In Go Tell It on the Mountain, I was struck by how deeply faith is ingrained in the way that John thinks about the world despite his expressed desire to reject his faith. One part that really stood out to me was when Baldwin describes John’s thoughts while praying in church. He writes, “For it was time that filled [John’s]’ mind, time that was violent with the mysterious love of God. And his mind could not contain the terrible stretch of time that united twelve men fishing by the shores of Galilee… this weight began to move at the bottom of John’s mind, in a silence like the silence of the void before creation” (76). In this passage, John compares his situation and his emotions to events in scripture so casually and nonchalantly that the reader could very easily miss it if she is not paying attention. However, it is important to remember that this is a fourteen-year-old boy who has expressed a lot of uncertainty about his faith life and has repeatedly intimated that he wants to avoid being like his father. One could feasibly assume that this includes rejecting the faith that his father has so firmly tried to instill in his children’s lives. Therefore, it is interesting, if not altogether surprising, that John easily communicates his thoughts with references to the Bible in the same scene that ends with him thinking, “And why did they come here, night after night after night, calling out to a God who cared nothing for them – if, above this flaking ceiling, there was any God at all? Then he remembered that the fool has said in his heart, There is no God” (77). Clearly, John does not think that he believes in God when he is actively deliberating on the subject, but in his everyday life, he makes connections to scripture in a way that might not even consciously register with him. I think this speaks to just how extensively Gabriel has conditioned John and the other children in his family to be religious, even if this is not necessarily something that they want to pursue themselves.
Month: March 2021
Heterosexual Hypervisibility and Depravity
Baldwin creates conflict between spirituality and sexuality as he shows the church’s suppression of homosexuality visibility next to the hyper-visible, yet brutal, indecency of heterosexuality. The story is framed around John’s struggles with homosexuality and the church’s narrative of homosexuality as an indecent and obscene sin saying, “in spite of the saints, his mother and his father, the warnings he heard from his earliest beginnings, he had sinned with his hands a sin that was hard to forgive” (16). The visibility of same-sex attraction has been universally suppressed under the guise that it was too vulgar for children to see. However, Baldwin pushes back against this and opens Go Tell it on the Mountain with young John and Roy witnessing crude and violent instances of heterosexuality, with the couple that, “did it standing up. The woman had wanted fifty cents, and the man had flashed a razor” (10). John also describes the intimacy of his parents with equally dirty descriptions as they did it, “over the sound of rats’ feet, and rat screams, and the music and cursing from the harlot’s house downstairs” (10).
The critique of homosexuality being hyper-visible and “flamboyant” is challenged as heteroerotic displays are prevalent everywhere for children, while John’s sexuality is deeply hidden and manifests in more pure displays like wrestling with Elisha. Not only are the displays of heterosexuality made visible for children but the expectation of their fulfillment is placed on them far too early in life, as Florence tells Elizabeth that “when [John] get big enough to really go after the ladies you going to have your hands full” (173). Even chaste displays of heterosexuality singled out as Elisha and Ella Mae are chastised for simply “walking disorderly” together (14). There is also the physical visibility of female sexuality seen in pregnancy that allows men to hide from their guilt, like Gabriel refusing to claim Royal, while women have to admit to their actions.
Heterosexual sex is also consistently used to oppress and enslave women. This is most evident in the white men’s assault of Deborah followed by the continued assault of Black men that degrade her with this memory. Baldwin writes, “when men looked at Deborah, they saw no further than her unlovely and violated body. In their eyes lived perpetually a lewd, uneasy wonder…lust that could not be endured because it was so impersonal” (69). Even Frank who loves Florence has an expectation for sex as something that he can demand as a husband from his wife and does not listen to her refusal. Even when men are not assaulting women during sex, they are passing judgment on their sexuality in a degrading manner. Gabriel demeans Deborah’s sexuality as “he thought of the joyless groaning of their marriage bed; and he hated her” (113). There is the double standard of Gabriel hating Deborah for not being sexually attractive enough and hating Esther for being sexually promiscuous. This adds to the hypocrisy of Gabriel for shaming John’s sexuality and finding the devil in him when Gabriel has sinned and cheated on his own wife with Esther.
