Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
When I decided impulsively to read Go Tell It on the Mountain, an agonizingly gritty novel of faith and hatred, I had no idea what a lucky choice it was. The writing, in fact, is so strong, vivid, and persuasive, that in retrospect I felt almost guilty at the end in having realized that the story itself, such as it is, lacks a traditional plot. Rather, its success is actually because its many graphic incidents successfully depict an elusive theme – a nagging uncertainty in the face of the author’s otherwise fervent convictions.
The title, GoTell It on The Mountain -- which James Baldwin gave to this intense portrayal -- was taken from a festive 19th Century American Negro spiritual celebrating the good news that Jesus Christ is born. It is an appropriate title. In many ways, however, the story as a whole is not so optimistic as the reference suggests. The reader may reasonably feel initially that he is being asked to regard with patience the vivid pain, struggles, and disappointments of the wretched characters, for surely there will be a culminating and gratifying release in conclusion.
By the end, however, the resolution is not so simple. The tale is utterly sincere in its depiction of faith and the changes it works in its characters, but the underlying element of hate which I just mentioned is why that same reader will sense that there is a lurking note of misgiving. There seems to be a curse at work. The glorious title is true, but there is an intentional but unresolved sense of the fragility of faith: the ubiquity of sin, the curse of Ham, and a motif of predestination.
Structure. This story which is about a black family in Harlem in the 1940s does not advertise the daily racial injustices and slights that underlie the life they led. I count that to Baldwin’s credit; he kept those things present and significant throughout the novel, but subordinate to his particular tale, leaving himself free to focus on the principal theme of possible spiritual redemption and reconciliation within the idiom and stigma of the black community.
The story is not given chronologically. There are three parts: (1) The Seventh Day, (2) The Prayers of the Saints, and (3) The Threshing Floor. Part one begins on a Saturday morning in 1949, the 14th birthday of John Grimes, the ostensible main character. Part three is the graphic depiction of his conversion to the faith early the next morning. In between, part two gives us the fraught and painful history of the adults in young John’s life without which the story would have little meaning. These riveting individual segments are essential to the momentous but uncertain culmination in part three.
The Setting. Generally, there is a background tension in the story between the dispiriting contrast of the hopeless lives in the south as lived in the early decades of the 20th century by the older characters and the confounding bitterness of their later continuing dismal existence now lived in Harlem. But every man and woman has his or her own distinct tale which will converge in its own distinct way with everyone else’s.
“[T]o look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place [the North] 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.”
***
“There was not, after all, a great difference between the world of the North and that of the South . . . ; there was only this difference: the North promised more. And this similarity: what it promised it did not give, and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other.”
Compounding that pressure, there is also the more personal strain imposed on all of them between their acceptance or rejection of faith and the obligations of obedience which faith imposes. And finally there is the essence of the specific story, the puzzling and virtually Biblical anger between young John and his father Gabriel Grimes.
John Grimes. Although it appears to begin that way, it would be wrong to dismiss Go Tell It on the Mountain as young John’s coming of age story. Of course, by making this teenager his apparently central character, Balwin obliges the reader to take interest in him, a 14-year-old boy with little about him that is extraordinary. He is described as small, rather ugly, and friendless, but good at school. For what it’s worth, everyone seems to assume from his gravity that he has a future, probably as a preacher; and yet his personality is not very fully elaborated.
From the first pages, the boy remembers the routine Sunday mornings on which his family, the Grimes family, always goes to their Harlem storefront church, the Temple of the Fire Baptized. John’s father, Gabriel, is one of two deacons there, but in actual fact, he is little more than “a holy handyman,” the significance of which is made clear later.
What is fully elaborated is the bleak, boring, and essentially colorless life of this unremarkable adolescent in the grim environment in which he must grow up. He lives in a dingy, filthy tenement with his mother Elizabeth, his father Gabriel, and three younger half-siblings.
After a cheerless and routine Saturday morning of chores and domestic bickering, John is actually surprised that his mother has actually remembered his birthday with a few coins, armed with which he then spends some hours walking alone in Manhattan, returning home to find that his unruly younger brother Roy has been stabbed in a street fight. There follows an inexplicably horrid scene of domestic violence. As the family watches, Gabriel, also Roy’s father, goes totally out of control and beats the injured child with a belt. In fact, we learn, he is repeating a horrible ritual he more regularly unleashes on John. It is that periodic history which Baldwin uses to introduce what I have identified as the curse.
“Then his father stood just above him, looking down. Then John knew that a curse was renewed from moment to moment, from father to son. Time was indifferent, like snow and ice; but the heart, crazed wanderer in the diving waste, carried the curse forever.”
“His father’s eyes looked down on him, and John began to scream. His father’s eyes stripped him naked, and hated what they saw. And as he turned screaming, in the dust again, trying to escape his father’s eyes, those eyes, that face, and all their faces, and the far-off yellow light, all departed from his vision as though he had gone blind. . . .
