The Fire Next Time: List 1

by James Baldwin
In this classic essay, James Baldwin reflects on his youthful experiences and probes America's history of racial injustice.

This list covers pages 3–30 of the 1993 Vintage edition.

Here are links to our lists for the book: List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4
15 words 677 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. truculent
    defiantly aggressive
    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.
  2. mediocrity
    ordinariness as a consequence of being average
    You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.
  3. integration
    incorporating a racial or religious group into a community
    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.
  4. upheaval
    a violent disturbance
    Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.
  5. unassailable
    impossible to attack
    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.
  6. depraved
    deviating from what is considered moral or right or proper
    Owing to the way I had been raised, the abrupt discomfort that all this aroused in me and the fact that I had no idea what my voice or my mind or my body was likely to do next caused me to consider myself one of the most depraved people on earth.
  7. manifest
    reveal its presence or make an appearance
    They began to manifest a curious and really rather terrifying single-mindedness.
  8. implacable
    incapable of being appeased or pacified
    It is hard to say exactly how this was conveyed: something implacable in the set of the lips, something farseeing (seeing what?) in the eyes, some new and crushing determination in the walk, something peremptory in the voice.
  9. reprimand
    rebuke formally
    They did not tease us, the boys, any more; they reprimanded us sharply, saying, "You better be thinking about your soul!”
  10. wary
    openly distrustful and unwilling to confide
    And I began to feel in the boys a curious, wary, bewildered despair, as though they were now settling in for the long, hard winter of life.
  11. incessant
    uninterrupted in time and indefinitely long continuing
    One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one’s situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long.
  12. gratuitous
    unnecessary and unwarranted
    One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one’s situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger one encountered every working day, all day long.
  13. tenuous
    lacking substance or significance
    It turned out, then, that summer, that the moral barriers that I had supposed to exist between me and the dangers of a criminal career were so tenuous as to be nearly nonexistent.
  14. inexorable
    impossible to prevent, resist, or stop
    Every effort made by the child’s elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment.
  15. exhort
    urge or force in an indicated direction
    And this filters into the child’s consciousness through his parents’ tone of voice as he is being exhorted, punished, or loved; in the sudden, uncontrollable note of fear heard in his mother’s or his father’s voice when he has strayed beyond some particular boundary.
Created on Fri Oct 25 09:33:46 EDT 2019 (updated Fri Aug 08 13:48:45 EDT 2025)

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