The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

《正常人》里提到这本书。决定找来读一读。也算从虚构类读物中暂时解脱出来吧。James Baldwin在美国种族和民权史上，可以说是举足轻重。最近他的小说If Beale Street Could Talk被搬上银幕。书和电影都没看，但我读过他的Go Tell It on the Mountain。

powerful stuff:

“God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water, the fire next time!”

MY DUNGEON SHOOK
Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation

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 reality 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 great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

DOWN AT THE CROSS
Letter from a Region in My Mind

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!