I read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain just after my eighteenth birthday, at a time when I presumed that my Catholic upbringing would soon mean little to me. During my first year at university, which I had just completed, I told no one that I had come close to joining a seminary. Some of my memories of almost having a vocation for the priesthood were embarrassing. I wished they belonged to someone else. But now my religious feelings had not merely ended; I hoped they had been effectively erased. Such feelings, I noticed, were mostly absent from the books I was reading, the films I was watching, the plays I was seeing, the conversations I was having.
Even the religion in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man seemed remote. Joyce himself—and Stephen Dedalus in the novel—had attended the same university where I was now studying, but the campus had moved to the Dublin suburbs; the new buildings were glass and steel, worlds away from the intimacy of Newman House in the center of Dublin where Joyce (and Stephen) had studied. And while I had attended school retreats as Stephen did, with long sermons, we did not hear about hell as much as he did. Hell, it appeared, had died out somewhat.
I did not know much about James Baldwin. I could not have named any of his other books. I was interested in the civil rights movement in America; that might have been one reason why I had bought a copy of Go Tell It on the Mountain. And since the university term was over, I had all summer to read books that were not on the curriculum.
I have no memory of being impressed or even detained much by the opening paragraph of Go Tell It on the Mountain. I just read it. I wonder if it was designed for that purpose: to be read without noticing the style. The sixty-one words in this opening paragraph include forty-two words with only one syllable:
Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said 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.
In many passages of Go Tell It on the Mountain, I saw when I began to study it, words are repeated. In the first page, for example, I registered not only the clarity of the diction, but the deliberate repetition of words, simple words like “said,” “memories,” “day,” “hospital,” “stranger.” Most novels avoid the repetition of single words in a paragraph or a page. If a story is to be told in chronological time—as though what comes next is not known and is now being revealed—then each sentence has to seem to follow from the one before. One sentence does not openly repeat the rhythm of the previous sentence or reflect it; it survives as though moving inexorably toward the future. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, however, Baldwin writes as if the story is already known— “Everyone had always said”—and is now being told again, as a folk tale might be recounted. Words are repeated as a way of making a statement appear natural, almost casual, but also as they might appear in a psalm or a prayer.
Baldwin writes, for example, about John, his young protagonist, in a church in Harlem: “He did not feel it himself, the joy they felt, yet he could not doubt that it was, for them, the very bread of life—could not doubt it, that is, until it was too late to doubt.” This moment has nothing of the untidy, spontaneous tone of ordinary, secular speech. Its source is rather religious intonation, words circling one another with an understated formality.
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In an essay published two years after Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin wrote about the sources of his prose style: “the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech—and something of Dickens’s love for bravura.” Baldwin’s style could be high and grave and reflect his glittering mind; his thought was embodied in his style. His thought was subtle, ironic, but also engaged and passionate. When he needed to, he could write a plain, sharp sentence, or he could produce a high-toned effect, or he could end a long sentence with a ringing sound. “I don’t mean to compare myself to a couple of artists I unreservedly admire,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1962,
Miles Davis and Ray Charles—but I would like to think that some of the people who liked my book responded to it in a way similar to the way they respond when Miles and Ray are blowing. These artists, in their very different ways, sing a kind of universal blues…they are telling us something about what it is like to be alive…. I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the way they sound…. I am aiming at what Henry James called “perception at the pitch of passion.”
Baldwin was suggesting that the rhythms of his own diction took their bearings from the solitary pain and uncompromising glamour of these two American musicians. But just in case anyone reading him wanted thus to think of him as a writer not also steeped in a literary tradition, he also had to invoke Henry James, the high priest of American refinement, an author known not for his passion, however pitched, but for the rigor of his controlling imagination.
In essays and interviews Baldwin needed to unloose himself from easy categories, but it was also central to his procedures as an artist to share James’s interest in consciousness as shifting and unconfined but also hidden and secretive, and his concern with language as both pure revelation and mask. Baldwin was fascinated with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence, as much as with the plain, declarative line. He would not settle for a single style. In her book Who Set You Flowin’: The African-American Migration Novel, Farah Jasmine Griffin compares the shifts in style in Go Tell It on the Mountain with John’s struggles to make a new life for himself: “Just as John vacillates between the larger white world of the stranger and the insular black world of Temple of the Fire Baptized, so too does the very language in which his story is told vacillate between that of the Western literary tradition and that of the black church.”
In 1953, just before Go Tell It on the Mountain was published, Ralph Ellison, who had received bound galleys from the publisher, wrote to Richard Wright that Baldwin’s book was “the best work on Negro religious conversion that I have seen thus far.” He had a problem, however, with the style; he saw the influence of Henry James. “I do think,” Ellison wrote, “that Baldwin could have gotten a bit closer to the material if he could have gotten rid of whatever it is that makes him feel the necessity of projecting such powerful material armored in Jamesian prose.”
In a letter three months later to his friend Albert Murray, Ellison found another way of describing his disapproval of the book: “As for Baldwin, he doesn’t know the difference between getting religion and going homo.”
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In Go Tell It on the Mountain Baldwin was indeed concerned with both “getting religion and going homo.” He was also concerned in a larger way with conscience, with the life of the spirit rather than the material life. He did not seek to write a novel in which love might lead to marriage or in which choice and chance would do battle. Nor did he seek to dramatize the tragic downfall, at the hands of prejudice or the police or fate itself, of a brilliant young man from Harlem. His novel is a portrait of the sinner as a young man; it dramatizes the inner life of John Grimes. John’s struggle with his father is a metaphor for other, more unearthly, more essential struggles, including the struggle to save his own soul.
Baldwin’s novel allowed these concepts—“the inner life” and “the soul”—to appear as natural in a style that played a light, ironic tone against a fierce sympathy and seriousness. What fascinated me when I read the book was how John Grimes is allowed to live in the novel at a remove from what happens to him. In a style we might call third-person intimate, Baldwin describes and invokes but does not often analyze motives or desires. The early pages of the novel, so soaked in church ritual as spectacle, had elements that were familiar to me, as well as elements that were strange. Nothing else I had read, however, had taken experiences and emotions that I recognized and then utterly transformed them. It may have been that very mixture of styles that Griffin identified, or the way the heightened emotion around ritual and religious belief strayed into same-sex desire, rendering the latter as unfathomable and as sacred as the former, but more dangerous.
The ability to be moved or even startled by religious ritual sets John apart from his younger brother, Roy. John is the religious one, whose destiny will be dictated by the intensity of his faith. Or so it might seem. But, almost gently, Baldwin infuses John’s faith with a current of feeling that is both distant and dangerously close. On the second page John and Roy recall watching a couple have sex, but even though Roy has watched them many times and “told John he had done it with some girls down the block,” John “had never watched again; he had been afraid.” On the next page we are introduced to John’s Sunday school teacher Elisha, who is seventeen, three years older than John, and “had but lately arrived from Georgia.”
John stared at Elisha all during the lesson, admiring the timbre of Elisha’s voice, much deeper and manlier than his own, admiring the leanness, and grace, and strength, and darkness of Elisha in his Sunday suit, wondering if he would ever be holy as Elisha was holy.
This is careful writing. The gaze is direct and sexual until “in his Sunday suit,” which reduces the intensity and makes it seem more ordinary. The “wondering if he would ever be holy as Elisha was holy” can be taken at face value, but it can also be read as a way of avoiding what John is really wondering. And just as John’s stare is not conscious, just as John is not self-aware, a reader like me in 1973 in Ireland could read this as a plain, straightforward account of how John is. He is different. He looks up to Elisha because Elisha is older, because he is holy, but also because of some other appeal, a masculine appeal, with the words there to prove it—“deeper and manlier,” “leanness, and grace, and strength.”
Elsewhere, John’s desires are almost spelled out. Clearly he masturbates, but the word is too clinical. Instead, “he had sinned with his hands a sin that was hard to forgive.” It happens when he is “in the school lavatory, alone, thinking of the boys, older, bigger, braver…” A scene when Elisha dances is filled with imagery that is almost garishly sexual; it describes a body on display using terms that move far beyond the religious even while invoking the name of Jesus. “And then, like a great black cat in trouble in the jungle, he stiffened and trembled, and cried out. Jesus, Jesus, oh Lord Jesus!”
There is no single word to describe how John feels, or who John is. He is religious, that much is certain. But what else is he? The novel says that he was a “funny” child, not because of a hinted-at sexuality but because he appeared both distant and unusually alert. Early in the book, in an unsettling moment, John becomes aware “that his mother was not saying everything she meant.” At another point he sees her face changing to the face “he gave her in his dreams.” But no image is simple. “Between the two faces there stretched a darkness and a mystery that John feared, and that sometimes caused him to hate her.” This is a fleeting thought; it does not define John. It merely shows his mind darting and shifting. He is becoming an interpreter of silence as much as speech. John is most alive when he is most alone. His stray or deliberately unspoken thoughts create an energy at the very center of the novel.
John is thoughtful, watchful, haunted by some things, afraid of others. He is also proud, but maybe that is an aspect of his fear. Sometimes his response is simple yet he is too interesting to be settled. Even when he decides early in the book that he would have a life different from that of his father “or his father’s fathers,” it is not clear if this is fantasy or youthful ambition or a passing thought or a mixture of all these things.
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While the power of prayer is apparent in Baldwin’s language, it does not save his characters from having to live in history and inhabit a world that undergoes change rather than redemption. John carries the weight of being a born noticer and the weight of having been a fourteen-year-old who can undergo a religious conversion. But he also carries another weight, which gives the book its structure. He carries the weight of what his parents went through.
In his book about Catholic novelists, Maria Cross, published in 1952, the Irish critic Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote about how those of us who come from “small and vocal communities” deal with a time and a generation that have passed:
There is for all of us a twilit zone of time, stretching back for a generation or two before we were born, which never quite belongs to the rest of history. Our elders have talked their memories into our memories until we come to possess some sense of a continuity exceeding and traversing our own individual being…. Children of small and vocal communities are likely to possess it to a high degree and, if they are imaginative, have the power of incorporating into their own lives a significant span of time before their individual births.
In Go Tell It on the Mountain, it is as if John contains all that has been experienced by the previous generation, who had come to Harlem from the South. He has thus been singled out in his own world not merely because of his intelligence, or because of his sexuality, or because of his eloquence or his susceptibility to religious feeling, but also because he comes haunted by what happened to his family before he was born. Roy is not haunted in this way.
The middle sections of the novel narrate the stories of the lives of the generation before John—the two sons who were born out of wedlock, the bad marriages, the religious fervor matched by hypocrisy. Baldwin’s shifting point of view gives us an intimate sense of John’s mother, Elizabeth; father, Richard; stepfather, Gabriel; and aunt, Florence. What happened a generation earlier doesn’t merely foreshadow events in time present, but infuses them, lives within them.
For Baldwin, the past was bound up with place, and since his sense of place was bound up with displacement, the past did not come simply. What is strange is how stories from the past represent the very center of Go Tell It on the Mountain, enough to make it a novel about how the displacement caused by the Great Migration entered into the spirit of these characters and their relationships. The novel has a shadow world where the past happened, where the earlier generation came from, and where much that was unresolved had been left behind.
That lost place is the American South. “A black boy born in New York’s Harlem in 1924,” Baldwin wrote in Esquire in 1980, “was born of southerners who had but lately been driven from land, and therefore was born into a southern community.” Two years after the novel appeared, Baldwin published an account of how his father, who died on July 29, 1943, came to resemble the figure of Gabriel:
No one, including my father, seems to have known exactly how old he was…. He was of the first generation of free men. He, along with thousands of other Negroes, came North after 1919 and I was part of that generation which had never seen the landscape of what Negroes sometimes call the Old Country.
David Leeming, in his biography of Baldwin, writes: “During the summer of 1957 Baldwin talked incessantly about the South, his fear of it and his sense of his own vulnerability in relation to it.” He was about to make his first visit there. In the essay “Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South,” Baldwin notes that, as he was preparing to set out, he was cautioned by a friend to “remember that Southern Negroes had endured things I could not imagine.” Leeming writes that he was warned of “the tension that might exist between blacks of the South and the black reporter from the North.” He is told “that it might be a good idea to arrive in Charlotte, North Carolina, the first stop on the itinerary, during the day rather than at night.”
Among the photographs in John’s family’s possession is one of his aunt, Florence, “when she had just come North” and another of his father as a young preacher who was married to a woman called Deborah, who had died in the South. “If she had lived, John thought, then he would never have been born; his father would never have come North and met his mother.” He doesn’t yet know that Gabriel is his stepfather, not his biological father.
That first wife of Gabriel’s, “this shadowy woman, dead so many years, whose name he knew had been Deborah, held in the fastness of her tomb, it seemed to John, the key to all those mysteries he so longed to unlock. It was she who had known his father in a life where John was not, and in a country John had never seen.” But it was a country he knows about: “John had read about the things white people did to colored people; how, in the South, where his parents came from, white people cheated them of their wages, and burned them, and shot them—and did worse things, said his father, which the tongue could not endure to utter.”
Gradually, events that took place in the South come to haunt the book, as they haunt John’s imagination, and offer a more fervid tone to the narrative. When Deborah was taken into the fields and raped by many White men, Deborah’s father threatened that he would kill these men, and he was left for dead by them. Then everyone, including Gabriel’s mother and his sister, “had shut their doors, praying and waiting, for it was said that the white folks would come tonight and set fire to all the houses, as they had done before.”
Baldwin has a special tone to describe the Southern night. A special eloquence, a way of balancing his sentences, using elaborate description and then a plain statement—moving from human feelings to ones that embrace the Almighty, creating an atmosphere that is unearthly and ominous: “In the night that pressed outside they heard only the horse’s hoofs, which did not stop; there was not the laughter they would have heard had there been many coming on this road, and no calling out of curses, and no one crying for mercy to white men, or to God.”
The South is not merely a place of fear but a place where slavery exists in living memory. John’s father’s mother had grown up as a slave, as “one of the field-workers, for she was very tall and strong; and by and by she had married and raised children, all of whom had been taken from her, one by sickness and two by auction; and one, whom she had not been allowed to call her own, had been raised in the master’s house.” From this place people would disappear, would be gone by morning on their journey North. Florence’s father, whom she scarcely remembered, had departed that way one morning not many months after the birth of her brother Gabriel. “And not only her father; every day she heard that another man or woman had said farewell to this iron earth and sky, and started on the journey North.”
It is as if the language of the book had itself known an earlier time, as if it took its bearing from a rhetoric that had been heard in a more dangerous place than Harlem, a place from which people sought to escape, as though escape were kind of deliverance. When Florence appears in the church at the very end of section one of the novel, Baldwin writes: “John knew that it was the hand of the Lord that had led her to this place, and his heart grew cold. The Lord was riding on the wind tonight. What might that wind have spoken before the morning came?”
This essay is adapted from On James Baldwin, published today by Brandeis University Press.
Colm Tóibín is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia. His eleventh novel, Long Island, was published in May. (July 2024)
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