Staff Pick - Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin

[Brian Bess]

Burning in the fires of Heaven


James Baldwin's first novel was published before he reached the age of 30 and yet it seems almost preternaturally mature and complex and the work of someone who has ruminated over these issues for many more than three decades. It is an autobiographical novel, as so many first novels are, and yet it avoids the limitations of a young author's narcissism and gets into much older characters' heads just as skillfully as it rests within the fourteen year-old protagonist's.

Most of the surface story takes place on John Grimes' fourteenth birthday at a pivotal spiritual 'threshing floor' prayer meeting at his father's Harlem church. The first section appears to be a conventional 'coming of age' story on its surface and on that level it succeeds immensely but it is also a very compact distillation of all the issues that an adolescent black boy in Harlem in the mid-1930's would experience. He has always felt isolated and set apart from the rest of his family, primarily because of the stern religious power of his father. He has never seen his father smile at him and very little at other people for that matter. He has received no affection or tenderness from him, only physical punishment and solemn pronouncements of the moral obligations of living a Christian life. He loves his mother but feels that she is too weak-willed to challenge her husband. He is restless and inquisitive and intellectually and emotionally hungry, yet at fourteen he still feels the pressure of his upbringing to be 'in the spirit' of his church, to get swept up in the rapturous prayer states of the elders or 'saints' of the church and the weight of judgment inflicted on him by his father. He also admires an older boy, Elisha, who is a model Christian who even so was brought up in front of the congregation along with the girl with whom he was simply being friendly as a preemptive strike against the Devil's assault into their hearts. This was John's father's doing and he shamed publicly the two adolescents who had not yet harbored lustful thoughts for each other as if they had already committed egregious sins. The congregation approved of this nipping of sin in the bud before it could even bear fruit. Elisha and his friend, though shamed, were extremely grateful for this action, seemingly symptomatic of this church. John's fascination with Elisha contains an erotic undercurrent; their playful wrestling seems to be the most satisfying physical contact with Elisha that he can receive.

After the first section we have three subsequent sections titled, 'Florence's Prayer,' 'Gabriel's Prayer' and 'Elizabeth's Prayer'. Though these are labeled prayers they don't all contain actual prayers although they all occur during the evening prayer service. Each contains extensive flashbacks. Florence is Gabriel's older sister, who has resented him since they were children. She considered him the favored child, despite the fact that he was selfish and indulged in promiscuous sex and alcohol consumption before his conversion. She knows secrets about his past behavior (including a bastard son from an earlier alliance while being married to his first, barren wife) and is holding it as blackmail against him. She doesn't ordinarily attend church service but she is here on this night, partly because she wants to 'set her house in order' before she dies of a terminal illness.

The second section is Gabriel's and we see his version of how he came to be converted and why he married his first wife. He had a dream which he interpreted as the Lord's prophecy that he would have a holy lineage and that the bloodline of righteousness must continue. The first wife was barren whereas he had an affair with a woman who moved to Chicago after telling him she was pregnant. She had told him that if he would not leave his wife he must bear some financial responsibility. He stole money from his wife to send her to have the baby and give it away. She died in childbirth and her body was brought back, along with her baby, her to be buried, him to be raised by another family. Gabriel watched him grow up and later learned that he was killed in a knife fight. The first wife died childless and he originally grew friendly with his current wife, Elizabeth, who had worked with his sister, as an attempt to bring this fallen woman (she already had the baby John by a first alliance) to a state of grace, then to marry her and raise her son as his own. This did not happen. He feels he has been promised a continuation of a royal line. As John is not his biological son but a reminder of the first, abandoned son, he cannot forgive John and places his hopes on the first son Elizabeth bears him, the young hell-raiser Roy. John is unaware of this fact through the end of the novel, wondering why his father hates him.

The third section, Elizabeth's, presents her background and the relationship she had with the father of John, who killed himself after being convicted of a crime he did not commit, without knowledge that she was carrying his son. Gabriel, as we have seen in the first section, has been an intolerant, tyrannical fundamentalist authoritarian who slaps his wife and fights with his sister after she has attempted to intervene. Elizabeth sees in John her only remainder of her first love.

The next section, 'The Threshing-Floor' is an extended spiritual crisis for John. He is struck by the spirit, as so many of the saints in the church had hoped, falls to the floor, and undergoes a hallucinogenic spiritual struggle. Intimations of the Biblical John of 'Revelations' intrude in his consciousness as he sees fires coming down from Heaven to purge away Man's wickedness. Yet this holy intervention seems hardly unequivocally benevolent. These spiritual labor pains contain very disturbing images and passages such as the following:
'He would weep again, his heart insisted, for now his weeping had begun; he would rage again, said the shifting air, for the lions of rage had been unloosed; he would be in darkness again, in fire again, now that he had seen the fire and the darkness…where joy was, there strength followed; where strength was, sorrow came—forever? Forever and forever, said the arm of Elisha, heavy on his shoulder.'
As he emerged from this altered state, traumatized by this spiritual beating, the ladies of the service reinforce his rebirth in the Lord. He agrees with their affirmation, yet he still seems dazed. His verbal proclamation that he is saved is unsatisfactory to his still scowling father, who says he must live it. Even at the end, after a kiss of benediction on his forehead from Elisha, he smiles at his father, who fails to reciprocate. The spiritual victory seems to remind him with every rapturous reflection that much struggle lies ahead, ending in ambivalence.

As many readers may have noticed, the names Elisha, Gabriel and John all contain Biblical allusions. Biblical imagery permeates this novel and familiarity with the Old Testament and how this kind of African American church interprets it enhances understanding of the symbology of these people's faith. This is as integral to an understanding of 'Go Tell it on the Mountain' as Irish Catholicism is to James Joyce's similar coming of age novel, 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. The viewpoints of John's stepfather, mother and aunt take us out of the young James Baldwin surrogate character's mind and, by learning their backstory, we can acquire an understanding of how they have evolved, even the extremely unsympathetic Gabriel. Just as religion permeates this novel, so does the African American treatment by a dominant white society. This is the fabric of their lives and our understanding of these characters' plight is expanded to a greater understanding of the people who participated in the Great Migration at the heart of the 20th century. It is an outstanding, assured and confident debut novel for a young writer with a breadth of perception and wisdom that illuminated a world that many in the literary world knew little about at mid-century. At such a young age, Baldwin knew that the top of the testimonial mountain is as fiery as the depths below.