Go Tell It on the Mountain

by James Baldwin

His earliest memories—which were in a way, his only memories—were of the hurry and brightness of Sunday mornings. They all rose together on that day; his father, who did not have to go to work, and led them in prayer before breakfast; his mother, who dressed up on that day, and looked almost young, with her hair straightened, and on her head the close-fitting white cap that was the uniform of holy women; his younger brother, Roy, who was silent that day because his father was home. Sarah, who wore a red ribbon in her hair that day, and was fondled by her father. And the baby, Ruth, who was dressed in pink and white, and rode in her mother’s arms to church. The church was

Example of using repetition effectively for making a point and for moving you through a long list. Also, oblique references hint at what's to come

Roy would be like them when he grew up, if the Lord did not change his heart.

They had gone from cursing to laughter, to anger, to lust.

The pastor, Father James, was a genial, well-fed man with a face like a darker moon.

It seemed that there had never been a time when he had not known this moment of waiting while the

packed church paused—the sisters in white, heads raised, the brothers in blue, heads back; the white caps of the women seeming to glow in the charged air like crowns, the kinky, gleaming heads of the men seeming to be lifted up—and the rustling and the whispering ceased and the children were quiet; perhaps someone coughed, or the sound of a car horn, or a curse from the streets came in; then Elisha hit the keys, beginning at once to sing, and everybody joined him, clapping their hands, and rising, and beating the tambourines.

Long sentence for effect

The room was narrow and dirty; nothing could alter its dimensions, no labor could ever make it clean. Dirt was in the walls and the floorboards, and triumphed beneath the sink where roaches spawned; was in the fine ridges of the pots and pans, scoured daily, burnt black on the bottom, hanging above the stove; was in the wall against which they hung, and revealed itself where the paint had cracked and leaned outward in stiff squares and fragments, the paper-thin underside webbed with black. Dirt was in every corner, angle, crevice of the monstrous stove, and lived behind it in delirious communion with the corrupted wall. Dirt was in the baseboard that John scrubbed every Saturday, and roughened the cupboard shelves that held the cracked and gleaming dishes.

Dirt as a living entity. Contrast with the cracked but gleaming dishes -- dirt lives despite their efforts.

But now it was too late. She would not speak before the judgment day.

A glacial sun filled the streets, and a high wind filled the air with scraps of paper and frosty dust, and banged the hanging signs of stores and storefront churches. It was the end of winter, and the garbage-filled snow that had been banked along the edges of sidewalks was melting now and filling the gutters. Boys were playing stickball in the damp, cold streets; dressed in heavy woolen sweaters and heavy pants, they danced and shouted, and the ball went crack! as the stick struck it and sent it speeding through the air.

Using all the senses

John knew that it was the hand of the Lord that had led her to this place, and his heart grew cold. The Lord was riding on the wind tonight. What might that wind have spoken before the morning came?

And then they sang: “Walk in the light, the beautiful light. Shine all around me by day and by night, Jesus, the light of the world.” And they sang: “Oh, Lord, Lord, I want to be ready, I want to be ready. I want to be ready to walk in Jerusalem just like John.”

For it was time that filled his mind, time that was violent with the mysterious love of God. And his mind could not contain the terrible stretch of time that united twelve men fishing by the shores of Galilee, and black men weeping on their knees tonight, and he, a witness.

I think he is following the wording and cadence of spirituals

My soul is a witness for my Lord.

There was an awful silence at the bottom of John’s mind, a dreadful weight, a d...

not even a speculation, but a deep, deep turning, as of something huge, black, shapeless, for ages dead on the ocean floor, that now felt its rest disturbed by a faint, far wind, which bid it: “Arise.” And this weight began to move at the bottom of John’s mind, in a silence like the silence of the void before creation, and he began to feel a terror he had never felt before. And he looked around the church, at the

Vivid metaphor

“ain’t no shelter against the Word of God, is there, Reverend? You is just got to be in it, that’s all—’cause every word is true, and the gates of Hell ain’t going to be able to stand against it.” He smiled, watching her, and felt a great tenderness fill his heart. “You just stay in the Word, little sister. The windows of Heaven going to open up and pour down blessings on you till you won’t know where to put them.” When she smiled now it was a heightened joy. “He done blessed me already, Reverend. He blessed me when He saved your soul and sent you out to preach His gospel.”

Gates and windows

Let us remember that we are born in sin, in sin did our mothers conceive us—sin reigns in all our members, sin is the foul heart’s natural liquid, sin looks out of the eye, amen, and leads to lust, sin is in the hearing of the ear, and leads to folly, sin sits on the tongue, and

leads to murder. Yes! Sin is the only heritage of the natural man, sin bequeathed us by our natural father, that fallen Adam, whose apple sickens and will sicken all generations living, and generations yet unborn! It was sin that drove the son of the morning out of Heaven, sin that drove Adam out of Eden, sin that caused Cain to slay his brother, sin that built the tower of Babel, sin that caused the fire to fall on Sodom—sin, from the very foundations of the world, living and breathing in the heart of man, that causes women to bring forth their children in agony and darkness, bows down the backs of men with terrible labor, keeps the empty belly empty, keeps the table bare, sends our children, dressed in rags, out into the whorehouses and dance halls of the world!”

Gospel cadence

And he moved from the well, picking up, like a man in a trance, the heavy pails of water. He moved toward the house, which now—high, gleaming roof, and spun-gold window—seemed to watch him and to listen; the very sun above his head and the earth beneath his feet had ceased their turning; the water, like a million warning voices, lapped in the buckets he carried on each side; and his mother, beneath the startled earth on which he moved, lifted up, endlessly, her eyes.

