112 pages • 3-hour read
The Fire This Time
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Reading Questions & Paired Texts
Reading Check and Short Answer Questions on key points are designed for guided reading assignments, in-class review, formative assessment, quizzes, and more.
“THE TRADITION” BY JERICHO BROWN
Reading Check
1. What type of plant does Brown reference in his poem?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What does Brown list in the last line of the poem, and how does the use of italics connect this line to other parts of the poem?
Paired Resource
- This poem by Ross Gay explores the life and death of Eric Garner, who was killed at the hands of police officers in New York City during an arrest.
- This poem connects to the theme of Remembrance and Recognition.
- This poem shares a similar message and theme as “The Tradition” by Jericho Brown. How does Gay’s poem help supplement Brown’s? What is significant about the shared plant imagery in both?
INTRODUCTION BY JESMYN WARD
Reading Check
1. What Baldwin essay did Ward read when she was in her twenties?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. How many essays did Ward receive that concerned themselves with the future, and what message did they convey to Ward?
“HOMEGOING, AD” BY KIMA JONES
Reading Check
1. In “Homegoing, AD,” for which family member’s funeral is the narrator traveling home?
“THE WEIGHT” BY RACHEL KAADZI GHANSAH
Reading Check
1. To which of her relatives does Ghansah compare James Baldwin in “The Weight”?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Where does the narrator travel in “The Weight,” why does she make this trip, and how does she feel about it?
“LONELY IN AMERICA” BY WENDY S. WALTERS
Reading Check
1. What is significant about the city of Portsmouth, NH in “Lonely in America”?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. How does Walters describe her “cultural memory” of slavery, and why does she dislike thinking about it?
Paired Resource
- This story from WYSO, an NPR-affiliate radio station in the Miami Valley of Ohio, describes the history of Fortune, an enslaved man whose skeleton was used after his death for anatomy lessons by his enslaver. Poet Marilyn Nelson wrote a book-in-verse called Fortune’s Bones: A Manumission Requiem, and this article was written to comment on the performance of composer Ysea Barnwell’s musical rendition of Nelson’s poetry. The audio is available along with the printed text.
- This resource connects to the theme of Remembrance and Recognition.
- Fortune’s Bones imagines Fortune’s life and the human impact his death had on his loved ones. Nelson’s poetry is a way of honoring the humanity of this long-anonymous skeleton. The essay “Lonely in America” also reflects on Black bodies after death and the ways in which they are erased from time and cultural memory. Compare Walters’ essay with Nelson’s poetry on the audio link. How do both address the theme of Remembrance and Recognition?
“WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE” BY ISABEL WILKERSON
Reading Check
1. What period of time do historians refer to as the Nadir, according to Wilkerson’s essay?
“‘THE DEAR PLEDGES OF OUR LOVE’: A DEFENSE OF PHILLIS WHEATLEY’S HUSBAND” BY HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS
Reading Check
1. How old was Phillis Wheatley said to be when she arrived in America as an enslaved child?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Who was Margaretta Matilda Odell, and what is her significance in present-day understanding of Phillis Wheatley?
“WHITE RAGE” BY CAROL ANDERSON
Reading Check
1. Who was belatedly credited with the 1981 interview describing the evolution concerning racist politics?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. According to Anderson, how does white rage differ from Black rage, and what does this distinction show about racism in America?
“CRACKING THE CODE” BY JESMYN WARD
Reading Check
1. Who does Ward mistake as a white woman in her essay “Cracking the Code”?
“QUERIES OF UNREST” BY CLINT SMITH
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What does a white boy call the speaker of “Queries of Unrest,” and what does that make the speaker think of?
“BLACKER THAN THOU” BY KEVIN YOUNG
Reading Check
1. What song did President Obama sing at the funeral for those killed at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What is the white woman’s name who is at the center of Young’s essay “Blacker Than Thou,” and what is her connection to race and racism?
Paired Resource
“Why Rachel Dolezal Can Never Be Black”
- This article from NPR’s “Code Switch” reflects on Rachel Dolezal and what her story shows about race and white privilege.
- This article connects to the theme of Grief: A Private Pain, A Public Protest.
- How does this article supplement some of what Kevin Young comments on in his essay “Blacker Than Thou”? Consider that the author of the NPR article is a Black woman who has written about parenting Black children–does this help connect Young’s essay with any others in the collection?
