‘the balloon of experience is tied to the earth,’ wrote henry james in the american, ‘andunder that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or lesscommodious car of imagination.’ in 1949 james baldwin was living in paris – a measure of ropehaving been unfurled – yet his ties to harlem grew stronger by the day. there was little of hemingway or gertrude stein in baldwin’s sojourn; though he enjoyed a little more freedomthere, and adventure too, he wasn’t there for friendship or freedom or adventure either, but forwriting. baldwin came to europe in search of his own voice. he came for a clear view of the past.
and this exile suited him, sentences at once beginning to bleed out of memory ands imagination,old wounds opening into new language.
baldwin’s father was a lay preacher; to his eldest son he was ‘handsome, proud, andingrown’. the son was born into a religious community, a world where duty joined with pride,where sin battled with high hopes of redemption, where the saved sang over the damned, wherelove and hate could smell similar, and where fathers and sons could be strangers for ever. ‘i haddeclined to believe,’ baldwin wrote in his famous notes of a native son, ‘in that apocalypse whichhad been central to my father’s vision.’
… i had not known my father well. we had got on badly, partly because we shared,in different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride. when he was dead i realized i had hardlyever spoken to him … he was of the first generation of free men. he, along with thousandsof other negroes, came north after 1919 and i was part of that generation which had neverseen the landscape of what negroes sometimes called the old country.
baldwin was the kind of writer who couldn’t forget, he remembered everything, and thepulse of remembering, and the ache of old news, makes for the beat of his early writing. at the ageof fourteen he underwent what he called later ‘a prolonged religious crisis’, a confusion too deepfor tears, but not for prose. ‘i then discovered god, his saints and angels, and his blazing hell,’ hewrote, ‘i suppose him to exist only within the wall of a church – in fact, of our church – and i alsosupposed that god and safety were synonymous.’ at this point baldwin became a preacher too. heknew that something important happened when he stood up and entered deeply into the languageof a sermon. people listened, they clapped. ‘amen, amen,’ they said. and all of it remained withhim: the smell of church wood and the crying out, the shimmer of tambourines; the heat ofdamnation; the songs of the saved, his father’s face; and the new york world outside with itswhite people downtown who’d say ‘why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?’ butmore than anything it was his father’s face. ‘in my mind’s eye,’ hw writes in notes, ‘i could seehim, sitting at the window, locked up in his terrors; hating and fearing every living soul includinghis children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching toward the world which had despised him.’
some novelists, in their early work especially, set out to defeat the comforts of invention:
they refuse to make anything up. go tell it on the mountain is james baldwin’s first novel, ashadow-album of lived experience, the lines here being no less real than those on his mother’sface. for baldwin, as for proust, there is something grave and beautiful and religious about thelove of truth itself, and something of sensual joy in bringing it to the page. baldwin’s career as anovelist was spent walking over old territory with ghosts. things became new to him this way.
‘mountain is the book i had to write if i was ever going to write anything else,’ he said years later.
‘i had to deal with what hurt me most. i had to deal with my father.’
the novel is centred around a “tarry service’ at the temple of the fire baptised in harlemin 1935. fourteen-year-old john grimes, dubious, fearful, and already bitter, is about to walk thepath to salvation. there are high expectations of john, ‘to be a good example’, and to ‘comethrough’ to the lord. the service will last the whole night, and john is there in the company of theelder ‘saints’ of the church, and with his father and mother and aunt florence. there is a strongsense of john being one of the anointed, but we absorb his slow, terrible doubts about himself.
altogether he is not a happy child on this special night:
something happened to their faces and their voices, the rhythm of their bodies, and tothe air they breathed; it was as though wherever they might be became the upper room, andthe holy ghost were riding in the air. his father’s face, always awful, became more awfulnow, his father’s daily anger was transformed into prophetic wrath. his mother, her eyesraised to heaven, hands arked before her, moving, made real for john that patience, thatendurance, that long suffering, which he had read in the bible and found so hard to image.