Religious Male Genealogy and Autobiography
Baldwin brings a lot of autobiographical elements into his writing, especially when writing about Gabriel and his quest for a male heir that he believes was ordained to him by God. Baldwin focuses on this heavily when writing about Gabriel, and I believe he is writing with the male lineage in mind when describing John as well. In all of Gabriel’s relationships, he believes he can “save” the woman he pursues by giving them his child. I believe that Baldwin thought this characteristic true of his own father, and that because Baldwin was not his own son, but a break in the lineage, he was viewed as evil by his father. But it is really the lineage of Gabriel that could be debated to be “evil,” because while John goes to church and does his chores, Roy gets into fights constantly. And it is not just Roy that gets into trouble, but Gabriel’s son Royal as well.
The narrator, describing Gabriel’s motivations behind the name of his first child, states “He had once told Esther that if the Lord ever gave him a son he would call him Royal, because the line of the faithful was a royal line – his son would be a royal child” (134). When Esther claims she has been ruined due to the pregnancy caused by Gabriel, he yells at her, saying “Ruined?… You? How you going to be ruined? When you been walking through this town just like a harlot, and a-kicking up your heels all over the pasture? How you going to stand there and tell me you been ruined? If it hadn’t been me, it sure would have been somebody else” (126). He continually refers to her as a harlot and claims he was tempted by her as if by Satan. He is unwilling to consider that it is he who is the evil part of the relationship with Esther because he views her through a sexist lens as a biblical temptress. But it is Gabriel that brings evil to each woman in his life through his desire for the birth of a son. He leaves Deborah because she is barren, he leaves Esther to die because she is not his wife, and he unjustly punishes Elizabeth’s son John simply because he is not his own child. Gabriel brings evil to all of these women through his sexual desire, not the other way around, and I think Baldwin is making a commentary about hyper-masculinity’s incompatibility with moral religion.
I feel like John (Baldwin) believes his father saw him as not good enough not only because he did not belong to his biological lineage, but also because of his homosexuality which prevented him from starting his own biblical male lineage; Gabriel’s unwillingness to view John as good even though he tries hard in church most likely stems from John’s inability in Gabriel’s mind to function as a traditional man. I believe Baldwin carried these thoughts with him while writing and is why he portrays Gabriel in such a toxic way; his shaming of women and ignorance of the damage inflicted by his own masculinity leads to sadness, violence, and death. Yet, it is masculine traits that are praised in the Bible and feminine ones which are scorned and criticized. I believe that this novel does a great job illuminating the hypocrisy of the gender roles enforced by traditional religion and how the perpetuation of these roles leads to actual damage in the lives of religiously concerned American families.
Biblical Parallels in the Story Line
While reading “Go Tell It on the Mountain” this week, I discovered an interesting parallel between this book and a story in the Bible. In class, we talked about many references Baldwin makes to the bible including the use of biblical names and language. I have noticed that some of the story lines mimic the bible as well. For now, I would like to focus on Gabriel’s adultery and how it correlates with Abram and Sarai in the Bible.
In Part 2 of “Go Tell It on the Mountain”, we learn more about Gabriel’s past with his late wife Deborah. During this time, Gabriel has been waiting for “[…] the son that God had promised him, who would carry down the joyful line his fathers name…” (Baldwin 110). Deborah is barren, so Gabriel remains sonless. There is another woman named Esther whom Gabriel commits adultery with and who later becomes pregnant with his son, Royal. Panicked, Esther decides to leave for Chicago. Years later when Royal dies, Deborah tells Gabriel that she knew that it was his son all along, and she would have raised him as her own had he told her the truth. Reading this story, I couldn’t help but notice the many similarities to Genesis 15- 16.
