For the eve of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, this past weekend, white supremacists had scheduled a vigil. Their procession took them across the University of Virginia’s campus to a slippery symbol: a statue of the slaveowner and President Thomas Jefferson. They carried lit tiki torches—the kind of kitsch party accessory you might buy at Costco. (At home, swarmed by live feeds, we remarked at the adaptability of hate, how quickly it becomes identified with the most innocuous objects.) The supremacists’ chant was “Blood and soil,” but they also meant fire, in the old zealous sense. Students had decided to counter-protest. When a group of them was captured by overhead cameras, it appeared as a small and dark void. It was the awful brightness of the marchers who surrounded them at the feet of the monument that illuminated the banner the students held: “VA Students Act Against White Supremacy.”

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The next day, for the A.P., the photographer Steve Helber shot an image of peculiar symmetry, in which a man of fortitude was bearing a different light. Two men extend weapons: one is the Confederate flag, furled, hiding its retrograde design, and the other is an aerosol can, modified to eject fire. The figures stand in a classical configuration, on the diagonal, as if a Dutch master has placed them just so. The white supremacist, a little stout, is dressed in a sloppy kind of uniform; his mouth is puckered as he strains to threaten his adversary. He waves his flag strenuously, an incoherent blur. The mob behind him looks on, seemingly timid.

His opponent, a black man who was recently identified as the twenty-three-year-old Corey Long, is, by contrast, a figure of elegance. (In an interview with the Root, Long said that the protest had seemed peaceful until “someone pointed a gun at my head. Then the same person pointed it at my foot and shot the ground.”) Long is shirtless; movement serves only to define his muscles. The line from his leg to the fire he sprays is unbroken. The bottom half of his face is obscured by a mask, but his pose telegraphs confidence: he seems almost relaxed. An old man hunches behind him, as if taking shelter. Compared to his foe, Long handles his instrument easily, and wittily—when that flag catches on fire, the supremacist will be carrying the sacrilege that he fears. The photo recalls the mysterious serenity of historical images of self-defense: Gloria Richardson eye-rolling in the direction of a National Guardsman’s bayonet, in 1963, her palm pushing his weapon away; Edward Crawford returning a cannister of tear gas to Ferguson police, in 2014. And Helber’s picture avenges, in its way, the same-day image of Deandre Harris, a twenty-year-old black boy who lay prostrate on a garage floor, shielding his head from a beating by gleeful Nazis.

The composition of this photo is fiercely theological. The black man is wielding what the black theologian James Cone, quoting the prophet Jeremiah, might call the “burning fire shut up in my bones,” what James Baldwin would have identified as “the fire next time.” (Cornel West, a student of Cone, has advanced the liberatory concept of “black prophetic fire”; West travelled to the city to march with members of Charlottesville’s faith community on Saturday.) It is a pose that upsets a desire for docility; it’s a rebuke to slogans such as “This is not us” or “Love not hate.” This graceful man has appropriated not only the flames of white-supremacist bigotry but also the debauched, rhetorical fire of Trump, who gloated, earlier this week, that he would respond to a foreign threat with “fire and fury.” The resistance has its fire, too.