If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

Baldwin writes this near the close of his 1963 book-length essay on American race relations, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Addressing the moral and political urgency of dismantling white supremacy, he warns that postponing justice risks catastrophic consequences for the nation as a whole. The line invokes a Black spiritual (“Mary Don’t You Weep”) that reworks the biblical covenant after the Flood (“Noah and the rainbow sign”) into an apocalyptic warning: if America refuses to change, the next judgment will not be water but fire. Baldwin uses the song—“re-created from the Bible in song by a slave”—to emphasize how enslaved people transformed scripture into prophecy and critique of American hypocrisy.

The sentence frames racial justice as a decisive, present-tense choice: either Americans “dare everything” to remake society, or they invite a violent reckoning. By pairing “prophecy” with a slave’s song, Baldwin suggests that the deepest truths about America’s future have long been voiced from the underside of history—by those forced to read the nation’s promises against its brutal realities. “The fire next time” functions both as biblical imagery of judgment and as a political metaphor for social conflagration. Baldwin’s warning is not fatalistic; it is conditional. The catastrophe he names is avoidable, but only through courageous, immediate transformation rather than gradualism or denial.