Books by & about James Baldwin

Carol E. Henderson, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical And Critical Essays. Peter Lang Publishing, 2006.

Go Tell It on the Mountain  /   The Fire Next Time  /   Notes of a Native Son  /   If Beale Street Could Talk

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Go Tell It on the Mountain 

By James Baldwin. Knopf. $3.50

Review by T.E. Cassidy

This is a novel about Harlem’s store-front churches, seen through the eyes of the people who go to one of them. These people have blood and flesh in their church, and in their past in the South, and it would seem that, therefore, their story would be of wonder, strength, tragedy, and sometimes beauty. The story is of all these things, partly. But it is not what the author hopes it will be, when he says of his intentions: “it is a fairly deliberate attempt to break out of what I always think of as the ‘cage’ of Negro writing. I wanted my people to be people first, Negroes almost incidentally.”

He has not really accomplished that in this book, because there is always the absolute feeling of injustice toward a people, not as people, but as a race of people. The disasters that occur are those that occur only, or largely, because these are Negro people. Their feelings may be those shared in other circumstances by others, but these, here, are clearly marked “Negro.” Yet the mark of the spirit is here, that which can be seen in any experience of men who have a sense of sin and a sense of repentance.

This is the mark that is upon the Grimes family, in one way or another. The tale of John’s childhood and growth is the tale of his awakening to his role in the life of the Harlem church where his father is head deacon. The “Temple of the Fire Baptized” is the scene of revival meeting. During the course of the meeting, the author goes back over the lives of the Grimes family—their individual journeys from the South to the North.

The first part (“The Seventh Day”) sets the scene and gathers all the family into present focus. In part two, the lives of Florence, Gabriel, and Elizabeth—sister, brother, and wife—are recorded in relation to each other and to the children, John and Roy. Each of these is a story that leads to a prayer for salvation and hope for the children, especially for John who is marked for the elect. The last part is “The Threshing Floor,” the wrestling arena where John meets the Lord and the sword-test of the soul.

Temptation stalks everyone, and wins ands loses alternately. Gabriel, for example, “hated the evil that lives in his body, and he feared it, as he feared and hated the lions of lust and longing that prowled the defenseless city of his mind.” Elizabeth had been told by her father to “weep, when she wept, alone; never to let the world see, never to ask for mercy; if one had to die, to go ahead and die, but never to let oneself be beaten.” And Florence, as she finds her way to the Lord, was “as though she had been hurled outward into time, where no boundaries were, for the voice was the voice of her mother, but the hands were the hands of death.”

There are many strong and powerful scenes in this work. Mr. Baldwin has his eye clearly on the full values that his sincere characters possess, though these values often are tossed aside and trampled. His people have an enormous capacity for sin, but their capacity for suffering and repentance is even greater. In think that is the outstanding quality of this work, a sometimes majestic sense of the failings of men and their ability to work through their misery to some kind of peaceful salvation. Certainly, the spark of the holy fire flashes even through their numerous external misfortunes.

Source: Commonweal (May 22, 1953)

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