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4.61 AVERAGE
4.61 AVERAGE
this is my introductory baldwin piece and what a wonderful place to start. baldwin’s accounts on race & religion are emotive, existential & unbelievably relevant. now is as essential a time to read this as ever. we must think beyond our understanding, we must fight for community and we must care about each other. there is no two ways about it!
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
*My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation*
What I appreciate most about this letter/essay is that James Baldwin maintains a spirit of hope while not shying away or downplaying the realities. I do recommend if someone approaches this book and finds the “run-on” nature of the paragraphs off putting that they read at least a bit of it out loud. While Baldwin is known as a writer, his style has a bit of that sermon quality to it- the kind that revs up more and more as it goes and can’t be bothered with stopping for a breath. Otherwise, I can say nothing more to praise or explain it than the title, but I will list my favorite quotes:
> 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. (Refers to how when his brother was young, James and his grandmother could easily soothe him. Now that he’s a grown man, his tears may not show but are ever present due to the realities of being a black man in the U.S.)
> Your grandmother was also there, and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. (James makes the statement earlier that for them, the conditions are as bad as those described by Dickens a hundred years prior. He also says people will call him wrong and **bitter** for saying so.)
> We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. (This would be a tattoo for me if it weren’t so long. These words are as true today as they were then and perhaps have always been in hard times.)
> You were not expected to aspire to excellence: **you were expected to make peace with mediocrity**. (The desire of the oppressors for the oppressed in every group.)
> Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does **not** testify to your inferiority **but to their inhumanity and fear**. (The hardest thing to keep sight of in the face of constant gaslighting.)
> Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. (This is such a kind acknowledgement by Baldwin. He knows that the antagonism they face stems from fear. He sees that and calls it what it is. This truth is good for not only for those on the wrong side of social justice, but for allies too when things start to feel messy.)
> The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off. (Baldwin quotes himself from an earlier work and it so poetically sums up that feeling many of us have as we deepen our understandings and expand our viewpoints. Just when things start to feel confusing and messy and like we’re lost in despair, the chains of old ways fall off.)
*Down at the Cross- Letter from a Region in My Mind*
I will attempt at synopsis as this piece is roughly 100 pages long, but summarizing Baldwin’s words is like trying to describe a truly amazing surrealist or abstract piece. The gestalt is what matters and pulling out individual pieces distracts from the impact of the whole. It’s hard to read it all at once in some ways, as I found my brain wanting to stop and digest and ponder and wander around with the thoughts it provoked, and yet I found if I walked away from it, I struggled to jump back in, just as one might in a really interesting dinner party conversation after a brief trip to the restroom. So I’ll do my best and accept it will fall short.
**Synopsis:**Baldwin starts by explaining his religious crisis at fourteen. He was driven into the church in his fear to escape the pimps and racketeers on “the Avenue”, as well as a desire to one up his father, who also preached. He initially enjoyed the attention received as a young preacher and appreciated the release, the catharsis that he could have (getting worked up & collapsing) in the church. But he also soon saw the church as yet another corruption- both in taking money out of poor people’s pockets and in the lie of one path to salvation that condemned everyone else, including his Jewish friends from school. He also talks about the use of Christianity in the past by white people to explain black Americans lot in life- that they were descendants of Ham and cursed and hence slavery and all the rest of it. The church was not pushing its members towards meaningful reform, like rent strikes; instead encouraging them to “reconcile themselves to misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life.”
He discusses sensuality and the lack of it in, particularly white, American life. “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be *present* in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”
There is discussion of Christianity’s relationship to power throughout history. This will lead into his discussion of the Nation of Islam and their claims of Allah bringing about a time of power being restored to black hands. He explains that Elijah Muhammed was interesting not because he was espousing new ideas (they weren’t in various ways) but that white people feared him and his group. He’d actually been able to pull people out of drugs and prison with success and this effectively suggested his group could succeed with their grander aims.
He takes a sidebar here to talk about the “decolonialization” of Africa (I use air quotes because we all know the undoing is more easily said than done) and compares/explains the role of the Holocaust and WW2 in challenging the racial status quo. He talks about how black soldiers had to endure the racism of their compatriots and how they saw better treatment in Europe and also saw how American soldiers gave German POWs more respect than them. That white people had to face the genocide Germany had committed and, perhaps not out loud, face the slower but ever persistent genocides they were committing.
He returns to discuss a dinner he had at the home of Elijah Muhammed. It appeared to be a bit awkward, Muhammed wanting him to join their side. Baldwin determined to remain solitary. He did not share their views against intermarriage and integration, nor their religious abstinence from drinking and smoking. He acknowledges Elijah’s power- his singlemindedness and the fatherly love he gave to all his members. His descriptions create a sense of a cult and he does discuss the question of where the money comes from, as well as that, on some levels at least, the Nazi Party and their group share certain ideological beliefs.
