of race, they completely agreed with one another. Baldwin makes clear that “the glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another…always has been and always will be a recipe for murder.” And once this process has begun, there is little reason stopping the affiliated parties from eventually attempting to exterminate the entirety of their supposed enemy—this, of course, is the path the Nazis took in Germany.

Baldwin asserts that he is very committed to African-Americans gaining full freedom in the United States, but he also makes clear that he is concerned about the “health of their souls.” Therefore, he voices his disapproval of any African-American attempt to inflict upon white people what white people inflicted upon them.

Shifting away from the Nation of Islam, Baldwin suggests that there can be no hope for meaningful change in the life of African-Americans if the United States doesn’t substantially alter its political and social structures. Unfortunately, only small gestures toward freedom have been offered to African-Americans, such as the 1954 court decision to outlaw segregation in public schools, which Baldwin presents as an example of “tokenism,” or a small and barely-influential nod toward freedom. Again, he argues that this decision was only made in order to “woo” African nations during the Cold War in the hopes that they wouldn’t join the USSR. He writes that, just as the word “integration” means next to nothing in America, the word “independence” means very little in Africa, where European colonizers have still not left the nations they conquered long ago.

Black people are extremely well poised to “precipitate chaos and bring down the curtain on the American dream,” though Baldwin says they may never rise to power. This is partly due to the fact that all Americans are afraid to truly examine this American dream, as they don’t actually want to know certain things about themselves. And this, in turn, is because most people don’t truly want equality, but rather superiority. Ultimately, Americans are controlled by their own confusion about the American dream, unwilling to examine their personal lives and unwilling to take responsibility for their country’s actions.

This confused attitude precipitated by the American dream has rendered the United States an “unmitigated disaster” on the international stage. Baldwin points out that Russia’s main advantage over America is America’s own fraught racial history, which scares away potential allies and drives them into Russian control. This means that, in effect, America’s unwillingness to confront oppression on its own soil propagates oppression abroad, because Russia would surely dominate these nations. Once America acknowledges its own oppressiveness, though, it will have the opportunity to set a precedent for true revolution internationally, because its difficult racial history renders it perfectly positioned to demonstrate what equality might look like. Baldwin insists that freedom brings with it a responsibility to “apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change.” As such, Baldwin argues white Americans should see their troubled history as an opportunity rather than an ugly and hidden shame.

White people in the United States, Baldwin writes, believe that they possess something intrinsically desirable, something that black people aspire to. This assumption makes white people believe that African-Americans want to be accepted by whites, but when a white person grants this supposedly desirable acceptance, it just reinforces his or her sense of self-importance and value. In reality, nothing supports this idea of intrinsic white value, a fact that Baldwin believes white people are, at the bottom of their hearts, aware of. As such, a large part of America’s racial problem has to do with “the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is.” At the same time, contemporary white people yearn to be seen as they are, to be “released from the tyranny of [the] mirror.”

Baldwin says that it is for this reason that love is so important, as it has the ability to pull everybody out of the masks they wear. White people must stop projecting their fears onto African-Americans so that they can learn to accept black people and, thus, accept themselves. Baldwin remarks that, while the black man came to the white man in search of some tangible thing—a place to sleep or perhaps some money—the white man came to the black man for love. The problem is, of course, that the white man found himself unable to love the black man, rendering himself unlovable.

Baldwin implores Americans—both black and white—to come together like “lovers.” He encourages black people to force their white countrymen into consciousness regarding race and, in the end, themselves. If America is capable of banding together like this, it might stand a chance of finally establishing itself as a united country and changing the world. If the country fails to do this, however, he warns that the old prophecy, “re-created from the Bible in song by a slave,” will be upon the nation: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”