In the Bible, Abram’s wife Sarai is also barren. Abram asks God, “ Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless, and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascuc” (Genesis 15:2)? God then promises Abram a son of his own flesh and blood. When Sarai remains childless, Sarai tells Abram to sleep with her slave Hagar to have a child through her. Abram goes through with this and Hagar becomes pregnant with a boy named Ishmael. Once Hagar realizes that she is pregnant, she begins to hate Sarai and Sarai sends her and the child away. However, they return and stay with them for a while longer. Keeping with His promise, God allows Sarai to become pregnant with a son, Isaac. After his birth, Sarai sends Hagar and Ishmael away yet again.
Gabriel and Abram are both promised a son by God, and are worried about their family lines. However, both men lack patience and take matters into their own hands. Gabriel has an affair with Esther which Deborah is aware of, and Abram sleeps with Hagar which Sarai is aware of. Hagar and Esther both become pregnant and bear these men son’s sons who are sent away, but return. However, eventually both sons leave again. Royal is born in Chicago, returns to the South, and is later killed. Ishmael is sent away by Sarai, returns, but is later sent away again to live in the desert. God keeps his promise to both Abram and Gabriel and provides them with sons through Sarai and Elizabeth. Baldwin attempts to mirror the bible in many ways including the story lines.
Baldwin, Christianity, & new voices
Class discussion on Wednesday made me think more about how Baldwin uses speech, voice, and silence in Go Tell It On the Mountain. David pointed out how Baldwin plays with changing voice in Florence’s chapter in particular, and I think that this aspect of the novel is a unique way in which Baldwin draws on the Christian religious tradition: although he is critical of Christianity in many regards, he also seems to participate in the prophetic tradition of the scriptures by foregrounding voices that are silenced elsewhere.
With the Lucan references, James Baldwin both contributes to and subverts the Christian tradition. In particular, Baldwin’s use of speech and silence critiques the religious environment he grew up in, while hinting at a more liberative vision of Christianity. Baldwin invites us to attend to different voices than those we normally hear, and to pay closer attention to the silences that persist in our communities and in ourselves.
In a feminist & multicultural theologies class that I took, we discussed liberative readings of scriptural texts that have historically been used to oppress. Although Christian scripture and teaching have often been used negatively against BIPOC, female, and queer people (among others), that’s counter to God’s will. Noticing whose voices are (un)heard is a significant part of the work of reclaiming scripture, and I think Go Tell It On the Mountain has this project in common with liberation theologies’ work of retrieval and reclaiming.
Revisiting the beginning of the Gospel of Luke which we read on Wednesday, I’m struck by Zechariah. His is the voice we would expect to hear in a religious tradition dominated by male voices, but Luke’s Gospel surprises us by letting us hear the voices of women. Likewise, Baldwin’s work “surprises” by disrupting the norms of whose perspectives we see. For instance, although there is much that John cannot say (p. 16), Baldwin makes sure that John’s perspective is the voice we hear. Because of his family relationships, race, and sexuality—not to mention his doubt, for which Zechariah was silenced by Gabriel—there are multiple silences imposed on John. Similarly, there are limits to what Florence can say aloud, but by writing a chapter from her perspective, Baldwin gives her more of a voice in the novel.
Baldwin is mindful of ensuring that there are multiple voices participating in Go Tell It On the Mountain, taking a new approach to the religious influences we see—and using his own voice in a new way in this debut novel. Even if John is not able to speak in his home or church, in Baldwin’s novel, he is able to break his silence. The same goes for Baldwin—in the act of writing this novel, he shatters the silences in his own life.
What is Homosociality?
Quick note: I apologize if none of this makes sense. I’m trying to explain a theory that Sedgwick wrote two whole books about, so I may have failed dramatically.
In class on Monday, I mentioned that I noticed an intertwining of queer coding and religious imagery in Part 1 of Go Tell It On The Mountain. I’d like to expand on this observation considering our extensive in class discussions of the topic. Specifically, we discussed the “holy kiss” between Gabriel and Elisha (Baldwin 53). On a related note, we discussed the fact that Bigger Thomas masturbates alongside his male friend, an action which is only “ok” because the object of desire is, allegedly, a woman (Mary Dalton). All of these scenes invoke homosociality, a word which is actually a technical term in queer theory.
