Go Tell It on the Mountain (Vintage International)

so at age 52 and having come from a mother who owned her personal library I thought I had read this book. I know the title well, but a month ago my youngest son 26 passed away. And I started reading again to clear my heart n ease my fury. What I can say now is this time reading this book meant so much more. I found myself struggling to understand the flow of the author but I couldn't stop reading. Determined to understand why something was pulling me to remember the story. Then as the story closed and the pages fell into place in my mind, my heart lifted and I understood why this book is so special. Even as I write this I know I have seen this in my dreams and for the1st time since I kisses my son a final goodbye do I feel like I am exactly where I am supposed to be in time n the loss of my son is not a burden I cannot carry, and my son is where he was destined to be. In the months before he passed he was shot and became a paralyzed, a fate he took on with the heart of a lion and a courage that made me stronger. As I completed the book I have a feeling that it was intended so I could understand, the words written so long ago found me and crazy as it sounds helped me to smile and see the pain fear darkness in my sons heart that changed to a place so full of faith that he defied the impact of his injury and did everything that "they" said he wouldn't do and when he was tired and needed to put his burden down he said his goodbyes closed his eyes and called for his father to take him home. I am forever charged but I am not as broken as I was before I read this book. Excellent and steady work Mr. Baldwin Thank you🙏

I came to James Baldwin late, long after I had read great African-American novelists like Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Ralph Ellison. I'm glad I saved him for my maturity, given the wisdom and richness of his prose. I was reading "Go Tell It on the Mountain" today while alternating the book with the coverage of George Floyd's funeral in my own home town (as well as Mr. Floyd's) of Houston. How the novel and the service meshed! Baldwin, in this story set in Harlem in the mid-30's, so powerfully conveys the centrality of the church in black lives, the incredible tradition of pastoral oratory, the promises and perils of the Great Migration to the North in the interwar period (continued much later when George Floyd moved from Houston to Minneapolis to begin a new life), and the dignity and strength of black women. More than one young black man in "Go Tell it on the Mountain" dies from violence. And just as in Baldwin's "If Beale Street Could Talk," New York cops arrest black men on the flimsiest of suspicions and brutalize them in custody. How little has changed in the better part of a century since the author's own Harlem childhood in the Depression! This book is rightly a classic. I wish that Baldwin were required reading not just in every college but in every police academy in this country. His is exactly the kind of loving honesty about the black experience that our society desperately needs.

