The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race

by Jesmyn Ward

Overview

A surprise New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race—collected by National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation—are “thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful. The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify” (USA TODAY).

In this bestselling, widely lauded collection, Jesmyn Ward gathers our most original thinkers and writers to speak on contemporary racism and race, including Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Young, Claudia Rankine, and Honoree Jeffers. “An absolutely indispensable anthology” (Booklist, starred review), The Fire This Time shines a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestles with our current predicament, and imagines a better future.

Envisioned as a response to The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin’s groundbreaking 1963 essay collection, these contemporary writers reflect on the past, present, and future of race in America. We’ve made significant progress in the fifty-odd years since Baldwin’s essays were published, but America is a long and painful distance away from a “post-racial society”—a truth we must confront if we are to continue to work towards change. Baldwin’s “fire next time” is now upon us, and it needs to be talked about; The Fire This Time “seeks to place the shock of our own times into historical context and, most importantly, to move these times forward” (Vogue).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501126352
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	06/20/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	55,243
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1230L (what's this?)

About the Author

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, and the Strauss Living Prize. She is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.

Table of Contents

"The Tradition" Jericho Brown 1

Introduction Jesmyn Ward 3

Part I Legacy

Homegoing, AD Kima Jones 15

The Weight Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah 19

Lonely in America Wendy S. Walters 33

Where Do We Go from Here? Isabel Wilkerson 59

"The Dear Pledges of Our Love": A Defense of Phillis Wheatley's Husband Honorée Fanonne Jeffers 63

White Rage Carol Anderson 83

Cracking the Code Jesmyn Ward 89

Part II Reckoning

Queries of Unrest Clint Smith 99

Blacker Than Thou Kevin Young 101

Da Art of Storytellin' (a Prequel) Kiese Laymon 117

Black and Blue Garnette Cadogan 129

The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning Claudia Rankine 145

Know Your Rights! Emily Raboteau 157

Composite Pops Mitchell S. Jackson 179

Part III Jubilee

Theories of Time and Space Natasha Trethewey 195

This Far: Notes on Love and Revolution Daniel José Older 197

Message to My Daughters Edwidge Danticat 205

Acknowledgments 217

Contributors 219

Permissions 225

Editorial Reviews

…powerful…There are five excellent reasons to buy this book: The essays by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Carol Anderson, Kevin Young, Garnette Cadogan and Ms. Ward. Each is so alive with purpose, conviction and intellect that, upon finishing their contributions, you feel you must put this volume down and go walk around for a while…The poet Gwendolyn Brooks once asked, "Are there ways, is there any way, to make English words speak blackly?" This potent…anthology…answers in the ringing affirmative.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

…a stirring anthology that takes more cues from Baldwin than just its title. Inspired by the chronological structure of the two sections of The Fire Next Time, Ward organizes the poems, columns, essays and other ruminations in this collection into three sections confronting the past, present and future of blackness in America. I say blackness more than race or racism; the anthology cannot avoid these last two uglier constructions, but the joy and pain of existing while black is what's celebrated here. That is to the credit of Ward, and the writers (like Edwidge Danticat, Kiese Laymon and Isabel Wilkerson) whose works she arranges in this volume…The pain of black life (and death) often inspires flowery verse, but every poem and essay in Ward's volume remains grounded in a harsh reality that our nation, at large, refuses fully to confront. In the spirit of Baldwin's centering of black experiences, they force everyone to see things our way.

The New York Times Book Review - Jamil Smith

★ 06/06/2016
In this timely collection of essays and poems, Ward (Men We Reaped) gathers the voices of a new generation whose essays work together as one to present a kaleidoscopic performance of race in America. The 18 contributions (10 of which were written specifically for this collection) cover topics deep in history as well as those in the current culture. One, for example, reveals fresh insight about Phillis Wheatley, the first published African-American poet, and her husband, while other essays are situated in the present, taking readers on a tour of street murals in N.Y.C. and exploring the music of hip-hop duo OutKast. One entry evokes the experience of a young college student exploring the streets of a new city as he learns “what no one had told me was that I was the one who would be considered a threat.” Over the course of the collection, readers engage with the challenge of white rage, and learn about the painful links between Emmet Till’s open casket and the black bodies on today’s streets. The two concluding pieces provide a profoundly moving view of the future deeply affected by the past, through a husband’s letter to his expectant wife, followed by a mother’s message to her daughters. Ward’s remarkable achievement is the gift of freshly minted perspectives on a tale that may seem old and twice-told. Readers in search of conversations about race in America should start here. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] stirring anthology that takes more cues from Baldwin than just its title ... every poem and essay in Ward’s volume remains grounded in a harsh reality that our nation, at large, refuses fully to confront."
—The New York Times Book Review

"[A] powerful book ... alive with purpose, conviction and intellect."
—The New York Times

"With this gorgeous chorus — Ward has done the same [as her ancestors]: she has created a world, a space, the one she, herself, was seeking. A new type of belonging, a new place to belong, is exactly what she has given us."
—L.A. Review of Books

