Month: March 2021

The presentations today prompted a continuation of thought regarding one of the things Baldwin takes issue with within the institution of the church: the sin of flesh. Baldwin has learned from the church to hate his body, which might commit actions of his sinful sexuality. Baldwin is taught by American society to hate his skin, which threatens the legitimacy of whiteness. Baldwin, in grappling against this self-loathing, reveals what he has struggled to love most about himself: his body.  

I believe this might relate to our discussion of the afterlife, which is said to be existence without flesh and body. Perhaps the Christian church orients itself away from the sin of our human bodies knowing that the afterlife means a dismissal and a departure from the profane. Yet this is a notion that Baldwin confronts, as he believes that the shame we are taught to approach our bodies with is harmful. Salvation need not be divorced from bodily existence. 

To believe sin is inherent in your body and written on your skin is to never believe in personal salvation. Baldwin believes in his own salvation and prophethood, regardless of his physicality. He refuses to be ashamed of his flesh, knowing that it instead is the content of his deliverance. Baldwin vehemently rejects flesh as sin as taught in religion and society, instead rewriting flesh to exist as sanctification. He suggests that “love can only be attained through a holistic acceptance of the body as well as the spirit,” which is perhaps why Baldwin also demands sanctity of nudity as an exposed body (Field 451). 

David, the protagonist of Giovanni’s Room, has salvation “hidden in his flesh,” as the body holds redemption in its very existence. Most of Baldwin’s protagonists make no distinction between the body and the spirit, as he contends that the two share in significance and value. He uplifts the body as a sight of salvation, “insisting on [its] sanctity and acceptance” (Field 451). I’m curious to track this train of thought as we continue to trace patterns in our second Baldwin novel. Questions I might ask going forward: Is transcendence reached when the body and soul meet each other? How are sexuality and religion continually entangled in Baldwin’s text? Does human flesh force a confrontation between sexuality and religion?

When reading Go Tell It On the Mountain, I could not help but make comparisons that John makes between his father Gabriel and how he views God as the Eternal Father. John’s world is steeped in shame and hatred, and the force that holds these two emotions together in John’s heart is intricately tied up with his perception of his father and the Father. Every time someone praises John, his mind immediately goes to his father — of Gabriel beating him, belittling him, calling him ugly — as if he subconsciously thinks of his father in moments of praise to humble himself in some sick way. This is much like how church teachings would encourage God’s servants to humble themselves, especially when doing God’s work.

One could infer that John cannot feel God’s presence (or even refuses to) because his perception of God as a vengeful, unforgiving, unyielding being converges with how he views his own father, Gabriel: “John’s heart was hardened against the Lord… John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.” (19) This comparison is deepened by the language people would use to describe familial relationships: “your Daddy beats you… because he loves you” (21) is akin to the trials and tribulations that God would bestow upon his subjects and servants, most prominently in the Book of Job. John lives in constant fear of his father and of God, and he is unable to understand what love would look like from either of them since he is only taught to obey and endure, and this battle of what he feels and what he ought to feel remains the driving force for the tension within Baldwin’s writings.

There is a scene in Go Tell It On the Mountain that’s bothered me since I first read it. It’s extremely short—you can almost miss it if you aren’t paying attention. In the scene, John has just watched a film and stands on a hill, pondering the allures of sinful city life. He runs down the hill in a moment of joyous freedom, only to nearly collide with an old white man; the two “stopped, astonished, and looked at one another. John struggled to catch his breath and apologize, but the old man smiled. John smiled back” (EN&S 32). 

And that’s it! That’s the whole scene. Now, John already enjoys a comfort among white people that his elders have never experienced; his intellect affords him his white teachers’ respect. And white people have never abused him in the ways his Black father has; in fact, it is Gabriel, not any white man, who continuously antagonizes John. Why, then, should John fear the white folks, who have always been kinder than his own flesh and blood?