Baldwin then outlines his own path forward. It involves black people fully accepting their history and learning how to use it. “To accept one’s past- one’s history- is no the same thing as drowning in it, it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used…” He cannot believe that tearing down any race is the path forward. He speaks about the Russians taking advantage of the poor but that they were only able to **because** current powers had left them so destitute and in need. “For if they find their state intolerable, **but are too heavily oppressed to change it,** they are simply pawns in the hands of larger powers.” He talks about the *Brown v Board* decision in the context of American fear and desire to show the re-developing African nation that they were “progressing” in their treatment of their descendants.
He does get a bit poetic here about love, life, and tragedy and I will not try to paraphrase it as I cannot do it justice. What I can express is that he demonstrates that black people do not need to “rise” to a level of equality with white people; that they have intrinsic value and that white people need to stop the pretense that their intrinsic value is somehow more. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” He acknowledges how incredibly difficult- impossible- this all is but also says “one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.”
He reiterates a warning that if we don’t choose love, if we don’t choose to work towards a fully integrated future, that bad things will happen, re-stating the Biblical passage turned slave song that “*God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”*
**Thoughts:** I am glad I read this book at this point in history and I am glad I had seen the Malcolm X movie with Denzel Washington before reading it. (This gave me some prior knowledge of Elijah Muhammed and what all went down with Nation of Islam, which I do think was important context.)
Baldwin is unflinching in his acknowledgement of the reality of black people at the time, while maintaining incredible spiritual idealism about love. He understands power and relates it to religion in ways more true than I have ever read or voiced. His writing voice definitely has a tone similar to the sermons one associates with the Civil Rights Movement yet distinct. He’s both easy and hard to read- he is forthright with accusations and facts, he does not hide behind extended metaphors; but he is reaching down into the bowels of humanity for an answer to a terribly difficult problem and finding more words than most, but still not enough. I stated earlier that reading this short text straight through was too much as my brain needed time to digest and process what I was reading, but leaving it was also poor solution as it was like trying to rejoin an ongoing conversation 20 minutes later. I’ve read it twice in less than a year and I can still say I feel I don’t fully grasp the final 15 pages, hence why my synopsis of that section is so short.
What I can say is that this book makes me think and gave me words for things I didn’t have. I have probably highlighted this copy more than any other book I own. That could be in part because it’s an e-book and those are easier to highlight, but I think it is more that Baldwin’s words demand acknowledgement in more colors than my Kindle book offers. I include a selection of the quotes that I highlighted to better demonstrate their power, but re-state- these are mere elements of the masterpiece that is this text. The gestalt is worth the read.
> “It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances.” (referencing the pimps & racketeers)
> “One would never defeat one’s circumstances by working and saving one’s pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear.”
> “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this- which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”
> “Negros had excellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues; it certainly did not work that way for black Christians.”
> “This world is white and they are black.”
”It was another fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.” (References to black children being forced to recognize the white hold on power.”
> “The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others. **I would love to believe that the principles were Faith, Hope, and Charity, but this is clearly not so for most Christians, or what we call the Christian world.”**
> “I remember feeling dimly that there was a kind of blackmail in it. People, I felt, ought to love the Lord *because* they loved Him, and not because they were afraid of going to Hell.”
> “It goes without saying, then, that whoever questions the authority of the true faith also contests the right of the nations that hold this faith to rule over him- contests, in short, their title to his land.”
> “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.”
> “Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.”
> “We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement.”
> “It was the kind of encounter one watches with a smile simply because it is so rare that people enjoy one another.”
> Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color. And this leads, imperceptibly but inevitably, to a state of mind in which , having long ago learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst.”
> “In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems.”
> “Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh, who since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go.”
> “It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate."
What I appreciate most about this letter/essay is that James Baldwin maintains a spirit of hope while not shying away or downplaying the realities. I do recommend if someone approaches this book and finds the “run-on” nature of the paragraphs off putting that they read at least a bit of it out loud. While Baldwin is known as a writer, his style has a bit of that sermon quality to it- the kind that revs up more and more as it goes and can’t be bothered with stopping for a breath. Otherwise, I can say nothing more to praise or explain it than the title, but I will list my favorite quotes:
> 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. (Refers to how when his brother was young, James and his grandmother could easily soothe him. Now that he’s a grown man, his tears may not show but are ever present due to the realities of being a black man in the U.S.)
> Your grandmother was also there, and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. (James makes the statement earlier that for them, the conditions are as bad as those described by Dickens a hundred years prior. He also says people will call him wrong and **bitter** for saying so.)
> We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. (This would be a tattoo for me if it weren’t so long. These words are as true today as they were then and perhaps have always been in hard times.)