between the novel’s opening and closing – the beginning of the service, with ‘the lord high on thewind tonight’, and the closing, the morning, with john writhing for mercy on the threshing floor infront of the altar – we read the stories of his relatives: florence, his aunt; gabriel, his father; andhis mother elizabeth. in three long chapters we come to know the beliefs, the leave-takings, theloves, the honour and dishonour, that had made up the lives of these three people, lives which haveanimated a host of other lives, and which, by and by, have come to animate the life of john grimestoo. there are secrets in the novel, as they emerge in a beautiful, disturbing pattern, uncoveredwords speaking clearly, soulfully, of this one family’s legacy of pain and silence.
in go tell it on the mountain, john has a certain dread of the life that awaits him; he feelsdoomed and he dreams of escape. he has made decisions. ‘he will not be like his father, or hisfather’s father. he would have another life.’ it might be said that this has been a vain dream ofartists – and teenagers – since the beginning of time, but in baldwin it is neither vain not merely adream, for john grimes represents, in all the eloquence of his wishes, a new kind of american. hisfather’s fathers were slaves. john’s father, gabriel, is free, bur he is expected to swear allegianceto the flag that has not sworn allegiance to him, and he lives in a racist land. on this front,baldwin’s america was to become a battleground, but john, given the date of events in the novel,can never be a civil rights cipher. he feels guilty for failing to share gabriel’s unambivalenthatred of white people, but john has additional freedoms in mind – freedom from the localoppressions of gabriel being first among them. go tell it on the mountain is not a protest novel, itis a political novel of the human heart. white men may be evil, but they are not the beginning northe end of evil. baldwin was interested at this point in corruption at the first level of legislativepower – the family.
baldwin wrote about black people. he did not write novels which understood the lives ofblack people only in terms of white subjugation. at the same time he recognized every terror ofsegregation, and go tell it on the mountain is a shocking, and shockingly quiet, dramatization ofwhat segregation meant in the years when the novel is set. early on we see john contemplating the forbidden world inside the new york public library, a world of corridors and marble steps and noplace for a boy from harlem. ‘and then everyone,’ baldwin writes, ‘all the white people inside,would know that he was not used to great buildings, or to many books, and they would look at himwith pity.’ this is a strong thing for a writer to remember, or to imagine, and baldwin brings it tothe page with a sense of anger, and regret. the novel is marked by the dark presence of ‘downhome’, the old south, where all of john’s family came from in search of a new life. this wasbaldwin’s primary milieu: the harlem of migrant black americans, bringing with them the storiesof their fathers and mothers, one generation away from slavery.
this northerness was important to baldwin. it was the world he knew from his childhoodand the world he cared most about. he had a feeling for the hopes that were invested in the journeynorth – ‘north,’ where, as gabriel’s mother says, ‘wickedness dwelt and death rode mightythrough the streets’. in one of his essays, ‘a fly in the buttermilk’, baldwin wrote of anothersoutherner’s contempt for the north, a man he tried to interview for a piece on the progress ofcivil rights: ‘he forced me to admit, at once, that i had never been to college; that northernnegroes lived herded together, like pigs in a pen; that the campus on which we met was a tribute tothe industry and determination of southern negroes. “negroes in the south form a community.” ’
baldwin’s sensibility, his talent for moral ambivalence, his taste for the terrifying patternsof life, the elegant force of his disputatious spirit, as much henry james as bessie smith, was notalways to find favour with his black contemporaries. langston hughes called go tell it to themountain ‘a low-down story in a velvet bag’. ‘a joan of arc of the cocktail party’ was amiribaraka’s comment on baldwin. some of this could be constructed as standard resentment –reminiscent of the kind expressed by gabriel towards john for not hating whites enough – andsome was a reaction against baldwin’s popularity with the white literary establishment. but thatwasn’t all. by the time he was writing novels, and writing these essays – works of magical powerand directness – baldwin had come to feel that the black ‘protest’ novel was breathlesslyredundant. in a recent essay about baldwin’s writing, the novelist darryl pinckney comments onbaldwin’s rejection of richard wright, the author of native son:
in retrospect baldwin praises wright’s work for its dry, savage folkloric humour andfor how deeply it conveys what life was like on chicago’s south side. the climate that hadonce made wright’s work read like a racial manifesto had gone. baldwin found whenreading wright again that he did not think of the 1930s or even of negroes, because wright’scharacters and situations had universal meanings.
