Author: James Baldwin
Title: Go Tell It On the Mountain
Year of publication: 1953
Page count: 242
Rating: ★★★★
Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical first novel, about a fourteen-year old boy’s tense relationship with his family and church, draws heavily on his childhood experiences in Harlem in the 1930’s: Just like the protagonist John Grimes, Baldwin also wrestled with reconciling his faith with his homosexuality, never knew his biological father, and was raised as the unwanted adopted son of a self-righteous, charismatic but tyrannical Pentecostal Church preacher.
“John’s heart was hardened against the Lord. His father was God’s minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.”
Go Tell It On The Mountain reads like a long gospel sermon: The characters’ names, chapter titles, epigraphs, and even the rhythm and language in the dialogues is rich with biblical quotations, hymns, allusions, and references, many of which I’m quite sure went over my head. The passionate rage I’ve come to associate with Baldwin’s writing is already very much present as well: For a debut novel by a young writer in his twenties, it’s remarkable in its boldness, intensity, symbolism, and lyrical power—a cutting indictment of Christianity’s moral hypocrisy. Church is portrayed as a positive source of community and inspiration, but Baldwin also very much explores its dark side, particularly in regards to sexual shame and the upholding of patriarchal control over women.
“Nothing tamed or broke her, nothing touched her, neither kindness, nor scorn, nor hatred, nor love. She had never thought of prayer. It was unimaginable that she would ever bend her knees and come crawling along a dusty floor to anybody’s altar, weeping for forgiveness. Perhaps her sin was so extreme that it could not be forgiven; perhaps her pride was so great that she did not need forgiveness. She had fallen from that high estate which God had intended for men and women, and she made her fall glorious because it was so complete.”
The novel covers a twenty-four hour period on John’s fourteenth birthday, and the two book-end sections focus on him wrestling with his anger and resentment towards his step-father and his (reluctant?) quest for salvation, as he looks to the Heavenly Father to substitute the one he hates. To me, the really outstanding part of the novel, the one I couldn’t put down, was however the middle section, which is broken into three prayer-chapters from the perspectives of John’s paternal aunt Florence, who could never compete for her mother’s love against her younger brother; his step-father Gabriel, the violent and sanctimonious drunk-turned-preacher; and his mother Elizabeth, who married Gabriel in the belief that it would be her penance for having had a child out of wedlock. As they kneel and pray at a tarry service, they muse on their lives, and these flashbacks allow us to look deep into their hearts as they bare their longings and regrets to God. Thanks to these glimpses, John’s salvation, however reluctantly he faces it, seems like an ominously inevitable outcome, and it’s precisely this ambivalence and tempered hope that made me like this novel so much: You get the sense that John’s long climb to the top of the mountain—out from under his step-father’s thumb, towards an acceptance of his own queerness, away from racial injustice—has only just begun.
“There are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.”
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