"[W]hat The Fire This Time does best is to affirm the power of literature and its capacity for reflection and imagination, to collectively acknowledge the need for a much larger conversation, to understand these split-second actions in present, past, and future tense, the way that stories impel us to do. This is a book that seeks to place the shock of our own times into historical context and, most importantly, to move these times forward."
—Vogue

"The Fire This Time is a powerful, rewarding read that gets to the heart of what it means to be black in America today."
—The Root

“A half century ago James Baldwin, the prophet in the American wilderness, delivered The Fire Next Time—as complex a reckoning with race, morality and human nature as we have seen. Jesmyn Ward has pulled together in this collection you now hold the incisive, sage, angry and deeply complex voices of a new generation, responding to many of the same questions that confronted us in 1963. To Baldwin's call we now have a choral response—one that should be read by every one of us committed to the cause of equality and freedom.”
—Jelani Cobb, historian

“In 1963, we were poised on a precipice, intellectually, spiritually, politically primed for the change we knew had to come. Now, some half-century later, we are again at the precipice. We are dismayed and disheartened to find ourselves here, aghast that the rules and players have changed but the game, somehow, is the same. What do we do, this post-Civil Rights generation, in the face of the same injustice, dressed in different clothes, coded in different laws? In The Fire This Time, a new generation of black writers speak with the ‘fierce urgency of now.’”
—Ayana Mathis, novelist

“Fires destroy things…burns them up…makes ashes for us all…But fires also keep us warm…give us a glow to sit by…to tell ancestry stories to the children against the rhythmic crackle of history…to make love to against the glow. The generation of segregations gave us The Fire Next Time…we broke down those walls…The generation after segregation gives us the water to mix with the ashes to build…something…anything all…in the words of Margaret Walker…our own. This is a book to pick up and tuck under our hearts to see what we can build.”
—Nikki Giovanni, poet

"Timely contributions to an urgent national conversation."
—Kirkus Reviews

"An absolutely indispensable anthology."
—Booklist (starred review)

"Ward's remarkable achievement is the gift of freshly minted perspectives on a tale that may seem old and twice-told. Readers in search of conversations about race in America should start here."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Groundbreaking."
—Library Journal

From the Publisher

06/15/2016
Using James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time as inspiration, this collection by National Book Award winner Ward (English, Tulane Univ.; Salvage the Bones) explores what it means to be black in America, past and present. A stellar cast of writers and poets ruminate on contemporary events such as the racially motivated church shooting in Charleston, SC, in 2015. Especially enlightening is the excerpt from Carol Anderson's White Rage, noting white backlash to Brown v. Board of Education. Novelist Edwidge Danticat parallels black mourning today to the events of the 1999 Amadou Diallo case, wondering how to explain injustice to her children. Poet Claudia Rankine describes the anxiety that mothers of black sons face, while cultural critic Garnette Cadogan relays the danger of walking as a black man (no hoodies or standing on street corners). Writer Kiese Layman mesmerizes with a reflection of hip hop duo Outkast, and Mitchell S. Jackson eloquently narrates the father figures in his life. Many black families will relate as Ward laments the difficulties of constructing a family tree or Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah's experience as the sole employee of color. VERDICT This relevant anthology illuminates the fears, hopes, and joys of blackness and will spark interest in the contributors' previous works. [See Prepub Alert, 2/8/16.]—Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

Library Journal

2016-05-02
Poets, scholars, and essayists reflect on race in America.In this insightful collection, novelist and memoirist Ward (Creative Writing/Tulane Univ.; Men We Reaped: A Memoir, 2013, etc.) brings together 18 writers "to dissent, to call for account, to witness, to reckon." Taking her title from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), Ward hopes this book will offer solace and hope to a new generation of readers, just as Baldwin's work did for her. Many essays respond to racial violence, invoking the tragedies of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sarah Bland, worshipers at Charleston's Emanuel Church, and Abner Louima, among many others. Edwidge Danticat reports that she asked Louima recently how it feels each time he hears that a black person was killed by police. "It reminds me that our lives mean nothing," he told her. As other parents reveal in their essays, Danticat feels she must have two conversations with her daughters: "one about why we're here and the other about why it's not always a promised land for people who look like us." She wishes, instead, to assure them "they can overcome everything, if they are courageous, resilient, and brave." Poet Claudia Rankine was told by the mother of a black son, "the condition of black life is one of mourning." Besides fear for their children's futures, some writers focus on their black identity. As a result of genetic testing, Ward discovered that her ancestry was 40 percent European, a result that she found "discomfiting." "For a few days after I received my results," she writes, "I looked into the mirror and didn't know how to understand myself." Wendy Walters resisted thinking about slavery until the discovery of long-buried slaves in New Hampshire provoked her to research the past. Poet Kevin Young shrewdly probes NAACP leader Rachel Dolezal's motives to pass as black. Carol Anderson, Emily Raboteau, Natasha Trethewey, and others also add useful essays to this important collection. Timely contributions to an urgent national conversation.

Kirkus Reviews