“’I am going to beat sin out of him. I am going to beat it out.’”
Church. But it is also the seventh day and the Grimes are a church-going family. And so later in the evening, on that same Saturday, they routinely go to the Temple of the Fire Baptized, across from a Harlem hospital where in the background wounded criminals are taken nightly amid sirens and commotion. As is his routine, young John, alone, arrives first in the late afternoon and bitterly cleans the church up preparing for the evening visitation. The detailed atmospheric scene is engaging and a natural invitation to the rest of the story.
But for this sketchy introduction, it is best not to recite here in detail the early lives of the various characters which make up the second part of the novel. Go Tell It on the Mountain does eventually assemble this essential information, but in vignettes – discrete by character, vivid and sympathetic – but never by overtly engaging the reader in an apparent plot line. The events are graphic and specific, but ultimately thematic. What we are given is an arresting novel without a coherent story line, but with a shattering culmination in part three.
Sin. Periodically throughout the book the Biblical injunction appears: “Set thy house in order.” In fact, well before bringing us to his amazing culmination of part three -- “The Threshing Floor,” which is John’s conversion -- the author has early remarked about the entire congregation of the Temple of the Fire Baptized that “[t]here was sin among them,” meaning their weakness for sex, notwithstanding their initial reluctance and need to embrace God. Father James himself, head of the church, warns that sex is “a sin beyond forgiveness.”
“. . . [T]there was no escape for anyone. God was everywhere, terrible, the living God; and so high, the song said, you couldn’t get over Him; so low you couldn’t get under Him . . .”
Baldwin’s observation that there was “sin among them” and Father James’s caution that sin is “beyond forgiveness” are specifically directed to sexual conduct outside marriage. In part two, a sermon by Gabriel, John’s father, in the segment summarizing his life when he was a young man of the cloth, he addresses this exact point to a crowd of worshippers:
“Let us remember that we are born in sin -- in sin did our mothers conceive us – sin reigns in all our members, sin . . . leads to lust . . . .”
This is a central point. The novel gives no comparable scrutiny to any other cardinal sin, which is why I said that the fascinating stories in part two are thematic and not particularly in service of an arresting and unfolding plot. What we learn is the history – specifically the sins -- of the older characters and what has brought each of them to Harlem: lives of hardship and faith accosted by the demands of the flesh.
The piety depicted throughout the story is displayed in a vein I was not familiar with. The church’s services are portrayed, though never ridiculed, as sensual, frenzied performances. In each of these several scenes, the “saints,” as the congregation is described, are virtually transported physically -- sweating, gesticulating, moaning for lengthy periods while they are enthusiastically and jubilantly encouraged by the other members of the congregation. It is never immoral, but it is unmistakably sensual.
And yet, in part two, almost half of what we see is devoted to the troubling early years of John’s father Gabriel who is the most interesting character.
Conversion. In the midst of part two’s sketches of these early lives, however, a foreshadowing light is abruptly thrown back on young John during the time of his church attendance in part one. He is suddenly seized and wracked by a prolonged and agonizing religious transformation, obviously intended to mirror an earlier experience of his father Gabriel.
Abruptly, in the cacophony of the evening prayer at the family’s church, John
“. . . . somehow knew from the sound of that storm which rose so painfully in him now, which laid waste —forever? — the strange, yet comforting landscape of his mind, that the hand of God would surely lead him into this staring, waiting mouth, these distended jaws, this hot breath of fire. He would be led into darkness, and in darkness would remain; until in some incalculable time to come the hand of God would reach down and raise him up; he, John, who having lain in darkness would no longer be himself but some other man. . . . . [S]own in dishonor, he would be raised in honor: he would have been born again.”
There are two phrases in this quotation worth considering. First is that strange interjection – “forever?” – about the reliability of John’s future state of mind. And that uncertainty is linked to the second phrase, “sown in dishonor,” one of the first clues about the tension – hatred, really – between John and his father Gabriel.
John, it develops, is not Gabriel’s son. He is actually the product of his mother Elizabeth’s passion before Gabriel knew or married her. John is his mother’s natural child with Richard, an intelligent, irreligious, and bitter young man who later commits suicide because of an act of injustice against him. Nothing that I found in the novel suggests that John knows any of this.
Gabriel. As for Gabriel’s backstory, it is told with absolute sympathy. His father had abandoned his family shortly after the end of the Civil War[1], leaving him, his religious mother, and his sister to provide for themselves. But Gabriel, a dissolute, irresponsible, wanton, and reckless young man, becomes an even graver torment to this depleted family. He “could not say yes to his mother and to the Lord; and he could not say no.”
