Review: Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

When the saints (the constituents of the Black churches in Harlem) fall, screaming, to the floor before God in Go Tell It On The Mountain, I want to know what dance of neurons and chemicals has possessed them, the triggers and processes. What is it about the magic performance of church ritual that brings people to the limit of their psychological experience, to an agony and ecstasy that most of us don’t access, at least most of the time, and not without the assistance of substances or sublimity. It seems cathartic, maybe we should do it more.

But these I know are the wrong questions, because they are a matter of faith, something that defies us to suspend objectivity in its very definition. But faith is also something practised by people with bodies and desires, and James Baldwin scratches away at both in this depiction of a Black family in Harlem wrestling with sin and salvation.

Eldest son John, nearing 14, is yet to enter the house of the Lord, the Temple of the Fire Baptized where his father Gabriel preaches. John is his community’s hope, adulated as a future leader, but he has a terrible secret, something he can barely mention, desire for men. His father is tough and unloving, favouring the second eldest son Roy. Perhaps he can sense John’s deviance; or perhaps there’s something else. On John’s fourteenth birthday, a Saturday in 1935, he goes to late night worship and is joined by his father, aunt and mother. The bulk of the book takes places over this evening, as we learn from John’s family their own terrible secrets as they pray. Gabriel is the fulcrum of this story and this family, his “prayer” forming the heart of the novel, shaping the narrative around him. Go Tell It On The Mountain, as its title suggests, is a novel of the untold and the withheld, through fear or otherwise. Notably when secrets are spoken aloud, healing begins.

And Baldwin confesses and reveals a lot. Among other things this is a potent study of gender, race and sexuality and their various intersections. The men are furiously angry at the world, the women are patient with it, but Baldwin complicates this idea through the voices of Aunt Florence, John’s mother Elizabeth, and other women who get variously short ends of the stick. The legacy of slavery hangs heavy over this novel; Gabriel’s mother was enslaved; and the inheritance of segregation is a heavy cross to bear. To this already fervid context Baldwin adds faith. What is one to do with the suffering of being born into a sinful world? What is one to do with the additional sin of one’s humanity being less recognised than others? Baldwin does offer a revelatory answer, I think, one that has less to do with embracing God (although that is certainly part of it in the book’s astonishingly depiction of religious ectsasy in its final section) than realising one’s own inherent sovereignty.

Baldwin’s prose labours to potent effect, labouring like giving birth, dying, living, straining under the weight of the ecstasy and agony it must convey, like sinners, that is, all of us, labouring under the terrible weight of sin. For all its yearning for the immaterial, it is startlingly embodied, whether in its depiction of the saints on the threshing-floor of the church, or its potent eroticism.

Gay rating: 3/5 for a queer protagonist.