Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
“Baldwin: Writing Class 101.”
During my doctoral work, I immersed myself in literature in order to learn how to write. I wanted to think like the critical theorists I was studying, but did not feel the need to emulate the, shall we say, “usual scholarly style” of crafting academic prose. Consequently, I read everything I could get my hands on. Novels. Plays. Books about writing. Creative nonfiction. Essays in particular drew me, and I took little time in discovering that James Baldwin (“Notes of a Native Son”) and Joan Didion (“On Keeping a Notebook,” “The White Album,”) would serve as my guiding lights. I’ve since added Jo Ann Beard’s searing “The Fourth State of Matter” among my touchstones.
I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never read Baldwin’s novels, but I haven’t read them. So, now I am reading them.
Cue up Go Tell it on the Mountain.
The novel tells the saga of the family of Reverend Gabriel Grimes. Gabriel comes into the world of 1879 Georgia and reveals at a precocious age flaws that would make the quintessential reformed sinner, Saint Augustine, blush. He (Gabriel) finds a faith in God equal to his agony, and after Tennessee Williams-like tragedy, lives a second life in Harlem from the first decades of the twentieth century up until the war period. The story takes us through each of the character’s lives as a series of overlapping flashbacks during an all-night service in which Gabriel’s stepson John undergoes an ecstatic conversion experience.
As a coming-of-age story, the book sails on strong tailwinds. Father-and-son tensions are as universal as they are intractable, and a rich vein to mine. Among myriad exemplars of the genre, we would do well to put Go Tell it on a Mountain in conversation with August Wilson’s Fences, a play in which baseball stands in for baptism, or also with Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, which critiques male parenting in the hidden ultra-Orthodox Jewish world, and which also involves baseball, in fact.
As an aside, the dust jacket on my library copy contains the baffling claim that critics hail the 1953 work as, “the first novel about Negroes to be written from a non-racial point of view.” Really? Not Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)? Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930)? Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)? Frederick Douglas? W.E.B. Du Bois? Shakespeare’s Othello, for that matter?
Also, James Baldwin, the voice of authority of black letters of his time, and maybe of all time, writes from a “non-racial” perspective??? Baldwin centers his writing on the importance of articulating the black experience(s) in America, and his contributions paved the way for a parade of black authors since that time, one more virtuosic than the next: Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colson Whitehead, N.K. Jemisin, Zadie Smith, Paul Beaty, etc., etc., etc. (we’ll put Maya Angelou among the Great Ancestors, in her own category), not to mention poets (Langston Hughes, Amanda Gorman, again, M.A.), and approximately a gazillion playwrights of color.
Speaking of which, teeming with conflict, the sparse dialogue portions of Go Tell it on a Mountain read a lot like a stage play, with narration as stage direction. Baldwin takes us through the lives of each of the characters, though the transitions can be hard to follow. The book happens in an Augenblick, after all, a series of flashbacks in the bat of an eye, and dissolves into a revelatory vision quest by the end.
I find myself at a disadvantage with Go Tell it on a Mountain because I don’t understand the religious impulse. I feel comfortable with ambiguity regarding existential questions and do not experience a need for a God in my life. However, many people do. Put plainly, America is not, and never has been, a secular nation. For example, 24% of all Americans self-identify as born again evangelical Protestant, a modest decline from the steady-state of 30% historically—although the rate can reach as high as something like 35% depending on the survey protocol (*this debate turns out to be surprisingly complex, but in short: since scholars can only speak in conjunctions, researchers had always asked people if they were “born again or evangelical,” thinking the two terms are interchangeable, when for many respondents, they are not.) The rates of black evangelicals clock in higher still.
Religious white, and also many black, readers may feel at sea with the novel’s depictions of ecstatic religious experience, as suburban Aristotelean variants of Christianity tend not to involve Ezekial-like visitations. I’m more sympathetic to the phantasmagoric aspects of Baldwin’s narrative than heavy-handed theology, since I take an interest in the fact that the role of trance in spirituality exists everywhere. If you’d like to go deeper into the subject, I recommend Mircea Eliade’s touchstone, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, or if you’re brave in terms of negotiating jargon, see Gilbert Rouget’s rigorous Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations Between Music and Possession. Executive summary: trance states emerge with human origins, and like so many aspects of American black culture(s), antecedents of Pentecostal ceremonies extend back to the pre-Middle Passage. All the same, the obsessive, unrelenting inclusion of religious language throughout the dialogue can feel overwhelming to those of us who adopt a “no thank you” stance towards organized religion.
As for the novel’s themes of hypocrisy, the disconnect between words and deeds among believers goes without saying. I would go as far as to suggest an inverse relation between religiosity and moral conduct. The loudest proponents of catechisms seem to be the first to stray from their marriage vows, as Gabriel bears out.
Again, Baldwin constitutes one of my literary guiding lights. His elevated writing voice, mixed with elemental language, rings true in a book about faith. The book’s sentences read like pronouncements, “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 of the leaves of trees, trampled the broad grass, and broke the neck of the flower.” Baldwin’s word choices take the breath away, and he adopts the mantle of theologian without effort. After having read the novel, I was not surprised to learn that Baldwin himself went through a teenage period as a youth minister for a Pentecostal congregation before leaving the church, due to his sexuality, among multiple factors.
On a stylistic level, I will say that Baldwin indulges in writer habits that I choose to omit in my own craft. Passive voice. Overuse of habit words (“suddenly,” “began to…”). The Awful It (“It was Mary who wrote the letter”—ugh, fingernails on all the chalkboards).
I think that I draw more inspiration from Baldwin as an essayist, though we can never overstate his importance in the development of black voices in novel form. At the very least, essays like, “The Fire Next Time,” “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” "Letter from a Region in My Mind", “"The Devil Finds Work,” and “Notes of a Native Son”—both the title essay and all ten essays that collection, would seem to inform reading his fiction, and vice versa.
I’m looking forward to Giovanni’s Room next, and then Another Country after that.
In the meantime, read this book on a mountainside, or anywhere else.