Go Tell It On the Mountain — James Baldwin
More than his words, his face caused John to stiffen, instantly with malice and fear. His father’s face was terrible in anger, but now there was more anger in it. John saw now what he had ever seen before, except in his own vindictive fantasies: a kind of wild, weeping terror that made the face seem younger, and yet at the same time unutterably older and more cruel. And john knew, in the moment his father’s eyes swept over him, that he hated John because John was lying on the sofa where Roy lay.
“I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal with my father” confessed James Baldwin on his controversial novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain. Baldwin’s novel is an ambitious take on the Christian religiosity within the Black communities of the sixties and the seventies, in the advent of the civil war and throughout it, exploring a pastor’s and his family’s life. John was always expected to be pious, to follow his father’s footsteps in building his own charismatic beliefs. However, John is apprehensive about his vocation, timid to explore the world that is deliberately hidden from him. Scourged mentally of a subjugating father, and a subservient mother, John will have to find his way out of the certain death of his inner voice. Otherwise soon he too will join ranks with his father in petting religious chauvinism and blinding convictions. One night at his home Church will change John’s perspective, edify him on his inner consciousness. But will John remain the young, naive boy he was?
Semi-autobiographical in nature, Baldwin pours down his cry for emancipation between the Black community of that time, to rise above the repression and moral hypocrisy that pervades the Pentecostal regime. Suffusing ideas of servitude from the Bible with that of the atrocities inflicted by men in white robes on the lay, he pens a painful recollection of memories that paint real to life characters embittered in the conformities of a people. Baldwin carries in his narration a backing of reality, realness, that suffers as much the lament of time as the battles of everyday life. Through John, we are introduced to the victims of abject religious intolerance. He reflects the moral dilemmas of our times and that which passed by. There is little fictional element attached to an account that feels so soft to heart, true to being. Perhaps, that is what gives the book a scholarly touch.
John’s story is worth reading, every sentence, and every word, dancing on toes, bubbling in bible hymns and prayerful wails. Gushing through individual lives of his patriarchal father and gullible mother. Go Tell It On the Mountain is an interesting and engaging enlightenment on faith, and what follows like a spectre down the path of godliness.