“DA ART OF STORYTELLIN’ (A PREQUEL)” BY KIESE LAYMON
Reading Check
1. What band, discovered by Laymon as a young adult, helps him understand his grandmother better?
“BLACK AND BLUE” BY GARNETTE CADOGAN
Reading Check
1. What three cities are at the center of Cadogan’s essay “Black and Blue”?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What prevents Cadogan from returning to New Orleans after traveling back to Kingston for his grandmother’s funeral, and where does he relocate instead?
“THE CONDITION OF BLACK LIFE IS ONE OF MOURNING” BY CLAUDIA RANKINE
Reading Check
1. What significant tragedy that further propelled the Civil Rights Movement occurred just days after Rankine’s birth?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What decision did Mamie Till Mobley make about her son Emmett Till’s body after his murder, and what symbolism did this choice hold?
“KNOW YOUR RIGHTS!” BY EMILY RABOTEAU
Reading Check
1. What poet defined hope as “the thing with feathers”?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. In “Know Your Rights!,” how does Raboteau’s four-year-old son respond to nearing the stairs to the bridge, and what worries Raboteau about his reaction?
“COMPOSITE POPS” BY MITCHELL S. JACKSON
Reading Check
1. What does the term “pops” signify to Jackson?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Where was Jackson when his first composite father Big Chris died, and what about Big Chris’s death confirmed the bond that Jackson had with this particular father figure?
Paired Resource
- This poem by Langston Hughes was originally published as an untitled addition to Hughes’s column in The Chicago Defender in October of 1955, after Emmett Till’s death. Hughes was the first major Black writer to respond in writing to Till’s murder.
- This poem connects to the theme of Grief: A Private Pain, A Public Protest.
- Emmett Till is present in many of the anthology’s essays. How does Hughes’s poem express many of the same emotions felt by various authors in The Fire This Time, both in relation to Till directly as well as other Black men?
“THEORIES OF TIME AND SPACE” BY NATASHA TRETHEWEY
Reading Check
1. In “Theories of Time and Space,” what will be waiting for the subject of the poem upon return to Ship Island?
“THIS FAR: NOTES ON LOVE AND REVOLUTION” BY DANIEL JOSÉ OLDER
Reading Check
1. To whom is the epistolary essay “This Far: Notes on Love and Revolution” addressed?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What word does Older express mistrust for, and why does he feel this way?
“MESSAGE TO MY DAUGHTERS” BY EDWIDGE DANTICAT
Reading Check
1. Of what specific demographic group does attorney and professor Raja Jorjani argue that Black Americans could qualify as members?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What conversation does Danticat consider having with her daughters, and why hasn’t she started that conversation yet?
Recommended Next Reads
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
- The Fire Next Time is a nonfiction work that contains two essays: “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind.” Published in 1963, the book discusses the role of race and racism in America through an epistolary essay to Baldwin’s nephew and an exploration of his own experience with race and religion.
- Shared themes include Grief: A Private Pain, A Public Protest and Finding Hope In Heritage.
- Shared topics include coming of age as a young Black person in America, familial relationships, the legacy of slavery, and the transformative power of hope.
- The Fire Next Time on SuperSummary
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Between the World and Me was published in 2015 and takes the form of a letter written from Coates to his teenage son, inspired by James Baldwin’s epistolary text The Fire Next Time. The book centers on the Black male experience in America and the racial violence that is woven into the social fabric.
- Shared themes include Remembrance and Recognition and Finding Hope in Heritage.
- Shared topics include the vulnerability of the Black body in America, race and racism, the role of the past, and the legacy passed down from both family and society.
- Between the World and Me on SuperSummary
Reading Questions Answer Key
“THE TRADITION” BY JERICHO BROWN
Reading Check
1. Flowers
Short Answer
1. Brown lists the names of Black men who have been killed by police officers (John Crawford, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown), and the use of italics connects these men to the flowers he lists earlier in the poem.
INTRODUCTION BY JESMYN WARD
Reading Check
1. “Notes of a Native Son”
Short Answer
1. Ward received only three essays that were future-oriented; the rest were focused on the past or the present. This showed Ward how intertwined the past is with the present, and it also spoke to how difficult it is to consider the realities likely facing younger Black children in their own futures.
“HOMEGOING, AD” BY KIMA JONES
Reading Check
1. Their grandfather’s
“THE WEIGHT” BY RACHEL KAADZI GHANSAH
Reading Check
1. Her grandfather
Short Answer
1. She travels to the Cote d’Azur region of France to visit the home in which James Baldwin was living when he died. She feels uncertain about this trip because she has complicated feelings about Baldwin.
