Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [4]
Baldwin never got over his religious crisis at the age of fourteen. He didn’t forget. ‘That summer.’ he writes in The Fire Next Time, ‘all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.’ He surrendered to a spiritual seduction, falling down before the altar, and thereafter preaching for three years. Baldwin recalls his father one day slapping his face, ‘and in that moment everything flooded back – all the hatred and all the fear, and the depth of a merciless resolve to kill my father rather than allow my father to kill me – and I knew that all those sermons and tears and all that repentance and rejoicing had changed nothing’.
Baldwin put the essence of all of this into Go Tell it on the Mountain. Gabriel has the preacher’s traditional love of helplessness, and traditional anger in the face of self-sufficiency. Yet the central issues of Gabriel’s life are his hypocrisy, and the sexual desire that accompanies the rejoicing of religious life. His treatment of Esther combines the two (‘I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore,’ she say) but only Florence seems aware of the truth after Ester is dead. At the close of the novel she seeks to name the tree by its fruit. And John, who is not strange fruit of that tree, might live to curse all lies and go free into the world.
Baldwin, all his writing, insisted he wrote only from experience. That was the kind of writer he was: he meant every word. There would always be something of the pulpit on Baldwin’s writing, and something too of the threshing floor. Go Tell It on the Mountain is a beautiful, enduring, spiritual song of a novel, a gush of life from a haunted American church. Like many writers with a religious past, the young man who wrote this novel was stranded in the space between his own body and the body of Christ, and strung between the father he hated and the Father who might offer him salvation. John Grimes finds the beginning of his redemption in the very place where his father lived out his hypocrisy, the church, where Gabriel spawned so much of the trouble in their lives. Here, at last, after all is said and done, John Grimes can go in search of the Everlasting, ‘over his father’s head to Heaven – to the Father who loved him’.
Andrew O’Hagan
Andrew O’Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968. He is the author of The Missing, a book about missing persons, and Our Fathers, a novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a Whitbread Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award. He is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books.
For
My Father and Mother
They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall turn and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.
Contents
Part One
The Seventh Day
Part Two
The Prayers of the Saints
Florence’s Prayer
Gabriel’s Prayer
Elizabeth’s Prayer
Part Three
The threshing-Floor
PART ONE
THE SEVENTH DAY
And the Spirit and the bride say,
Come. And let him that heareth say
Come. And let him that is athirst
come. And whosoever will, let him
take the water of life freely.
I looked down the line,
And I wondered
Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It has been so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.
His earliest memories—which were in a way, his only memories—were of the hurry and brightness of Sunday mornings. They all rose together on that day; his