Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [1]
Something happened to their faces and their voices, the rhythm of their bodies, and to the air they breathed; it was as though wherever they might be became the upper room, and the Holy Ghost were riding in the air. His father’s face, always awful, became more awful now, his father’s daily anger was transformed into prophetic wrath. His mother, her eyes raised to heaven, hands arked before her, moving, made real for John that patience, that endurance, that long suffering, which he had read in the Bible and found so hard to image.
Between the novel’s opening and closing – the beginning of the service, with ‘the Lord high on the wind tonight’, and the closing, the morning, with John writhing for mercy on the threshing floor in front of the altar – we read the stories of his relatives: Florence, his aunt; Gabriel, his father; and his mother Elizabeth. In three long chapters we come to know the beliefs, the leave-takings, the loves, the honour and dishonour, that had made up the lives of these three people, lives which have animated a host of other lives, and which, by and by, have come to animate the life of John Grimes too. There are secrets in the novel, as they emerge in a beautiful, disturbing pattern, uncovered words speaking clearly, soulfully, of this one family’s legacy of pain and silence.
In Go Tell It on the Mountain, John has a certain dread of the life that awaits him; he feels doomed and he dreams of escape. He has made decisions. ‘He will not be like his father, or his father’s father. He would have another life.’ It might be said that this has been a vain dream of artists – and teenagers – since the beginning of time, but in Baldwin it is neither vain not merely a dream, for John Grimes represents, in all the eloquence of his wishes, a new kind of American. His father’s fathers were slaves. John’s father, Gabriel, is free, bur he is expected to swear allegiance to the flag that has not sworn allegiance to him, and he lives in a racist land. On this front, Baldwin’s America was to become a battleground, but John, given the date of events in the novel, can never be a Civil Rights cipher. He feels guilty for failing to share Gabriel’s unambivalent hatred of white people, but John has additional freedoms in mind – freedom from the local oppressions of Gabriel being first among them. Go Tell It on the Mountain is not a protest novel, it is a political novel of the human heart. White men may be evil, but they are not the beginning nor the end of evil. Baldwin was interested at this point in corruption at the first level of legislative power – the family.
Baldwin wrote about black people. He did not write novels which understood the lives of black people only in terms of white subjugation. At the same time he recognized every terror of segregation, and Go Tell It on the Mountain is a shocking, and shockingly quiet, dramatization of what segregation meant in the years when the novel is set. Early on we see John contemplating the forbidden world inside the New York Public Library, a world of corridors and marble steps and no place for a boy from Harlem. ‘And then everyone,’ Baldwin writes, ‘all the white people inside, would know that he was not used to great buildings, or to many books, and they would look at him with pity.’ This is a strong thing for a writer to remember, or to imagine, and Baldwin brings it to the page with a sense of anger, and regret. The novel is marked by the dark presence of ‘down home’, the Old South, where all of John’s family came from in search of a new life. This was Baldwin’s primary milieu: