Black History Month: Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin Rating: ★★★★½ Publication Date: May 18, 1953 Genre: classic, fiction Pages: 240 ReRead?: No Project: back to the classics, Mt. TBR 2022 “Mountain,” Baldwin said, “is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” Go Tell It on the Mountain, originally published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery one Saturday in March of 1935 of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

I’m still catching up on my Baldwin reads. This was a powerful book – it’s Baldwin’s first major work, published in 1953.  Set all on one day, it covers four separate perspectives: the main character, John Grimes, his step-father, Gabriel, a minister, his father’s sister, Florence, a woman nearly overcome with bitterness, and his long-suffering mother, Elizabeth. It’s semi-autobiographical, and reading Notes of a Native Son after reading this helped me to better understand the character of step-father – who comes off quite badly – and the relationship between the protagonist and his step-father.

Set in Harlem in 1930, it provides deep insight into the depression-era African-American experience in the (supposedly) more welcoming northern states.

“There was not, after all, a great difference between the world of the North and that of the South. There was only this difference: the North promised more. And this similarity: what it promised it did not give, and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other”.

It also pays attention to, in particular, the deep reliance on Christian faith possessed by many (if not most) African-Americans, in spite of their oppression and marginalization. Written in poetic language that echoes the King James Bible, I would count Go Tell It On The Mountain as essential reading for anyone who is interested in understanding the history of racism in the United States.