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Rating: 4 Stars


I posted this a couple of weeks ago, but I think my computer timed out before it saved. I looked for it and surprised to find it not there.
Unfortunately, that was about 20 books ago and it is no longer as fresh in my mind.

This was my first book by James Baldwin. It is the coming of age story of John Grimes, and ends with his religious conversion. John grows up in the shadow of Gabriel, his domineering evangelist father. He needs to make a decision about his faith and how he will live his life. This main story is woven together with those of his family and spanning over several decades. Through the family stories, we come to understand the dynamics between the characters.

Imagine you are turning 14 and you've been brought up to think that most pleasures in life are sinful. That going to the movies or playing with other kids in the street puts you on the path to perdition. You firmly believe that unless you are saved by Jesus, you will burn in Hell eternally. Imagine also that you are repeatedly told that your father, deacon and preacher, is a good man and that you should follow his example. That when he beats you and your brother with his belt, it is only to beat the sin out of you. Imagine that you hate your father with the intensity of the fires of hell, and that the last thing you want is to ever be like him. This is the dilemma John struggles with in Go Tell it on the Mountain.

The story is told within the space of John's 14th birthday, as he struggles with hatred, yearning, and existential terror. But as the congregation kneels in song and prayer, we also get the backstory, and all the terrible secrets, through the memories of his aunt, his father, and his mother. Thus, the novel spans the time just after the American civil war and up to the 1930s.

This book is rage and despair. It broke my heart again and again, and then it stomped on the pieces. And it did so beautifully and with such passion it gave me the chills. And such prose! The introduction calls it 'a beautiful, enduring, spiritual song of a novel (...) soaked in the Bible and the blues'. I can confirm. This is the most powerful novel I have read in quite some time.

Read 2011, Go Tell It On The Mountain written by James Baldwin and published in 1953 is semi autobiographical and examines the African American experience in the Christian church both as a source of spiritual support and also moral hypocrisy. The story is set in Harlem during the 1930s and the protagonist is John. His mother Elizabeth and her preacher husband Gabriel raise John. John's father is strict and abusive to his family. The story is told through the prayers (flashbacks) of his aunt Florence, Gabriel, and his mother Elizabeth. John is at the threshing floor in crisis this church service night. There are many references to the Holy Bible in this book, all in the King James Version.

The author grew up in Harlem and never knew his biological father. He was raised by a Baptist minister. Baldwin had a spiritual rebirth at age 14 as John does in this story. Baldwin later is disillusionment with the church as his books that follow this often reveal.

This book was easy to read. It was basically an okay read. I am glad I read it as it is Baldwin's debut novel and will be interesting to compare with his writings after he moves away from his ties to the church. Reportedly all of Baldwin's works are semi autobiographical. I also read this while listening to the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the two books go well together. The ending left me hanging. John has been saved but sin is still at the door. His stepfather is still angry and violent minded toward John. I had a feeling of a bad omen for the future.

This is the 2nd book that I've read by James Baldwin. I read Giovanni's Room a few years ago and liked it.

Go Tell it on the Mountain is Baldwin's first novel and is set in Harlem in the 1930's and centers around an African-American family. It is John Grimes 14th birthday and he is overwhelmed by his father Gabriel, who is a church leader. A lot of the book is about John struggling with and trying to find his faith. John lives under the shadow of his father who preaches that anything John finds pleasurable (movies, hanging out with friends etc.) is a sin and that John's soul needs to be saved. The book flashes back to other's in John's life, such as his father. Gabriel puts a lot of pressure on his family to be good and faithful, however Gabriel himself is far from perfect. He beats his boys when he believes they've done wrong. He is not the best spouse...and more.

I am glad that I read this and it wasn't too much of a challenge. There were a lot of references to the bible and religion. I am not super religious so I was a bit unsure going into this based on what I'd read in reviews about it being a lot about religion, but for me, it wasn't too much. It worked with the story.

This is Baldwin’s first novel and is said to be semi-autobiographical. It is the story of an African-American family whose adult members - preacher Gabriel Grimes, his wife Elizabeth and his sister Florence - have separately left the South and moved to Harlem, New York. All of them have brought secrets and the novel has a great sense of tension as the family relationships are uncovered and revealed.

14 year old John Grimes is central to the story. He is struggling with the harsh and violent discipline and the religious pressure that his father Gabriel imposes. He is torn between a desire to find salvation and the wish to reject what his father represents.

This is beautifully written and appeals to the reader’s emotions. It is the third book I have read by Baldwin and they have all been powerful and moving.

The intensity of religiosity, and especially the struggle with it as way to cope with an evil, racist world is a strange thing to try and experience from the outside. I recently saw an incredible production of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone and there is quite a bit of resonance between the stories, but being present with the acting made a difference. And for that reason here I'm also glad that I listened to this as an audiobook, because I think the emotion would not have been as present for me on the page.

I found the sketch of the father fascinating. He is so sure of his current righteousness, he is without insight, because also maximally angry and fearful. The portrait of his profound failure to be humane to his family is drawn with empathy, without condemnation in fact, almost with forgiveness from a great distance. In contrast, John's story is painful for the reader, because it becomes a cover up, the false story of a child trying to deny himself because the family needs him to. The only redemption in it is that one assumes it is the adult and eventually self-rescued John who is able to write this narrative down. But at the same time, that world was harsh for Black men and women, physically dangerous, and so to be incandescent with rage, to believe that your enemies would burn in hell and you would be saved, that is a tremendous source of psychic strength to cope with that terrible world. We know from Baldwin's non-fiction writing that he lived with rage against racism and worked against it all his life, although he also says that you cannot live inhabiting that rage all the time. But he gives us a gift by showing us so many different souls grappling with how to live and believe in world that pounds at them relentlessly and seemingly without mercy.

I have read Go Tell It on the Mountain previously and remembered it as an extraordinarily eloquent presentation of the struggles of Pentecostal faith where the line between saved and sinner is very thin and the consequences are perceived to be infinite.
This came up in my Random Challenge this year and I realized that I had never written a review, so I returned to reread the novel.
On this reading, I was able to see how the whole book was about possession. To be possessed by fear, by hatred, by longing, by a hunger for forgiveness, by an undying love are all captured in the slim book and this possession is applicable to a board swath of humans and not just those of a Pentecostal faith. The book takes place on John's 14th birthday and we are introduced to him through his overriding anger at his father, his deep longing for a world that is about material wealth and his true hatred of the racism that surrounds him. We hear his Aunt Florence, his father's and his mother's story through their own musings and prayers which gives us the rich background that brings such terror and hatred to John's world. I find Baldwin's writing to be masterful and I am so glad that I read the book again.