James Baldwin's "Down on the Cross": Race, Identity, and Alienation

Introduction: Baldwin's Long Road to The Fire Next Time

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." — James Baldwin

The now-flourishing talent of James Baldwin had no easy birth, and he did not emerge overnight, as some of his new discoverers would have you believe. For years this talent was in incubation in the ghetto of Harlem, before he went to Europe nearly a decade ago in an attempt to discover the United States and how he and his people relate to it. The book in which that discovery is portrayed, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963), is a continuation of his search for place and definition.

The hardships of that search were recently described by Sterling Stuckey, Chairman of the Committee of Negro Culture and History:

The tragedy of the American Negro is born of the twin evils of the slave experience and varying patterns of segregation, supported by law and custom, that have been nationwide in dimension for a century. The consequences of the Negro's quasi-freedom, unfolded against a grim backdrop of two and a half centuries of slavery, have been no less destructive to his spiritual world — his hierarchy of values and his image of himself — than to his everyday world of work.

James Baldwin's essay "Down on the Cross" opens up an entirely new world to most readers. It opens the reader to the harsh world of a Black boy growing into a man in the poor city slums and all of the issues that a Black man has to face. This essay does more for the reader than any article published about Black life in poor urban communities in terms of direct exposure. The reason it has this power lies in how Baldwin wrote it. He was able to express all of himself through the essay form combined with a storytelling technique. Together these two approaches form a meditation on what Blackness means in America.

Racial Alienation and the Illusion of Freedom

This quasi-freedom of the Negro is often more humiliating than slavery and more difficult to fight, because it gives Black Americans the illusion of freedom while denying them the fact. Thus the Negro continues an alien status in a country where his people have lived for more than three hundred years. The Fire Next Time, like most of Baldwin's writings, is about this alienation.

In this essay, light is shed on the relationship between Black and white Americans. Baldwin discusses throughout the idea that to be successful in the world as it exists, one must navigate a white world. This creates a painful bind: Black people who want to succeed find themselves confronted by a white society unwilling to fully accept them. Baldwin deconstructs the myths surrounding Blackness in America and raises the possibility that Black people are required to accept white Americans on terms that are not reciprocated. Even so, he is not anti-white. He understands that one day whites and Black people will have to come together and live as one in order for all to succeed as a whole.

Blackness, Dignity, and the Black Muslims

The long essay "Down at the Cross" is brilliantly written. In essence, it consists of Baldwin's reflections on growing up in Harlem and on how that ghetto upbringing influenced him. Baldwin's evaluation of the Black Muslims and their leader, Elijah Muhammad, tells us more about the author than about his subject. As a guest in the home of Muhammad, he seems to have vacillated between personal attraction and ideological estrangement. He speaks of his host as follows:

I felt that I was back in my father's house — as indeed, in a way, I was — and I told Elijah that I did not care if white and Black people married, and that I had many white friends. I would have no choice, if it came to it, but to perish with them, for (I said to myself, but not to Elijah) "I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn't love more important than color?"

But the people in control of the power structure of the United States have already answered Baldwin's question in the negative. This answer is one of the main reasons for the existence of the Black Muslims, for in spite of all that can justifiably be said against them, they have found what most Black Americans are still searching for — a way of reclaiming their dignity as human beings.