Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [3]
Take John’s mother Elizabeth. Look at the shape of her thoughts on the page, as brought out in Baldwin’s third-person narrative:
‘I sure don’t care what God don’t like, or you, either,’ Elizabeth heart replied. ‘I’m going away from here. He’s going to come and get me, and I’m going away from here.’ ‘He’ was her father, who never came. As the years passed she replied only: ‘I’m going away from here.’ And it hung, this determination, like a heavy jewel between her breasts; it was written in fire on the dark sky of her mind. But, yes – there was something she had overlooked. Pride goeth before destruction; and a haughty spirit before a fall. She had not known this: she had not imagined that she could fall.
When reading this novel I am always aware of the charge that sex gives to religion, a bond the novel explores and confirms. We think of Baldwin as a figure of the 1960s, a literary embodiment of outrage in the face of American segregation, but actually, Baldwin, in his novels, writes more of sex and sin than he does of Civil Rights. Gabriel, a preacher speaking fiery words from the pulpit, is actually a secret sinner, fallen in ways that are known to his sister Florence, and known to his wife Elizabeth too. When younger, ‘he drank until hammers rang in his distant skull; he cursed his friends and his enemies, and fought until blood ran down; in the morning he found himself in mud, in clay, in strange beds, and once or twice in jail; his mouth sour, his clothes in rags, from all of him rising the stink of his corruption’.
The novel tells the story of how John comes to know this. Gabriel uses the church not to raise but to conceal his true character: his hypocrisy is everywhere around him, and nowhere more than in the minds of the women who had suffered him, and increasingly, too, in the mind of John, his ‘bastard’ son. Florence’s lover Frank was similarly corrupt, yet he, at least, in ‘the brutality of his penitence’, tried to make it up to Florence. It is John’s terrible fate – and everyone else’s – that Gabriel can neither inspire forgiveness nor redeem himself. He goes on with his lying. He inspired fear. He is hated.
Novels about the sins of men often turn out to be novels about the courage of women. Florence, Elizabeth, Deborah, and the tragic Esther, who is made pregnant by Gabriel and sent away to die, are the novel’s moral retainers, keeping faith with humanity, whilst all around them Faith rides on his dark horse, cutting down hope and charity. Florence says something for all the women in the novel, and for James Baldwin, one suspects, contemplating the fate of the women in his early life, when she looks at the face of Frank. ‘It sometimes came to her,’ Baldwin writes, ‘that all women had been cursed from the cradle’; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.’ Florence remembers the beginning of her own cruel destiny. It began with the birth of Gabriel. After this her future was ‘swallowed up’, and he life was over: ‘There was only one future in that house, and it was Gabriel’s – to which, since Gabriel was a man-child, all else must be sacrificed.’
Baldwin is unusual – and controversial, for more traditional black writers, as well as the countercultural ones ahead of him – in making the African-American bid for freedom complicated. For Florence, and for her nephew John Grimes, ‘free at last’ would have to mean several things, not only free from the Old South, or free from the evils of segregation, but the freedom to enter the world outside, and freedom from the hatreds of the family kitchen. ‘And this because Florence’s deep ambition: to walk out one