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I think one of the things that makes me the angriest about a lot of organized religions is the systematic shaming and regulating of sexuality. Few things strike me as more abhorrent than controlling people by threatening and terrorizing them with divine punishment. Given the primal function sex serves in humans, being able to control it with the threat of damnation if one doesn’t respect the arbitrarily imposed limits, this is a tremendous power that religious leaders have hoarded sadistically for as long as organized religion has been a thing.

And this is the core of “Go Tell It On The Mountain�: what if sex wasn’t a sin? What if homosexuality wasn’t a sin? Would John feel the way he does about himself, about his life? Would Gabriel have half the power he uses and abuses? Knowing how autobiographical James Baldwin’s first novel is makes this story even more brutal, and goes a long way to inform the reader on why Mr. Baldwin thought and wrote the way he did.

Stuck between his stepfather Gabriel’s rigid and unforgiving dogmatism and a racist and homophobic society, John Grimes lives between a rock and a hard place, and this novel takes us through a couple of days of his young life (the novel opens on the morning of his 14th birthday), with long flashbacks to show us how he got there.

I love Baldwin’s prose: it strikes an amazing balance of muscular and poetic, conjures amazingly vivid images in my mind and astonishes me with how carefully (and lovingly) each word is chosen. There is a raw passion behind each sentence, and just as with “Giovanni’s Room� (/review/show...), it is impossible not to be affected by a story told so powerfully.

The screaming hypocrisy of Gabriel’s brand of evangelism made me absolutely furious, but I also felt very moved by his story. And I loved Florence and Elizabeth's stories; their lives were hard and bitter, and the strength and sacrifice they needed to make to survive was impressive and heartbreaking. We tend not to think much of parents before they were parents, and I am always fascinated with the exploration of their own lives and sufferings, and how all that stuff inexorably trickles down: Baldwin may have never forgiven his father, but in this book, he gives Gabriel the grace of having his pain and guilt acknowledged.

This novel is magnificent, and it gets 4 instead of 5 stars because I got to the end wanting to know what happened to John after this very strange birthday. Where did he go? Did he ever shake off his father's shadow? Considering the quote by Baldwin on my copy, that mentions that he wrote this book to deal with what had hurt him the most, namely his father, I can only guess that much trauma lingered...