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.

Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Plot introduction

The novel includes five parts: a chapter told largely from 14 year-old John's perspective; then three chapters called "The Prayers of the Saints," told from the perspectives of John's aunt Florence, his father, and his mother; and a concluding chapter. The three prayers correspond to the thoughts and recollections of the three "saints" as they pray in a revival-style service.

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, the latter of whom 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.

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. Florence buys a one-way train ticket to New York and leaves her mother on her deathbed. 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. He has a brief affair with her 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 works as a medium. It turns out that Gabriel is not John's biological father. 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 falls to the floor in a spiritual fit (unaffected). Curiously, he is overtaken by the spirit right after his friend Elisha is. He has a series of dreamlike visions, seeing visions of hell and heaven, life and death, and seeing Gabriel standing over him. When he awakes, he says that he is saved and that he has accepted Jesus. Yet even as the group leaves the church, old sins are revisited as Florence threatens to tell Elizabeth of Gabriel's sordid past.

Characters

• John, the protagonist. He is fourteen years old at the beginning of the novel. He is described as frail and awkward.
• Roy, John's younger brother, who gets beaten up by whites in the first section of the novel. He is described as boisterous.
• Elizabeth, the mother
• Gabriel, the father. He is a deacon. He holds a grudge against white people. He shows GREAT hatred towards John(son)
• Aunt Florence, Gabriel's sister and therefore John's aunt. She intercedes with her brother over the punishments he gives out.
• Elisha, the pastor's nephew. He is a young man. He wrestles. He attempts to talk John into being a good lord-abiding young man.
• Sister Price
• Sister McCandless
• Deborah, Gabriel's first wife. She was raped at an early age 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 was unable to save his money and he drank.
• Elder Peters, an elder priest.
• 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.
• Sister McDonald, Esther's mother and thereby Royal's maternal grandmother.
• Elizabeth, goes to live with her aunt after her mother dies.
• Elizabeth's mother, light-skinned, dies when Elizabeth is still a child.
• 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.

This story is important for two reasons. Firstly, it was used as a Biblical justification of slavery and the explanation of the supposed inferiority of people of African descent because Ham’s sons migrated to Africa. John wonders about this interpretation briefly in the novel. Secondly, this story established the taboo of the nakedness of the patriarchy. John one day also saw Gabriel naked in the bath, when he was asked to help wash Gabriel's back and is revolted and angry by the experience. But he also sees Gabriel naked metaphorically. John sees him as a hypocrite. Because of this, the story of Ham is referenced often when Baldwin describes John’s crisis of faith.

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 (Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, Basic Books, 1987).

Major themes

• autobiography : James Baldwin grew up in Harlem and never knew his biological father. His stepfather was a Pentecostal Christian minister and Baldwin said he was abusive and strict. Also like John, Baldwin underwent a religious awakening at the age of 14, the age when Baldwin became a 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. 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.

References