This is what a rocked world looks, sounds and feels like

While he walked, held by his caution more rigid than an arrow, he prayed, as his mother had taught him to pray, for loving kindness; yet he dreamed of the feel of a white man’s forehead against his shoe; again and again, until the head wobbled on the broken neck and his foot encountered nothing but the rushing blood.

Sentence takes a sharp turn

“I know,” he said abruptly, “but they ain’t going to bother me. They done got their nigger for this week. I ain’t going far noway.” Then the corner on which they stood seemed suddenly to rock with the weight of mortal danger. It seemed for a moment, as they stood there, that death and destruction rushed toward them: two black men alone in the dark and silent town where white men prowled like lions—what mercy could they hope for, should they be found here, talking together? It would surely be believed that they were plotting vengeance.

Description is cinematic

The rain came down as though once more in Heaven the Lord had been persuaded of the good uses of a flood. It drove before it the bowed wanderer, clapped children into houses, licked with fearful anger against the high, strong wall, and the wall of the lean-to, and the wall of the cabin, beat against the bark and the leaves of trees, trampled the broad grass, and broke

Strong verbs in series.

the neck of the flower.

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective, to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.

ah, something had happened to John!

Sudden use of third person to emphasize the out of body experience

Yes: there was Elisha, speaking from the floor, and his father, silent, at his back. In his heart there was a sudden yearning tenderness for holy Elisha; desire, sharp and awful as a reflecting knife, to usurp the body of Elisha, and lie where Elisha lay; to speak in tongues, as Elisha spoke, and, with that authority, to confound his father.

Into a dungeon deeper than Hell, into a madness louder than the grave?

How is a grave loud? When it is filled with the death and misery of the Black race

Yes, he had sinned: one morning, alone, in the dirty bathroom, in the square, dirt-gray cupboard room that was filled with the stink of his father. Sometimes, leaning over the cracked, “tattle-tale gray” bathtub, he scrubbed his father’s back; and looked, as the accursed son of Noah had looked, on his father’s hideous nakedness. It was secret, like sin, and slimy, like the serpent, and heavy, like the rod. Then he hated his father, and longed for the power to cut his father down.

Was this why he lay here, thrust out from all human or heavenly help tonight? This, and not that other, his deadly sin, having looked on his father’s nakedness and mocked

and cursed him in his heart? Ah, that son of Noah’s had been cursed, down to the present groaning generation: A servant of ser...

All niggers had been cursed, the ironic voice reminded him, all niggers had come from this most undutiful of Noah’s sons. How could John be cursed for having seen

Then I looked in the grave and I wondered. Ah, down!—what was he searching here,

And the grave looked so sad and lonesome.

Lines from the song "I looked down the line and I wondered" the unstated refrain: to see how far from a God I was

he found his mother and his father, his mother dressed in scarlet, his father dressed in white.

Love is as strong as death, as deep as the grave.

Then the darkness began to murmur—a terrible sound—and John’s ears trembled. In this murmur that filled the grave, like a thousand wings beating on the air, he recognized a sound that he had always heard. He began, for terror, to weep and moan—and this sound was swallowed up, and yet was magnified by the echoes that filled the darkness. This sound had filled John’s life, so it now seemed, from the moment he had first drawn breath. He had heard it everywhere, in prayer and in daily speech, and wherever the saints were gathered, and in the unbelieving streets. It was in his father’s anger, and in his mother’s calm insistence, and in the vehement mockery of his aunt; it had rung, so oddly, in Roy’s voice this afternoon, and when Elisha played the piano it was there; it was in the beat and jangle of Sister McCandless’s tambourine, it was in the very cadence of her testimony, and invested that testimony with a matchless, unimpeachable authority. Yes, he had heard it all his life, but it was only now that his ears were opened to this sound that came from darkness, that could only come from darkness, that yet bore such sure witness to the glory of the light. And now

in his moaning, and so far from any help, he heard it in himself—it rose from his bleeding, his cracked-open heart. It was a sound of rage and weeping which filled the grave, rage and weeping from time set free, but bound now in eternity; rage that had no language, weeping with no voice—which yet spoke now, to John’s startled soul, of boundless melancholy, of the bitterest patience, and the longest night; of the deepest water, the strongest chains, the most cruel lash; of humility most wretched, the dungeon most absolute, of love’s bed defiled, and birth dishonored, and most bloody, unspeakable, sudden death. Yes, the darkness hummed with murder: the body in the water, the body in the fire, the body on the tree. John looked down the line of these armies of darkness, army upon army, and his soul whispered: Who are these? Who are they? And wondered: Where shall I go?

Who are these? Who are they? They were the despised and rejected, the wretched and the spat upon, the earth’s offscouring; and he was in their company, and they would swallow up his soul. The stripes they had endured would scar his back, their punishment would be his, their portion

his, his their humiliation, anguish, chains, their dungeon his, their death his.

bright and pained with love,

“I’m going to pray God,” said John—and his voice shook, whether with joy or grief he could not say—“to keep me, and make me strong … to stand … to stand against the enemy … and against everything and everybody … that wants to cut down my soul.”

The water ran in the gutters with a small, discontented sound; on the water traveled paper, burnt matches, sodden cigarette-ends; gobs of spittle, green-yellow, brown, and pearly; the leavings of a dog, the vomit of a drunken man, the dead sperm, trapped in rubber, of one abandoned to his lust. All moved slowly to the black grating where down it rushed, to be carried to the river, which would hurl it into the sea.

And he was filled with a joy, a joy unspeakable, whose roots, though he would not trace them on this new day of his life, were nourished by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered.

Where joy was, there strength followed; where strength was, sorrow came—forever?

Out of joy strength came, strength that was fashioned to bear sorrow: sorrow brought forth joy. Forever?