Go Tell It On The Mountain

James Baldwin's first novel is as fresh a wound today as when it was first published in 1952. Baldwin was so steeped in the Bible as a living Word for African Americans--or a certain sub-culture of African Americans (the sub-culture from which he had himself emerged)--that pages of the book read as if they must have poured, without effort, from his pen. The Bible as "living Word" envelops Baldwin's characters, an insistent presence that promises them meaning (and, therefore, dignity) in the white-dominated world that denies them dignity; it promises them hope of victory over that world and over the temptations that crowd in on them from all sides when the animal pleasures of the body are all that are left them for solace in that world.

But Baldwin's is not a simple tale of Christian redemption: the relation of that great Myth to the daily lives and loves, hates, and lusts of his characters is complicated and, in the end, the reader is left wondering if it can actually deliver on its promise or if, as Marx remarked famously, it offers only an opiate or palliative alongside sex and booze and other entertainments.

At the end of the novel we find John, the preacher's adopted son, struggling to find a way to live by that Myth, to use it as means of penetrating the oppressive nature of Black life, North and South, in mid-twentieth century America, to something more true, more powerful and elemental:

"And John tried to see through the morning wall, to stare past the bitter houses, to tear the thousand grey veils of the sky away, and look into the heart--that monstrous heart which beat forever, turning the astounded universe, commanding the stars to flee away before the sun's red sandal, bidding the moon to wax and wane, and disappear, and come again; with a silver net holding back the sea, and, out of mysteries abysmal, re-creating, each day, the earth. That heart, that breath, without which was not anything made which was made. Tears came into his eyes again, making the avenue shiver, causing the houses to shake--his heart swelled, lifted up, faltered, and was dumb" [James Baldwin, Go Tell It On The Mountain, New York: Dell (1980), 257].

Baldwin closes the book with John hopeful--or at least trying to convince himself--that ecstatic religious experience and the community that promotes it and offers to support him in the future will all prove effectual. But given the life of the preacher himself, and the lives of other members of John's extended family, it is difficult to imagine how this might actually happen.

Go Tell It On The Mountain is a powerful reminder of the ways in which myth and experience overlap and mutually inform one another in the life of religious communities, providing them with rich resources for interpretation; but it is also a reminder that there is more to the story of every individual life than the available stock of enculturated interpretations will allow:

"'God sees the heart,' [the preacher] repeated, 'He sees the heart.' 'Well, He ought to see it,' [his sister] cried, 'He made it! But don't nobody else see it, not even your own self! Let God see it--He sees it all right, and He don't say nothing'" [ibid., 253].