I opened Go Tell It On the Mountain knowing only that it was written by James Baldwin — the Baldwin who talks about the “moral responsibility of the artist” – the Baldwin who left for Paris to escape the terrorism of the United States. I had read other James Baldwin’s works over time, but many years had passed since last I picked up one of his works. I had no idea what to expect of this novel and to be honest it took a while to get past the first fifty pages, but once I did, I finished it within two days.
As I read this, I remembered Baldwin is the son of a preacher and the same is true for the main character in Go Tell It On the Mountain. The entire novel takes place in one day following the family from their home to church and back again. That’s it. That’s all that happens in the physical movement of this family — just a walk down a few blocks in Harlem, but within these short hours multi-generational stories are told. Stories that reflect the trauma of enslavement, Jim Crow and the Great Migration north. And that is where I was drawn in (as I always am) to the stories of the ancestors that live inside of us coming out in ways we often don’t understand.
John is young, a teenager who cannot see past the hypocrisy and violence of his father’s religion and religious practices. The narrative starts out describing a relatively typically tense father-son relationship but that tension grows as John’s father, Gabriel pushes him to be baptized/born again. It’s in the church where John is sitting, then kneeling, then crying before his father where all the stories of his family intermingle. Narrators change and readers get a glimpse into the world the family left behind and the world they inhabit now.
Baldwin’s writing is breathtaking and heartbreaking. Although John has been raised by Gabriel, Gabriel is not his biological father. John’s biological father Richard killed himself before John was born. After being imprisoned and then released for a crime he didn’t commit, Richard commits suicide. Through the eyes of John’s mother Elizabeth, Baldwin writes: “And what would they do with Richard. And if they sent him away, what would he be like, then, when he returned? She looked out into the quiet, sunny streets, and for the first time in her life, she hated it all — the white city, the white world. She could not, that day, think of one decent white person in the whole world. She sat there, and she hoped that one day God, with tortures inconceivable, would grind them utterly in to humility, and make them know that black boys and black girls, whom they treated with such condescension, such disdain, and such good humor, had hearts like human beings, too, more human hearts than theirs.” The writing here, as I said earlier, is heartbreaking precisely because it shows there is no way out for Richard even if he is freed from jail (which he is). It doesn’t matter. There is no refuge for black “boys and girls” in the United States. No place is safe. And for Richard, that is exactly what happens. The day after he is sent home, he kills himself. There is no freedom. There is no refuge. There is no safe place.
Each character in the novel experiences this — a brief glimpse of something beautiful, of something possible followed by the utter devastation of being Black within the lie that is democracy and freedom in the United States.
I’m not naive, but even then, there was a moment when I was deep into the story of Elizabeth and Richard. They have been out for the day and return back to her apartment later than usual. He leaves, but there is a moment when she wants to call him back. She doesn’t and that is the night he is arrested. What struck me here was the dread, the fear, the knowledge I had as a reader of what would happen next. Families of color know this; it is never safe to enjoy too much, to be too free, to let your guard down in the world outside because that is when the strike happens. The hit you weren’t expecting and shame on you for letting yourself be caught unaware. That’s the lesson Richard and Elizabeth already know when he walks away from her on the sidewalk and the consequences as they have been for centuries are no different.
Patricia Marie Perea 