in ‘alas, poor richard’, an essay in the collection nobody knows my name, baldwin concludesthat wright was not the polemical firebrand he took himself to be. many of baldwin’s blackcontemporaries hated this view.
baldwin’s first novel, in respect of all this, demonstrates a remarkable unit of form andcontent; the style of the novel makes clear the extent to which he was turning away from hisliterary forefathers. it may be sensible to see the novel as a farewell not only the harlem of hisfather, but to the literary influence of richard wright and uncle tom’s cabin. baldwin was unremitting on this point, and these several goodbyes, offered from his paris exile, became thecreed of his early writing. ‘in most of the novels written by negroes until today,’ he wrote, ‘thereis a great space where sex ought to be; and what usually fills this space is violence.’
go tell it on the mountain is a very sensual novel, a book soaked in the bible and theblues. spiritual song is there in the sentences, at the head of chapters, and it animates the voices onevery side during the ‘coming through’ of john grimes. as he steps up to the altar john issuddenly aware of the sound of his own prayers – ‘trying not to hear the words that he forcedoutwards from his throat’. baldwin’s language has the verbal simplicity of the old testament, aswell as its metaphorical boldness. the rhythms of the blues, a shade of regret, a note of pain risingout of experience, are deeply inscribed in the novel, and they travel freely along the lines ofdialogue. there is a kind of metaphorical, liturgical energy in some novels – in faulkner’s thesound and the fury, in joyce’s portrait of the artist as a young man, in elizabeth smart’s bygrand central station i sat down and wept, in toni morrison’s beloved – which is utterlyessential to the art. it may seem at first overpowering, to waft in the air like perfume, or to have thetexture of langston hughes’s velvet bag, but it is, in each of the cases, and especially in the caseof baldwin’s first novel, a matter of straightforward literary integrity. every word is necessary.
every image runs clear in the blood of the novel.
take john’s mother elizabeth. look at the shape of her thoughts on the page, as broughtout in baldwin’s third-person narrative:
‘i sure don’t care what god don’t like, or you, either,’ elizabeth heart replied. ‘i’mgoing away from here. he’s going to come and get me, and i’m going away from here.’
‘he’ was her father, who never came. as the years passed she replied only: ‘i’m goingaway from here.’ and it hung, this determination, like a heavy jewel between her breasts; itwas written in fire on the dark sky of her mind. but, yes – there was something she hadoverlooked. pride goeth before destruction; and a haughty spirit before a fall. she had notknown this: she had not imagined that she could fall.
when reading this novel i am always aware of the charge that sex gives to religion, a bond thenovel explores and confirms. we think of baldwin as a figure of the 1960s, a literary embodimentof outrage in the face of american segregation, but actually, baldwin, in his novels, writes more ofsex and sin than he does of civil rights. gabriel, a preacher speaking fiery words from the pulpit,is actually a secret sinner, fallen in ways that are known to his sister florence, and known to hiswife elizabeth too. when younger, ‘he drank until hammers rang in his distant skull; he cursed hisfriends and his enemies, and fought until blood ran down; in the morning he found himself in mud,in clay, in strange beds, and once or twice in jail; his mouth sour, his clothes in rags, from all ofhim rising the stink of his corruption’.
the novel tells the story of how john comes to know this. gabriel uses the church not toraise but to conceal his true character: his hypocrisy is everywhere around him, and nowhere morethan in the minds of the women who had suffered him, and increasingly, too, in the mind of john,his ‘bastard’ son. florence’s lover frank was similarly corrupt, yet he, at least, in ‘the brutality of his penitence’, tried to make it up to florence. it is john’s terrible fate – and everyone else’s – thatgabriel can neither inspire forgiveness nor redeem himself. he goes on with his lying. he inspiredfear. he is hated.
