James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain

Sisyphus and epiphany.

It’s hard to write about the work of James Baldwin, in part because so much has already been said, in part because his writing is so crystal clear, so luminous and wonderful, that it’s not unreasonable to say that it speaks for itself and leave it at that. That said, one purpose of these musing about literature is to have a record to look back at, a reminder of what I was thinking and feeling as I read, so let’s begin.

Despite having read a good selection of Baldwin’s non-fiction work and a few short stories, Go Tell It on the Mountain was the first time I’d read one of his novels. It’s an autobiographically inspired bildungsroman superficially akin to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Baldwin said that “Mountain was the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else,” and I can only imagine how powerfully cathartic it was to interrogate his past through the lens of fiction.

Beyond that shared sense of purpose and discovery, Mountain is a very different novel from Portrait. Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, seems always eager to find some kind of escape: from religion, from Ireland, to fulfill some deeper artistic purpose. It’s in his name, the son who flies away, too close to the sun. Baldwin’s John Grimes is more deeply rooted to family and the church, and rather than fly off, he must muck about in treacherous swamp that is the past—like Dedalus, his name describes his path.

The novel opens with the following lines:

Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.

As I read the opening section, I did not fully take Baldwin at his word. I expected that John would leave the church, that he would find another path to fulfillment and adulthood. It took a while before I understood that I should have trusted Baldwin. This is not a straightforward novel of growth and understanding, but an investigation into the past and its inexorable pull on the present.

Most of the action of Mountain takes place at church, overnight, as John Grimes experiences a religious epiphany. But before this epiphany can take place, the novel is interrupted by the personal histories of his aunt, his stepfather, and his mother. Their troubles have intruded upon his own. Baldwin writes of his protagonist:

Oh, but his thoughts were evil—but tonight he did not care. Somewhere, in all this whirlwind, in the darkness of his heart, in the storm—was something—something he must find. He could not pray. His mind was like the sea itself: troubled, and too deep for the bravest man’s descent, throwing up now and again, for the naked eye to wonder at, treasure and debris long forgotten on the bottom—bones and jewels, fantastic shells, jelly that had once been flesh, pearls that had once been eyes. And he was at the mercy of this sea, hanging there with darkness all around him.

We too are at the mercy of these competing narratives that complicate and humanize John’s elders. That his pain and desire and frustration is in part his mother’s story and his stepfather’s story and his aunt’s story in reinforced by the way the narrative weaves in and out of the past so fluidly that it feels like everything is happening at once.

This storytelling that links kin to kin is a major part of Baldwin’s project as a writer and thinker. Reading it in Mountain brought me back to “My Dungeon Shook¹,” Baldwin’s letter to his nephew James:

I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I don’t know if you’ve ever known anybody that far back; if you’ve loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father’s face, for behind your father’s face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember him falling down the cellar steps, and howling, and I remember, with pain, his tears, which my hand or your grandmother’s so easily wiped away. But no one’s hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it.

This passage explains Go Tell It on the Mountain far better than I could: the collapsing of time, the hidden pain, the power of memory, the fight for survival.

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It’s interesting that one of the central images of a novel with “mountain” in the title is debris thrown up from the depths of the ocean: you have to dig deep before you can rise. The act of climbing, of the struggle to conquer the mountaintop, is described early in the novel as well:

The rug would not be clean. It became in his imagination his impossible, lifelong task, his hard trial, like that of a man he had read about somewhere, whose curse it was to push a boulder up a steep hill, only to have the giant who guarded the hill roll the boulder down again—and so on, forever, throughout eternity; he was still out there, that hapless man, somewhere at the other end of the earth, pushing his boulder up the hill. He had John’s entire sympathy, for the longest and hardest part of his Saturday mornings was his voyage with the broom across this endless rug; and, coming to the French doors that ended the living-room and stopped the rug, he felt like an indescribably weary traveler who sees his home at last. Yet for each dustpan he so laboriously filled at the doorsill demons added to the rug twenty more; he saw in the expanse behind him the dust that he had raised settling again into the carpet; and he gritted his teeth, already on edge because of the dust that filled his mouth, and nearly wept to think that so much labor brought so little reward.

Baldwin hides the Sisyphus story in John’s irritation at having to do chores on his birthday, but it reverberates within and beyond the pages of the book. It captures the struggles of his stepfather, whose life is not made easier by his own religious awakening. He experiences a moment of certainty, of understanding and joy, but then all the pain and struggles of his life return. It is an onerous task to be good and to stay good. He works so hard, but as with John and the rug, he finds so little reward.

And of course the struggle against the Jim Crow era in American history, the context in which the novel exists, is a Sisyphean task in and of itself. I read part of W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk with my African-American Studies class yesterday; in it DuBois tells the story of Alexander Crummell’s rejection from the seminary:

Like some grave shadow he flitted by those halls, pleading, arguing, half angrily demanding admittance, until there came the final No; until men hustled the disturber away, marked him as foolish, unreasonable, and injudicious, a vain rebel against God’s law.

In this passage Crummell returns again and again to his own personal mountain, only to be denied. This kind of story, the story told in Go Tell It on the Mountain, aches for a solution, but it’s not contained within these pages: only understanding and compassion for those who have come before and faced the same boulders, the same mountain, the same desire to finally reach the top.

1. Here’s a link to the full text of “My Dungeon Shook” — extremely highly recommended.