James Baldwin’s debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, the semi-autobiographical story that culminates in 14-year-old John Grimes’ born-again experience as he physically struggles on the floor of his stepfather’s storefront church, is generally considered his masterpiece. It comes in at No. 39 on the Modern Library list of “Best English-Language Books of the 20th Century,” and also made Time magazine’s 2005 list of the “100 Best English Language Novels since 1923.” Thus, along with Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Baldwin’s novel forms a kind of triumvirate of the most significant novels by African Americans between the Harlem Renaissance and what we usually think of as the Civil Rights Movement. But Baldwin’s book is simultaneously broader and narrower in its concerns than either Wright’s or Ellison’s. It is broader in that it is about more than being Black in America. It’s also about universal concerns like growing up, sexuality and sexual identity, faith and its loss, love and its loss. It is narrower in that it really doesn’t try to tell us about Black experience in a white society. Rather it focuses on one very specific individual—teenaged John Grimes, in a very specific family—one in which his abusive stepfather is a Pentecostal preacher who loves his own son Roy, John’s unreliable brother, but cannot bring himself to love John; in a very specific place—Harlem in the 1930s; on a very specific day—John’s birthday. Baldwin makes no implication that John’s experience is the quintessential metaphor for all African Americans everywhere. But readers will extrapolate some general truths from the experiences of this single family. What Baldwin’s book does more convincingly and through the truth of personal experience is document the significant role of the church in African American life, both in its positive function of unifying the community and providing inspiration, and also in its negative aspects as a source of moral judgment and exclusion. Baldwin was well aware of these aspects, having been brought up in them, and, like John in the novel, having had a religious awakening at the age of 14 and having become a preacher himself, until he eschewed his faith. Baldwin divides the novel into three sections. The first part begins as John wakes up on his birthday, wondering if anyone in his family is going to remember what day it is. Elizabeth, his mother, is arguing with Roy about their father, Gabriel, who is aloof and authoritarian and ready to enforce his dictums with beatings. When John thinks everyone has forgotten his birthday, his mother gives him some money to buy himself whatever he wants as a present. He uses it to attend a movie, one of the things his father forbids. When he gets home, he finds that Roy has been in a fight in which he was stabbed, and Gabriel is blaming Elizabeth for Roy’s wild behavior. Florence, Gabriel’s sister, tries to intercede, but Gabriel strikes Elizabeth anyway, and then beats Roy for defending his mother. The section ends with John joining Elisha, his church’s youth minister, in cleaning the church his family attends, and Gabriel, Elizabeth, and (to John’s surprise) Florence entering the church to attend the evening service. The second part of the book, titled “The Prayers of the Saints,” is a brilliant tour de force in which Baldwin presents us with the entire complex backstory of this family while never straying from the self-imposed straight chronological narrative of this single day in John’s life, a classical unity of time in which is revealed a classical family curse. He does it by allowing us to overhear the unspoken prayers of all the novel’s chief characters as they rehearse before God their secret sins. The section begins with the prayer of John’s aunt Florence, Gabriel’s sister, who has nearly forgotten how to pray, it’s been so long. She reveals her resentment of her brother dating back to childhood, when Gabriel’s drinking and gambling drove her to leave their southern home on a train for New York, where she had married, and lost, a good man. She also remembers her friend Deborah, Gabriel’s first wife, who knew that Gabriel had an illegitimate son in Chicago. In Gabriel’s prayer, he remembers his conversion after a night of wild carousing, remembers his turning preacher and his defending Deborah at a revival meeting when others shunned her for having been raped at 16. He also remembers his first son, the illegitimate Royal, now dead through his own debauched life, and whose mother Gabriel had abandoned when she became pregnant, giving her money to start over in Chicago. Elizabeth prays, recalling her own unhappy childhood, in which her mother died and an aunt took her away from her father. She recalls her lover Richard, who suffered unjustly at the hands of the police (Black Lives mattered then, too) and died before she had given birth to John. In New York, she had met Florence, who introduced her to her brother Gabriel. Elizabeth comes out of her prayer when she hears John, lying on the floor and overcome with the power of the Holy Spirit. The climactic part three of the book, called “The Threshing Floor,” focuses on John himself, writhing on the floor of the church in the throes of the Holy Spirit. Throughout the book, the adolescent John has been struggling with his own sexuality and his church’s attitude toward sin. His thoughts and his natural inclinations, he feels, threaten to separate him from God: “You is in the Word or you ain’t—ain’t no half way with God.” Prior to the service, John had been roughhousing with Elisha, whom he admires deeply—a struggle that he compares to Jacob wrestling with the angel. In a way that seems radical by today’s standards, but which has a history in English poetry that goes at least as far back as Donne—“Imprison me, for I /except you enthrall me never shall be free,/ nor ever chaste, except you ravish me”—Baldwin equates the physical ecstasy of sex with the spiritual ecstasy of religious fervor: John is enthralled by the way Elisha’s “thighs moved terribly against the cloth of his suit,” and as the Holy Ghost speaks to him on the church floor he experiences “a tightening in his loin strings” and “a sudden yearning tenderness for holy Elisha; desire, sharp and awful as a reflecting knife, to usurp the body of Elisha, and lie where Elisha lay; to speak in tongues, as Elisha spoke, and, with that authority, to confound his father.” Baldwin would not write openly about a homosexual relationship until his next novel, Giovanni’s Room, in 1956. But it is clearly suggested in this novel, though it is not a crucial element in the plot since any form of sexuality would cause the 14-year-old protagonist shame and confusion in the stifling atmosphere of this particular tradition. John hopes that his born-again experience will bring him closer to his stepfather. You can probably guess how well that works. I won’t give away the ending, but I will say that it is more positive than you might imagine. For a book that deals with violent conflict with a difficult father, sexual ambivalence, religious guilt and shame, and, oh yeah, living in a racist society, it’s surprisingly affirmative—as if something has been exorcised, something has been blessed. If you haven’t read it, you ought to.

How did I go all through school and not know of James Baldwin. His words weave together in your mind and paint vivid pictures of what his characters see, but more importantly he makes you feel what they feel. The family in this book in some ways is so like my own. 100 years apart, different color skin, but ruled by religion to some degree, yet ruled by past sins and buried secrets even more. He lets you see the good and bad in all things in his character’s hearts and minds. As the reader you know everything, everything but the ending. An incredible book. So glad I read it.

Because of this I am reading his other works.

As expected. One to read. Fantastic wordsmith, as we all know.

This book is recommend, as I feel it is an important piece of literature - not just an important part of black literature. The writer is very gifted and has produced several great pieces of work; including his essays. I purchased the Everyman's Library Classics Edition of the book, and it is that I would like to recommend. The Everyman's Library Classics Editions, are really great quality editions, that don't cost the earth. They feature dust jackets, quality binding, and ribbon page markers; and the pages are quite thick, with good size print.

Livre en très bon état, tout à fait conforme à la description.

Religion has always been a crucial topic in the Afro-American society. For a race so into the practice of religion , would it translate to more peace and order? Can the ‘anointed’ one led a better life? Did the teachings of religion see sons of former slaves forgive their former masters? James Baldwin in his own way he portrays the real image of a 1930 Afro-American society . Broken families , adultery, hatred , homosexuality, deceit , blackmail and many more issues are addressed. We follow through the lives of Gabriel, Elizabeth, Florence , Deborah, Richard , Roy , Elisha and more importantly John . The hatred within Gabriel’s family- who happens to be a deacon and a former pastor - is well illustrated through the entire book. James Baldwin however unlike his proceeding books quite avoided to address the concept of sexuality . He however became more outspoken on sexuality in his later books especially a fan favourite - Giovanni . As a reader the book is incomplete , I expected John to seek a different life . To defy the norms and seek a more fulfilling life but yet on that night he got saved . A sequel to the book is needed , how did John transverse his new found salvation yet he had some hidden feelings for Elisha. Did Roy get better ? Did John find a way to forgive his father ? . Did Florence and Gabriel ever come into better terms ? Mathew P Ndegwa Gitau