Go Tell It on the Mountain (novel)

Go Tell It on the Mountain
First edition cover
Author(s)	James Baldwin
Country	USA
Language	English
Genre(s)	Semi-autobiographical novel
Publisher	Knopf
Publication date	1953
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	272 pp (paperback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-440-33007-6 (paperback edition)
OCLC Number	24659110
LC Classification	PS3552 .A5 G6

Go Tell It on the Mountain is a 1953 semi-autobiographical novel by James Baldwin. The novel examines the role of the Christian Church in the lives of African-Americans, both as a source of repression and moral hypocrisy and as a source of inspiration and community. It also, more subtly, examines racism in the United States.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Go Tell It on the Mountain 39th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Plot summary

The opening chapter tells the story of John, a young African-American boy in Harlem in the 1930s. John has been raised by his mother Elizabeth and her preacher husband Gabriel, who nominally is John's father and is a strict disciplinarian, abusive to both his children and his wife. Gabriel's religious philosophy is tough and one of salvation through faith in Jesus, without which one is damned to hell. John hates his father and dreams of wounding or killing him and running away. The characters are members of the Temple of the Fire Baptized Church in Harlem, a Pentecostal Protestant denomination.

Florence's prayer tells her life story. She was born to a freed slave who chose to continue to work in the South for a white family. Her mother always favored Florence's younger brother Gabriel, causing Florence to feel a yearning need to escape from her life. Inspired by a black cook, Florence buys a one-way train ticket to New York and leaves her mother on her deathbed with Gabriel. In New York, Florence marries a dissolute man named Frank, resulting in a power struggle within their marriage which ends after ten years when Frank leaves one night and never returns. He later dies in France in World War I, but Florence only finds out from Frank's girlfriend.

Gabriel's prayer starts with a description of his drunken, womanizing ways as a teenager, before his rebirth in Christ and the start of his career as a preacher. After his conversion he forms a relationship with a childhood friend of Florence, a slightly older woman from his town named Deborah who was gang-raped as a teenager by a band of white men. Deborah is devout in her faith, and Gabriel uses her strength to become a successful Reverend himself. However, despite his religious convictions, Gabriel is unable to resist his physical attraction for a woman named Esther. Esther and Gabriel work for the same white family. Gabriel has a brief affair with her that but then ends it out of guilt. When Esther finds herself pregnant, Gabriel steals his wife's savings and gives them to Esther to hush up the matter and allow Esther to go away to have her baby; she goes to Chicago but dies giving birth to their son, Royal. Royal knows his father but doesn't know of their relationship, and is eventually killed in a barroom fight in Chicago. Gabriel is powerless and unable to stop his son's murder. Deborah, who knew or suspected that Royal was her husband's son from the beginning, admonishes Gabriel before her death for abandoning Esther and his son.

Elizabeth's prayer, the shortest of the three, tells her story. As a young girl, Elizabeth was very close to her father, but when her mother dies, she is forced by a court order to live with an imperious and cold aunt, and then goes to live in New York with a friend of the aunt's who is a Spiritualist medium. It is revealed that Gabriel is not John's biological father, for Elizabeth had gone to New York with her boyfriend, Richard, a self-educated "sinner" who did not believe in the Church and who never carried out his promise to marry Elizabeth. Richard is arrested for a robbery he didn't commit, and while he is acquitted at trial, the experience – including the abuse he takes at the hands of white police officers – leads him to commit suicide on his first night home. Elizabeth, then just a few months pregnant with John, takes a job, where she meets Florence. Florence introduces her to Gabriel, whom she marries.

The final chapter returns to the church, where John sees his friend Elisha fall to the floor in a religious ecstasy and is himself then caught up in a Pentecostal spiritual experience and falls to the floor. He has a series of dreamlike visions in which he sees hell and heaven, life and death, and also Gabriel standing over him. When he regains his senses, he says that he is saved and that he has accepted Jesus as his savior.

Yet even as the group leaves the church, old sins are revisited as Florence threatens to tell Elizabeth of Gabriel's sordid past. Although she does not tell Elizabeth, she hopes that she finds out eventually.

