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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17143.Go_Tell_It_on_the_Mountain?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Go Tell It on the Mountain (Penguin Modern Classics)" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166804459m/17143.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17143.Go_Tell_It_on_the_Mountain?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Go Tell It on the Mountain</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/10427.James_Baldwin">James Baldwin</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/15751748?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 4 of 5 stars<br/>Great story, though a dense, puzzle-like narrative, told third-person limited through each of several characters’ experience. Well-rounded characters. <br/> <br/>Story gradually pieces together to become a whole—about 40 years of biography, though actual time is only a day—a Saturday, John’s birthday. The day begins with chores, then John gets birthday money and goes to the movies. He comes home to disaster, Roy has been in a fight, there’s argument between his father, mother, and aunt Florence. The day ends at church in the “Tarry” service—prayers of the people. <br/> <br/>Story begins through the eyes of John, eldest step-son of a preacher, Gabriel, and true son of Elizabeth. John is the good boy who, nevertheless, is unloved by his stepfather. Gabriel lavishes all his attention and child-rearing energies on Roy, the younger trouble-making boy. John wrestles between wanting to leave the community, wanting a better life and wanting to please his mother who prays for his salvation. However, receiving salvation would mean receiving the Lord’s minister, his stepfather. This he cannot do. <br/> <br/><b>Background…</b> <br/> <br/>As a child, Gabriel’s older sister Florence resented her status in the home. Florence was second-best child to the boy—who was given more of everything, love, meat, punishment, because he would grow to be a man. She became friends with Deborah, and together, they hated men. They watched her spoiled brother stumble home drunk at night. Claiming a freedom like her mother’s after slavery was abolished, Florence left for the north one day. She left Gabriel to care for their sick mother—just punishment. In New York, Florence met Frank, who sang the blues and drank too much. Frank was a poor manager of money, he’d spend foolishly on an expensive turkey and 5 pounds of coffee, when their cupboards were bare. Then they’d fight, he’d antagonize in soft bitter speech, then leave and waste the rest of his paycheck and return penitent, for sweet lovin’. She and Deborah wrote to each other; Deborah told her about the suspected bastard child. She thought she’d change Frank, but after 10 years of marriage, he left her, the same man he’d always been. He lived with another woman, then died in the war in France. It was the other woman who was listed as next of kin, she told Florence that Frank had died. <br/> <br/>Gabriel first married Deborah to “lift her up” in the eyes of the people who saw her as the same ruined girl who was raped by a band of white men. She is plain, but noble, visits the sick, prays for the people, but she is barren and unloved. <br/> <br/>Gabriel works for a white family where he meets Esther, another servant girl. They have an affair—she gets pregnant. Gabriel steals Deborah’s savings and gives it to Esther who takes off to Chicago to have her baby in private. She dies giving birth to a son—naming him Royal as an affront to the father who’d had a vision of a “royal lineage”. Royal later dies in a Chicago knife fight at 16. <br/> <br/>Deborah dies of illness, but first tells Gabriel the news that the boy, Royal, has died. All along she has known the truth, but now she asks, “He was your boy, wasn’t he?” She asks him why he sent Esther away, why he never claimed the son he wanted to desperately. She says she would have accepted Royal and raised him as their own, had he confessed the truth. <br/> <br/>Next, Gabriel marries Elizabeth— a single mother who has John, a bastard son. Together they have Roy, Sarah, and the baby. <br/> <br/>As a child, Elizabeth’s had mother died. She loved her father, but her aunt gained custody because her father ran a seedy club of sorts. Lived with her aunt, fell in love with the insolent Richard from the grocery store who called her “Little-bit”. They both went to live in New York, working at a hotel as elevator boy and chambermaid. She lived with (and went on the pretext of living with) a relative, Madame Williams, spiritualist. Elizabeth became pregnant, but hadn’t told Richard yet. Then, one night Richard walked her home late, at 2a.m., went to the subway, and was taken, in a sloppy arrest, as part of a robbery. The white police made no distinction between him and the other black boys. Though the guilty boys corroborated Richard’s innocence, the white shop-owner said “Yep, that’s them. They’re all the same.” Richard refused to confess and was severely beaten, so he could barely walk. In court though, he was miraculously let off, on lack of evidence. When Elizabeth went to get him, he cried like crazy—she held off telling him about the baby. The experience had changed Richard, and that night, at home, he slit his wrists and died. Later, Elizabeth wondered if the knowledge of his baby could have sustained him. She carried this guilt, never regretting the baby, John. <br/> <br/>Gabriel believes that Roy is the son of the promise, remembering a vision he had of God’s blessing on his line. John is just a bastard child who stands in the way of Elizabeth’s salvation. He asks Elizabeth to repent of her sin and asks, if she could do it over again, would she have him? She is indignant that they have two sons, neither of which she regrets having. <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/918446?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>