From an old slave song - "God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time."

I very much enjoy reading a book that can point to areas of blindness in our minds, causing a leap of enlightenment that forever changes our perceptions of people and things.

James Baldwin's book "The Fire Next Time" may date back to 1963 but the message it delivered to the world is just as current today as it was then. It begins as an autobiographical ramble about his early life and growing up in Harlem written so magnetically that the reader is willing to go wherever the ramble takes them. He divulges with forceful clarity the contents of the hearts and minds of Negroes, their fears, their hopes, their love for each other and their attempts to somehow reconcile the disastrous position that God has placed them in with the wholesome values of Christianity. Baldwin was disinclined to condemn white people but rather to pity them as morally inferior fools. He saw his fellow Negroes as being rendered morally superior for the suffering they have endured.

James Baldwin opened the eyes of white people not only to the suffering of Negroes but also to their own blindness. It is easy to see someone suffer from a distance and agree that they are suffering. But after being invited to intimately share someone's innermost thoughts you come to realise just how much of the humanism of other people your mind is blanking out, almost to the point of seeing them as mere pictures.

It is a strange quirk of human nature that although a great many people can tell the world a particular thing, only a few individuals have the special gift of being able to tell it in a such way that it blasts through the complacency of the masses to touch people's consciences gently enough to stir their sympathies without alienating them in the process.

This author had that gift. His narrations enabled white people to mentally experience for themselves the horrors of prejudice against the American Negroes and truly understand their attitudes and actions in attempting to survive against the odds. It is, for example, easy to mock the religious fervor of black congregations until your mind is fully awakened to the desperation for hope that propels the worshipers. The author's description of his interview with Elijah Muhammad is similarly enlightening as to the beliefs and ideals that drove the rise of Islam among sections of the black population.

"Deep and powerful understanding" would be the catch-phrase of this book. That is what the author possessed. That is what he passes with amazing ease to the reader, who is given a unique opportunity to actually live for themselves the life of Negroes in Harlem. That is the sort of experience that meaningful change is born from.

Some quotes from the book:

"You know, and I know, that this country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon."

"In spite of the Puritan-Yankee equation of virtue with well-being, Negroes had excellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by any striking adherence to the Christian virtues; it certainly didn’t work that way for black Christians."