JAMES BALDWIN: MY Dungeon Shook
The 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation was ambiguously
observed in the United States. Some Negroes and many whites marked the
date January 1, 1963 as of vast importance in American history, and paid
homage to the men mainly one man, Abraham Lincoln who a century before had
stated officially, and for the first time, that slavery was not only
immoral but also illegal. Others were not in a celebrating mood. One of
them was the noted Negro novelist James Baldwin, who may have summed up
the feelings of a large number of Americans, both white and black, in the
remark "You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred
years of freedom one hundred years too soon. " The remark closed a letter
that Baldwin wrote to his nephew and published in December 1962. The
letter, slightly revised, appeared in a collection of essays published the
following year.
Source The Fire Next Time, New York, 1963.
Dear James
I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep
seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother.
Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody with a very definite
tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you are soft.
You may be like your grandfather in this, I don't know, but certainly both
you and your father resemble him very much physically. Well, he is dead,
he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before
he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white
people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy.
I am sure that your father has told you something about all that. Neither
you nor your father exhibit any tendency towards holiness you really are
of another era, part of what happened when the Negro left the land and
came into what the late E. Franklin Frazier called "the cities of
destruction." You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are
what the white world calls a nigger. I tell you this because I love you,
and please don't you ever forget it.
I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my
arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to
walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that far back; if you've
loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a
man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort
Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's
face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other
faces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does
not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present
laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember him falling
down the cellar steps, and howling, and I remember, with pain, his tears,
which my hand or your grandmother's so easily wiped away. But no one's
hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears
in his laughter and in his speech
and in his songs. I know what the world has done to my brother and how
narrowly
he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime
of which
I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time
nor history
will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are
destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not
want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and
philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of
mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most
of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the
authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which
constitutes the crlme.
Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well-meaning people, your
countrymen,
have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from
those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a
hundred years ago. (I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, "No!
This is not true! How bitter you are!"but I am writing this letter to you,
to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do
not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions under which you
were born, for I was there. Your countrymen were not there, and haven't
made it yet. Your grandmother was also there, and no one has ever accused
her of being bitter. I suggest that the innocents check with her. She
isn't hard to find Your countrymen don't know that she exists, either,
though she has been working for them all their lives.)
Well, you were born, here you came, something like fourteen years ago; and
though your father and mother and grandmother, looking about the streets
through
which they were carrying you, staring at the walls into which they brought
you, had every reason to be heavyhearted, yet they were not. For here you
were, Big James,
named for me you were a big baby, I was nothere you were to be loved. To
be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the
loveless
world. Remember that I know how black it looks today, for you. It looked
bad that
day, too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but
if we had
not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must
survive be- cause we love you, and for the sake of your children and your
children's children.
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it
intended that
you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the
heart of the
matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born
where
you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black
and for
no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be
set forever. You
were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as
many ways as
possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to
aspire to
excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you
have
turned, James. in your short time on this earth, you have been told where
you could
go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could
live and
whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about
this,
and I hear them saying, "You exaggerate." They do not know Harlem, and I
do. So
do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine but trust your
experi-
ence. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really
no limit to
where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been
deliberately con-
structed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try
to remem-
ber that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to
endure, does not
testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.
Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about
your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words
acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become
like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent
assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old
buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You
must accept them and accept them with love. Bor these innocent people have
no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they
do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released
from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable
reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed,
know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to
act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is
to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white
Americans, is the loss of their identity.
Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the
sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it
is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying
because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well,
the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as
an immovable pillar and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are
shaken to their foundations. You, don't be afraid. I said that it was
intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being
allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never being allowed
to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this
intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who
believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of
reality.
But these men are your brothersyour
lost, younger brothers. And if the word in-
tegration means anything, this is what it
means that we, with love, shall force our
brothers to see themselves as they are, to
Try to imagine how you would feel if
you woke up one morning to find the sun
shining and all the stars aflame. You would
be frightened because it is out of the order
of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is
terrifying because it so profoundly attacks
one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the
black man has functioned in the white
man's world as a fixed star, as an immov-
able pillar and as he moves out of his
place, heaven and earth are shaken to their
foundations. You, don't be afraid. I said
that it was intended that you should perish
in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed
to go behind the white man's definitions,
by never being allowed to spell your proper
name. You have, and many of us have, de-
feated this intention; and, by a terrible law,
a terrible paradox, those innocents who be-
lieved that your imprisonment made them
safe are losing their grasp of reality.
But these men are your brothersyour
lost, younger brothers. And if the word in-
tegration 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. ~or 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 terri-
fying odds, achleved an unassailable and
monumental dignity. You come from a long
line of great poets, some of the greatest po_
ets since Homer. One of them said, The
very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon
shook and my chains fell of J:
You know, and I know, that the country
is celebrating one hundred years of freedom
one hundred years too soon. We cannot be
free until they are free. God bless you,
James, and Godspeed.