“LONELY IN AMERICA” BY WENDY S. WALTERS
Reading Check
1. It contains a recovered African American burial site.
Short Answer
1. Walters describes her “cultural memory” of slavery as being a mainly Southern phenomenon, and she doesn’t like thinking about it because she doesn’t want to consider how slavery was present in her own geographic community.
“WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE” BY ISABEL WILKERSON
Reading Check
1. The period of time that reversed Black advancement after Reconstruction
“‘THE DEAR PLEDGES OF OUR LOVE’: A DEFENSE OF PHILLIS WHEATLEY’S HUSBAND” BY HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS
Reading Check
1. She was thought to be about seven years old.
Short Answer
1. Odell was a self-described “collateral descendent” of the Wheatleys, and much of what has been used to piece together Phillis Wheatley’s life has been filtered through Odell’s own words.
“WHITE RAGE” BY CAROL ANDERSON
Reading Check
1. Lee Atwater, Reagan’s key political strategist
Short Answer
1. Unlike overt protest and looting, white rage is more unnoticed and insidious. It takes the shape of redlining or voter suppression, or the nuances of the criminal justice system. This distinction reinforces institutional racism and the power dynamic between white and Black Americans.
“CRACKING THE CODE” BY JESMYN WARD
Reading Check
1. Her great-aunt Eunice
“QUERIES OF UNREST” BY CLINT SMITH
Short Answer
1. The speaker is referred to as marginalized, and this makes him think of the edge of a sheet of paper and other things that exist on the margins.
“BLACKER THAN THOU” BY KEVIN YOUNG
Reading Check
1. “Amazing Grace”
Short Answer
1. The woman’s name is Rachel Dolezal, and she is a white woman who passed as Black for many years, which connects to complicated racial concepts like white privilege, passing, and “blackface.”
“DA ART OF STORYTELLIN’ (A PREQUEL)” BY KIESE LAYMON
Reading Check
1. OutKast
“BLACK AND BLUE” BY GARNETTE CADOGAN
Reading Check
1. Kingston, New Orleans, and New York City
Short Answer
1. Hurricane Katrina prevents Cadogan from returning to New Orleans, so he goes to stay with an aunt in New York City.
“THE CONDITION OF BLACK LIFE IS ONE OF MOURNING” BY CLAUDIA RANKINE
Reading Check
1. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young Black girls
Short Answer
1. Mamie Till Mobley chose to have an open-casket funeral, where the funeral goers and media would have to look upon her son’s mutilated body. In doing so, she remade his body as evidence of the crimes perpetrated against Black people, and her public grief used “the lynching tradition against itself.”
“KNOW YOUR RIGHTS!” BY EMILY RABOTEAU
Reading Check
1. Emily Dickinson
Short Answer
1. He refuses to walk down the stairs, instead laying on the pavement in defiance. While this behavior is frustrating in a child, it was particularly disturbing to Raboteau because “that defiance could get him killed” in a world where being a defiant Black man is dangerous.
“COMPOSITE POPS” BY MITCHELL S. JACKSON
Reading Check
1. The collection of father-like figures who have influenced him
Short Answer
1. Jackson was on a plane en route to say goodbye to Big Chris when he died. Big Chris’s last words, expressing his desire to hold on until Jackson arrived, confirmed the bond that the two had; Big Chris viewed Jackson as one of his own sons, despite biology.
“THEORIES OF TIME AND SPACE” BY NATASHA TRETHEWEY
Reading Check
1. A photograph of the subject
“THIS FAR: NOTES ON LOVE AND REVOLUTION” BY DANIEL JOSÉ OLDER
Reading Check
1. Natassian, the author’s wife
Short Answer
1. Older mistrusts the word revolution, because he has seen revolutions go wrong; he also feels that when words become overused, as revolution has, they lose meaning.
“MESSAGE TO MY DAUGHTERS” BY EDWIDGE DANTICAT
Reading Check
1. She says they could qualify as refugees.
Short Answer
1. Danticat wonders when she should tell her daughters about the abuse that their family friend Abner Louima faced at the hands of police. She hasn’t yet had the conversation because, not only is it a difficult one, but she also doesn’t want her daughters to grow up fearful of the world in which they live.
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