I hear people use the word “homosocial” quite a bit. Many people assume the word merely refers to same-sex socialization, describing a space that is exclusively male or exclusively female. In academia, though, homosociality is a term popularized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a literary scholar of queer theory and feminism. Attention to homosociality notes the intense male-male (or female-female) desire which is “at once compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds” (Epistemology of the Closet 187). In wikipedia’s words, homosociality “connote[s] a form of male bonding often accompanied by a fear or hatred of homosexuality.” It is “a form of male bonding with a characteristic triangular structure. In this triangle, men have intense but nonsexual bonds with other men, and women serve as the conduits through which those bonds are expressed.” According to Sedgwick, same-sex spaces are structured around anti-queerness, using their hegemony to exclude and deny queer people. For example, players on a basketball team often grope and spank each other. Such behavior is socially obligated to some extent as a form of camaraderie and validation (e.g. “compulsory” same-sex desire). Yet such behavior is only “ok” as long as it is not explicitly “gay.” The basketball team itself will go to extreme lengths to exclude and bully queer men precisely to ensure that the team’s own manifestation of same-sex affection is not perceived as queer. They grope each other because they’re not gay, a paradoxical phenomenon.
This definition of homosociality is in line with how we have been using it in class. After all, Baldwin pays special attention to the ways that same-sex religious spaces in Go Tell It On The Mountain are “gay” but also “not gay.” Men and women may kiss each other, as long as it is a “holy kiss” between straight men/women. Elisha and John can wrestle, as long as they do so in a (heterosexual) “manly” way. When Elisha and John wrestle in the back room of the Church, Baldwin writes, “Elisha let fall the stiff gay mop and rushed at John” (53). The paragraph is filled with phrases like “stiff,” “thrust,” and Elisha’s “damp fists, joined at the small of John’s back” (Baldwin 50). The language of the scene emphasizes that which, in almost any other context, would be queer. This same analysis can be applied to Bigger in the movie theatre, when he does a “gay thing” (masturbating with a man) because he is “not gay.” This, in essence, is homosociality: same-sex spaces that demand same-sex desire while categorically denying the rights of a person who desires the same-sex.
The Humanity of Florence
One of the major critiques of Native Son in our class discussions centered on the objectification of women in the text. Bessie and Mary were brutalized and and dehumanized by Bigger, and in a way by Wright. I wondered then how Baldwin would shape the women characters in Go Tell It on the Mountain. Would his female characters have more dignity? To what extent would female characters be at the forefront of the text? I decided to examine the passages with Florence to answer this question. (Of course, my answer now will be limited given that I have not finished the book.)
Florence describes growing up in a home with her mother and Gabriel as difficult for a myriad of reasons, but mostly because everything she wanted was handed over to Gabriel simply because of his gender. Her mother gave him everything of value: nicer clothes, better food, and “the education that Florence desired more than he” (68). In this scene, Baldwin makes sure to include the structural inequalities affecting women, but especially black women, at this time: they were often undervalued and given second priority. Florence, though, within this cultural and structural oppression, enacts more agency than any woman in Native Son. Florence is a narrator in this text, with the ability to tell her own story and develop a more nuanced perspective about the family relationship. She also leaves her mother and brother and moves north. Her physical movement away from this environment where she is undervalued shows that she values herself and prioritizes her wellbeing, a choice that Bessie and Mary never have the chance to make.
Florence moves north, but she does not escape her oppression. Her relationship with Frank is a combination of her trying to exercise power and her being treated as less than once again. When Frank would come home drunk, Florence felt some semblance of power: “Then he, so ultimately master, was mastered. And holding him in her arms while, finally, he slept she thought with the sensations of luxury and power: ‘But there’s lots of good in Frank. I just got to be patient and he’ll come along all right'” (79). Florence believes that she can change Frank for the better, that she can guide him towards a more virtuous life. But at the same time she realizes he would never change, and recalls a time when Frank refused to stop his sexual advances even when she asked him not to. Florence is a character consistently dealing with the oppressive behaviors of men, but also a character who is trying to find power where she can.
