Randall Kenan. Photo by Mark Derewicz; ©2008 Endeavors.
Beyond Baldwin’s Fire
For author Randall Kenan, today’s racial conflicts are more cultural than moral.
by Mark Derewicz
(filed under: language & literature)
The Fire This Time. By Randall Kenan. Melville House Publishing, 149 pages, $20.
When I read James Baldwin’s gritty 1963 memoir The Fire Next Time, I wondered if it was truly meant for someone like me, a middle-class kid from lily-white suburbia. It made me sweat.
Today as I read Randall Kenan’s memoir and essay The Fire This Time, I know his words are meant for eyes like mine. We now live in a country that might elect a black president. We live in Oprah Winfrey’s America. People get fired for slinging racial slurs. Universities, once segregated, now help poorer minority students attend college. But life along the color line is far from perfect.
The titles of both books refer to an ominous prophecy that a black slave wrote and sang — God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water; the fire next time!
Baldwin wrote honestly about what it meant to grow up black in Harlem, what it meant to be black in mid-twentieth-century white America. The struggles were many, but he saw hope and beauty in people black and white — even though he knew racism will die hard, if it ever will.
Kenan’s The Fire This Time takes a direct cue from Baldwin’s best-seller, telling stories of life in the United States and what race means here today. But Kenan’s book is different. It has to be, because no matter how much remains the same, so much has changed.
The Civil Rights Movement was a moral crusade, a fight for equality before the law. Kenan says we revere Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks because their cause was based on what was morally correct.
But today, race as an issue is more about culture than it is morality, Kenan says.
“Once the morality is removed,” he writes, “we are left with a not-so-easily defined struggle. Race, as a rallying cry, as something over which to politically bond, at once loses its potency and is transformed into something unnecessary, even ugly; an excuse, something one should not be preoccupied with.”
From Hurricane Katrina to the violent, sexist music staking its claim to the rhythm and blues and hip-hop traditions, the fires along the racial divide come in varied forms this time.
Yet Kenan’s book is much more than a treatise on our problematic race relations; it weaves in history with culture and personal stories like Baldwin used to do. It didn’t make me sweat as much as it made me appreciate the depth of what it means — and could mean — to be an American.
Randall Kenan is an associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences.