What John doesn’t realize, of course, are all the twisted ways in which whiteness has shaped his entire family. It is whiteness that carved the racist, postbellum landscape of Gabriel’s youth; which brutally violated Gabriel’s first wife, Deborah; and which destroyed his firstborn son Royal. It is whiteness which drove Elizabeth’s first love Richard to take his own life after he was implicated in the robbery of a white man’s store, a crime he did not commit. It is whiteness that instilled in Florence the internalized racism which alienates her from the “dirty” and “common” lower class Black people; which moves her to try and lighten her skin; and which ultimately contributes to her separation from her husband, who feels Florence would prefer it if he’d only “turn white” (81). 

Gabriel, like his wife and sister, is a product of whiteness—a victim. In an extremely screwed-up way, it makes sense that, recognizing in John’s intellect a sort of whiteness, Gabriel would so violently react. I’ve talked a lot about inheritance laws; this is John’s allotted portion. The same Gabriel who once reflected on “how sin led to sin” and who has for so long borne that Great White Sin of racism now passes the fruits of his trauma onto John, projecting years of oppression onto his step-son (129). It reminds me of that Philip Larkin poem, “This Be the Verse”:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Gabriel and Elizabeth and Florence have all lived their lives; they’ve each experienced whiteness in all its cruelty and fallen victim to the cycle of oppression, Their fates are sealed. But John! John is young—only fourteen—and has his whole life ahead of him. John is the future—a future that has emerged from a history of racism and violence, but which ultimately promises to break the cycle. John, at his core, is a symbol of Baldwin’s hope for the next generation of Black Americans: where whiteness has marred John’s entire family tree, it only smiles at him.

The only thing that I ever managed to retain from my mandatory Theology class at Notre Dame, is, somehow, Genesis I. I do not know why this is what I remember after four months of learning about the Bible, but on further thought, I feel it is the most universal thing in the Bible that I could relate to. The idea of creation is something each individual belonging to any religion has pondered upon at some point. As human beings, we are created by our parents. Each religion talks about a different God or power that created the Earth and all its wonders. Even an atheist has a scientific or another theory of how the world he or she has come to live in was created. It is because of this universality of the idea of creation that Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountainis relatable. I found John’s story in Go Tell It on the Mountainvery similar to Genesis I. Genesis I states that 

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And, God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.” (Genesis 1:1) 

John’s tale is of the creation or the building of his faith. Earlier, he had a void which contained information about faith, given to him by his father. Later, he processes that information and realizes he must discover the reality of faith himself. The darkness of his father’s thoughts and behavior covered John’s life. However, A wind, or understanding of God, swept over him, towards the end of the book, which illuminated his mind and freed him from his darkness. The darkness was no longer a concern since he had been enlightened about faith. John says that “no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember—please remember—I was saved. I was there.” (Baldwin 356) In this moment, John is has a wind that sweeps his dark thoughts away and he is illuminated about God and saved from making the darkness in his life his main concern.   

In the preface of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde writes, “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.” When I first read Wilde’s book and encountered these lines, I interpreted them in the context of Wilde’s time and never considered how they may apply to a work like Go Tell It on the Mountain until Dr. Kinyon asked us to contemplate them in class. I then realized that these lines explain the relationship between Gabriel and John. 

Gabriel is confused by his strange, intelligent son who reminds him of the white people he hates so much. As a result, Gabriel seems to hate John and treats him with anger. Gabriel’s reaction to John is the “rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.” Gabriel wants John to be like him, but instead, Gabriel sees in his son traits that he associates with whiteness. Like Caliban in this quote, Gabriel is upset to see the unexpected and lashes out. 

At the end of the novel, John undergoes his conversion, and thus becomes more like his father, a dutifully religious man. However, Gabriel does not respond to this conversion as you might expect, with pride, joy, and love. Rather, when John turns to face his father smiling, Gabriel does not smile back. Gabriel only thinks of being saved from his own sin. In this way, Gabriel demonstrates the “rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.” Finally, John is acting like his father and embracing the Church, but his dad remains unhappy. He is too consumed by the letter his sister Florence shows him. Gabriel refuses to accept what he sees in the glass, because it reveals the truth about himself and the child he fathered by cheating on Deborah. Whether it is dismay at seeing what he does not wish to see or distress upon seeing who he really is, Gabriel exemplifies Caliban as he looks into the glass.