novels about the sins of men often turn out to be novels about the courage of women.
florence, elizabeth, deborah, and the tragic esther, who is made pregnant by gabriel and sentaway to die, are the novel’s moral retainers, keeping faith with humanity, whilst all around themfaith rides on his dark horse, cutting down hope and charity. florence says something for all thewomen in the novel, and for james baldwin, one suspects, contemplating the fate of the women inhis early life, when she looks at the face of frank. ‘it sometimes came to her,’ baldwin writes,‘that all women had been cursed from the cradle’; all, in one fashion or another, being given thesame cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.’ florence remembers the beginning of herown cruel destiny. it began with the birth of gabriel. after this her future was ‘swallowed up’, andhe life was over: ‘there was only one future in that house, and it was gabriel’s – to which, sincegabriel was a man-child, all else must be sacrificed.’
baldwin is unusual – and controversial, for more traditional black writers, as well as thecountercultural ones ahead of him – in making the african-american bid for freedom complicated.
for florence, and for her nephew john grimes, ‘free at last’ would have to mean several things,not only free from the old south, or free from the evils of segregation, but the freedom to enter theworld outside, and freedom from the hatreds of the family kitchen. ‘and this because florence’sdeep ambition: to walk out one morning through the cabin door, never to return.’ but the novelknows there is a price to be paid for this too. elizabeth, a long time away from the south, enjoyedwalking in central park, because ‘it recreated something of the landscape she had known’.
baldwin never got over his religious crisis at the age of fourteen. he didn’t forget. ‘thatsummer.’ he writes in the fire next time, ‘all the fears with which i had grown up, and whichwere now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between theworld and me, and drove me into the church.’ he surrendered to a spiritual seduction, falling downbefore the altar, and thereafter preaching for three years. baldwin recalls his father one dayslapping his face, ‘and in that moment everything flooded back – all the hatred and all the fear, andthe depth of a merciless resolve to kill my father rather than allow my father to kill me – and iknew that all those sermons and tears and all that repentance and rejoicing had changed nothing’.
baldwin put the essence of all of this into go tell it on the mountain. gabriel has thepreacher’s traditional love of helplessness, and traditional anger in the face of self-sufficiency. yetthe central issues of gabriel’s life are his hypocrisy, and the sexual desire that accompanies therejoicing of religious life. his treatment of esther combines the two (‘i guess it takes a holy man tomake a girl a real whore,’ she say) but only florence seems aware of the truth after ester is dead.
at the close of the novel she seeks to name the tree by its fruit. and john, who is not strange fruitof that tree, might live to curse all lies and go free into the world.
baldwin, all his writing, insisted he wrote only from experience. that was the kind ofwriter he was: he meant every word. there would always be something of the pulpit on baldwin’swriting, and something too of the threshing floor. go tell it on the mountain is a beautiful,enduring, spiritual song of a novel, a gush of life from a haunted american church. like manywriters with a religious past, the young man who wrote this novel was stranded in the space between his own body and the body of christ, and strung between the father he hated and thefather who might offer him salvation. john grimes finds the beginning of his redemption in thevery place where his father lived out his hypocrisy, the church, where gabriel spawned so much ofthe trouble in their lives. here, at last, after all is said and done, john grimes can go in search ofthe everlasting, ‘over his father’s head to heaven – to the father who loved him’.
andrew o’haganandrew o’hagan was born in glasgow in 1968. he is the author of the missing, a bookabout missing persons, and our fathers, a novel shortlisted for the booker prize, a whitbreadaward, the john llewellyn rhys prize and the impac dublin international literary award. he isa contributing editor to the london review of books.
for my father and mother they that wait upon the lord shall renew their strength;they shall mount up with wings like eagles;they shall turn and not be weary,they shall walk and not faint.