Then, in a virtually Pauline epiphany, this same young Gabriel -- probably no more than 21 years old -- staggering home alone from a night of drink and women, is abruptly and unaccountably struck by a genuine faith in God. And so this irredeemable prodigal miraculously converts his life; he becomes an astonishingly eloquent and widely respected preacher, the youngest and most fervent in the vicinity. And yet, Gabriel‘s older sister, something of a Cassandra, sees right through him, regardless that he has become a preacher:
“’Folks can change their ways much as they want to. But I don’t care how many times you change your ways, what’s in you is in you, and it’s got to come out.’”
The discouraging fact is that she proves right. Gabriel, who has already taken a saintly wife, presently falls victim to Esther, a woman of no virtue whom Baldwin describes in Hellish terms of flame and fire. And so, although God had promised Gabriel a son who someday “would carry down the joyful line his father’s name,” it “was in the womb of Esther, who was no better than a harlot, that the seed of the prophet would be nourished.”
I repeat, this son was not John, though by the book’s standards, each of them was conceived in concupiscence. And Gabriel never acknowledges him. Ester decamps to the north and delivers the child whom she names Royal, in apparent mockery of God’s supposed promise to Gabriel. This son, still in his youth, is eventually murdered ignominiously in a tavern, apparently in the same year that Gabriel’s son John was born.
And Gabriel, although he cannot escape his guilt,
“held on to [God’s] promise; he had walked before God in true repentance and waited on the promise.”
And “Most strangely . . . his faith looked up.” Until his death, he must bear witness to his redemption.
Notwithstanding John’s hatred of Gabriel, the reader is not exactly encouraged to share this feeling. Gabriel’s youthful epiphany prefigures John’s own later sudden and inexplicable transfiguration in Part Three – including that caution – “forever?” -- about his own future. As I have said, there is an element of predestination in this novel.
The Prayers of the Saints. Although Gabriel’s story is the essence of part two, it is also the place where we also learn the related histories of young John’s other family antecedents. These segments are perfectly told and they certainly integrate into the story of John’s story. One way or another they foreshadow or comment on what is to come and the novel would not succeed without them. And yet they are far more in service of the book’s serious theme of a curse than they advance a compelling plot.
The Curse. In part three the author merges these specific characters from part two whom he has outlined in such heartrending detail with the agonizing curse that appears to be at the bottom of all of their lives. As I have illustrated, the first time that Baldwin mentions a curse, it appears to run only between John and Gabriel, ironically in connection with Gabiel’s savage beating of John’s younger brother.
As the novel progresses the father/son tension becomes the central problem in this novel without a plot: Can the mutual love between God and man (particularly between John and Gabriel) supervene John’s hatred for Gabriel?
“[John] did not want to love his father; he wanted to hate him, to cherish that hatred . . . . Oh that his father would die! . . . . Yet in the very grave he would hate him. . . . The grave was not enough for punishment, for justice, for revenge. Hell, everlasting, unceasing, perpetual, unquenched forever, should be his father’s portion . . . .”
I doubt Baldwin intended his readers to hate Gabriel, but only to understand him. Gabriel’s “daily anger” had become a “prophetic wrath,” leaving him merely a “holy handyman,” bound by the ardent forms of his faith, but incapable of its love. In illustration, while Baldwin depicted the man’s unfeigned religious conversion in part two as genuine, it is then pitiably corrupted by irresistible lust, the shameful betrayal of his first wife, and the resulting flawed and angry man that we see on the day of John’s own intense and mirthless conversion, a weak man in the grip of an ancient curse.
In fact, as part of the ordeal of John’s own epiphany in part three, we are obliged to recall Gabriel’s vow to “to beat sin out of John.”
“Yes he [John] 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 [John] lay here [during his conversion], 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 servants shall he be unto his brethren.”
Earlier I commended Baldwin for his restraint in keeping the narrative focus on the Grimes family, since he also always retained in the subtextual background the wider indignities faced by all such Black families. In the culmination, however, Baldwin having clarified the duel between John and Gabriel, I submit that it might have been more subtle to have stopped there, leaving the larger implications latent for the reader to reflect on.
But this is Baldwin’s novel, not mine, and he has certainly earned a hearing. Suddenly, therefore, there is an abrupt extrapolation and -- more heartbreaking -- an agonizing question:
“ . . . . All niggers had been cursed, . . . all niggers had come from this most undutiful of Noah’s sons. How could John be cursed for having seen in a bathtub what another man—if that other man had ever lived – had seen ten thousand years ago, lying in an open tent? Could a curse come down so many ages?”
Denouement. As Sunday morning breaks, the small group of saints who have witnessed John’s conversion silently leave the Temple of the Fire Baptized. They are walking home.
“[T]hey came to the wide crossing where the streetcar line ran. A lean cat stalked the gutter and fled as they approached; turned to watch them, with yellow malevolent eyes, from the ambush of a garbage can . . . .”
ENDNOTES
1. “[H]e had made his decision. He would not be like his father, or his father’s fathers.”
[1] The timeline is a bit awkward for a novel set in 1949. Gabriel appears to have been born in 1880.