Characters

• John, the protagonist. He is fourteen years old at the beginning of the novel; described as frail and awkward.
• Roy, John's younger half-brother, who gets beaten by whites in the first section of the novel. He is described as boisterous.
• Ruth, infant daughter of Gabriel and Elizabeth.
• Sarah, daughter of Gabriel and Elizabeth.
• Elizabeth, the mother.
• Gabriel, the father. He is a deacon, and is prejudiced against white people. He shows great antipathy, even hatred, towards John.
• Aunt Florence, Gabriel's older sister and therefore John's aunt. She intercedes with her brother over the punishments he gives out.
• Elisha, the pastor's nephew. He attempts to talk John into being a good lord-abiding young man.
• Sister Price
• Sister McCandless
• Deborah, Gabriel's first wife. When a teenager, she was gang-raped by white men.
• Mother Washington, a parishioner.
• Ella Mae, Mother Washington's granddaughter.
• Frank, Florence's husband, who died in the First World War in France. He drank, was dissolute, and saved no money.
• Elder Peters, an elder of the church.
• Esther. She drinks whisky and says she doesn't have time to pray. Gabriel, feeling a passion for her that he does not feel for his first wife, has sex with her and ends the relationship nine days later.
• Royal, Gabriel's illegitimate son with Esther. When news of Royal's death arrives, Deborah correctly surmises that Gabriel is Royal's father.
• Sister McDonald, Esther's mother and thereby Royal's maternal grandmother.
• Elizabeth, Gabriel's second wife. As a child, she goes to live with her aunt in Maryland after her mother dies. Elizabeth speaks fondly of her loving father. Elizabeth is mother to four characters in the book: John (with Richard) and Roy, Ruth, and Sarah (with Gabriel).
• Elizabeth's mother, who dies when Elizabeth is still a child; described as light-skinned.
• Elizabeth's father, he would take Elizabeth to the circus when she was a child.
• Elizabeth's aunt, who lives in Maryland.
• Richard, Elizabeth's boyfriend who takes her to New York City; self-educated, sometimes bitter, he is the biological father of John and the true love of Elizabeth's life, the only character in the book with ambition to change the system in which the characters live.
• Madame Williams, a Spiritualist friend of Elizabeth's aunt, with whom she stays while in city.

References to other works

Baldwin makes several references to the Holy Bible in Go Tell It on the Mountain, most importantly to the story of Ham, Noah’s son who saw his father naked one day. Noah consequently cursed Ham’s son Canaan to become the servant of Noah’s other sons.

Baldwin refers to several other people and stories from the Bible, at one point alluding to the story of Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt, and drawing a parallel to that exodus and the need for a similar exodus for African-Americans out of their subservient role in which whites have kept them. John's wrestling with Elisha evokes the story of Jacob wrestling with a mysterious supernatural being in Genesis.

The rhythm and language of the story draws heavily on the language of the Bible, particularly of the King James translation. Many of the passages use the patterns of repetition identified by scholars such as Robert Alter and others as being characteristic of Biblical poetry.

Major themes

• autobiography : James Baldwin grew up in Harlem and never knew his biological father. His stepfather was a Baptist minister and Baldwin said he was abusive and strict.^{[citation needed]} Also like John, Baldwin underwent a religious awakening at the age of 14, the age when Baldwin became a Pentecostal preacher. He later became disillusioned with church life and expressed this in his later novels. He began to feature homosexual and bisexual themes in his later works.^{[citation needed]} His novel Giovanni's Room, serves as an example of these themes and is taken as an indicator of Baldwin's sexuality.

There are some hints of homosexual themes in Go Tell It On The Mountain; as for example John's fascination and attraction for Elisha.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

In an attempt to copy the success of the 1977 mini-series Roots, which was also an African-American family saga, the ABC network produced a made-for-television movie based in Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1984. Stan Lathan directed the film, with Paul Winfield starring as Gabriel in his adulthood and Ving Rhames playing Gabriel in his youth.[1]