> You were not expected to aspire to excellence: **you were expected to make peace with mediocrity**. (The desire of the oppressors for the oppressed in every group.)
> Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does **not** testify to your inferiority **but to their inhumanity and fear**. (The hardest thing to keep sight of in the face of constant gaslighting.)
> Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. (This is such a kind acknowledgement by Baldwin. He knows that the antagonism they face stems from fear. He sees that and calls it what it is. This truth is good for not only for those on the wrong side of social justice, but for allies too when things start to feel messy.)
> The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off. (Baldwin quotes himself from an earlier work and it so poetically sums up that feeling many of us have as we deepen our understandings and expand our viewpoints. Just when things start to feel confusing and messy and like we’re lost in despair, the chains of old ways fall off.)
*Down at the Cross- Letter from a Region in My Mind*
I will attempt at synopsis as this piece is roughly 100 pages long, but summarizing Baldwin’s words is like trying to describe a truly amazing surrealist or abstract piece. The gestalt is what matters and pulling out individual pieces distracts from the impact of the whole. It’s hard to read it all at once in some ways, as I found my brain wanting to stop and digest and ponder and wander around with the thoughts it provoked, and yet I found if I walked away from it, I struggled to jump back in, just as one might in a really interesting dinner party conversation after a brief trip to the restroom. So I’ll do my best and accept it will fall short.
**Synopsis:**
There is discussion of Christianity’s relationship to power throughout history. This will lead into his discussion of the Nation of Islam and their claims of Allah bringing about a time of power being restored to black hands. He explains that Elijah Muhammed was interesting not because he was espousing new ideas (they weren’t in various ways) but that white people feared him and his group. He’d actually been able to pull people out of drugs and prison with success and this effectively suggested his group could succeed with their grander aims.
**Thoughts:** I am glad I read this book at this point in history and I am glad I had seen the Malcolm X movie with Denzel Washington before reading it. (This gave me some prior knowledge of Elijah Muhammed and what all went down with Nation of Islam, which I do think was important context.)
Baldwin is unflinching in his acknowledgement of the reality of black people at the time, while maintaining incredible spiritual idealism about love. He understands power and relates it to religion in ways more true than I have ever read or voiced. His writing voice definitely has a tone similar to the sermons one associates with the Civil Rights Movement yet distinct. He’s both easy and hard to read- he is forthright with accusations and facts, he does not hide behind extended metaphors; but he is reaching down into the bowels of humanity for an answer to a terribly difficult problem and finding more words than most, but still not enough. I stated earlier that reading this short text straight through was too much as my brain needed time to digest and process what I was reading, but leaving it was also poor solution as it was like trying to rejoin an ongoing conversation 20 minutes later. I’ve read it twice in less than a year and I can still say I feel I don’t fully grasp the final 15 pages, hence why my synopsis of that section is so short.
What I can say is that this book makes me think and gave me words for things I didn’t have. I have probably highlighted this copy more than any other book I own. That could be in part because it’s an e-book and those are easier to highlight, but I think it is more that Baldwin’s words demand acknowledgement in more colors than my Kindle book offers. I include a selection of the quotes that I highlighted to better demonstrate their power, but re-state- these are mere elements of the masterpiece that is this text. The gestalt is worth the read.
> “It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances.” (referencing the pimps & racketeers)
> “One would never defeat one’s circumstances by working and saving one’s pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear.”
> “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this- which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”
> “Negros had excellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues; it certainly did not work that way for black Christians.”
> “This world is white and they are black.”
”It was another fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.” (References to black children being forced to recognize the white hold on power.”
> “The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others. **I would love to believe that the principles were Faith, Hope, and Charity, but this is clearly not so for most Christians, or what we call the Christian world.”**
> “I remember feeling dimly that there was a kind of blackmail in it. People, I felt, ought to love the Lord *because* they loved Him, and not because they were afraid of going to Hell.”
> “It goes without saying, then, that whoever questions the authority of the true faith also contests the right of the nations that hold this faith to rule over him- contests, in short, their title to his land.”
> “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.”
> “Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.”
> “We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement.”
> “It was the kind of encounter one watches with a smile simply because it is so rare that people enjoy one another.”
> Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color. And this leads, imperceptibly but inevitably, to a state of mind in which , having long ago learned to expect the worst, one finds it very easy to believe the worst.”
> “In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems.”
> “Time and time and time again, the people discover that they have merely betrayed themselves into the hands of yet another Pharaoh, who since he was necessary to put the broken country together, will not let them go.”
> “It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate."
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
fast-paced
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
fast-paced
challenging
hopeful
reflective
fast-paced
God bless james baldwin
Written in 1962 and sadly still eerily relevant in 2016.