Florence is more human to me than Bessie or Mary because she actively struggles against the norms of society, even though she still falls prey to them at times. She is not merely a prop, but a narrator of her own story and actor within it. She questions the common attitudes towards gender and religion, while still dealing with internal need to conform when she attempts to bleach her skin and make Frank into something he is not.
No Escape
Just as John cannot seem to escape the endless accumulation of dust in his house, in his church, or on his body, I couldn’t escape the initially unclear motif of dust within Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain. I initially thought this dust might signify John’s interminable dread and shame with regard to his position in the church. However, upon further investigation, this notion is complicated when viewed in a Biblical context.
Baldwin relies heavily on religious language and imagery, and its parallels and subversions illustrate John’s existential crisis. Dust appears everywhere: “in the walls and the floorboards…beneath the sink where roaches spawned…in the wall against which they hung…in every corner, angle, crevice of the monstrous stove and lived behind it in delirious communion with the corrupted wall”; dust even “veils [the] doubtful glory” of the windows, which might otherwise offer a reprieve of “gold or silver” (19). The dust of John’s home reflects the dust that he feels spoils his interior. He feels dirty, vile, and even wonders if he resembles Satan presumably because of his emerging sexuality.
“The Temple of the Fire Baptized” has caused John an inescapable self-loathing and contempt for his body. John is so affected by this intrusion that he is nearly suffocated by the dirt that surrounds him. The dust “rose, clogging his nose and sticking to his sweaty skin,” it “fill[s] his mouth” and threatens to “bury” him (24). He is submerged in the dust of his own self-hatred and internal dissonance; a feeling I believe Baldwin knew all too well. John harbors an extreme self-consciousness and feels the need to atone for the pronounced evil inherent in his body, yet “so much labor brought so little reward” (24). He is horrified that this filth will remain forever and come to dictate consequences afterlife. The same church that taught him to hate his sexuality and body is the church of which is to decide his fate, a toxic entanglement of which John feels he will never elude.
In the Old Testament of the Bible, God creates man from the dust of the ground and envisions a return to this origin: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust, you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). John sees the origin and fate of humanity as a reminder that he is sub-human, and must bend to the will of God. He is stifled by this notion of nothingness, coming from and returning to, the nothingness of dust. Yet this dust transcends the junction of before birth and of after death, it characterizes John’s very life. He is not permitted the freedom to escape the reminder of the beginning of his already-determined end, he is smothered within the confines of life. Dust, for John, will not solely exist before and after his life on Earth, it instead must destroy him from within.
Whose protest novel?
After last Monday’s class, I was having a conversation with a friend on the idea of Native Son being or not being a novel about race. The idea we were stuck on was what a Black woman might feel after reading this novel. How could they identify with its message as a Black reader? Are they supposed to identify with Bigger after his treatment of women, or worse, should they have to identify with Bessie after her treatment by Bigger?
Some of the presentations touched on the differences between Wright’s treatment of racial experiences and Baldwin’s. I truly feel as though Wright misses the mark in trying to get his message across by making the deliberate choices that he did. In failing to understand sexual violence against women and making blatant references to the bible, for instance, that solidified this misunderstanding, I feel as though he lost any connection he might have had to his Black female audience.
In addition, the presentations touched a little on Baldwin’s queer identity. Baldwin seemed to have a more intersectional perspective on the race idea. It’s possible his queer identity gave him the ability to critique Wright’s work and lacking perspective of the issue. I personally agree with Baldwin’s view on the novel and Bigger’s character. Wright did not have to deliver this message by means of stripping Bigger of his humanity. We have referenced in class the idea that Baldwin was growing up and existing in a time where who he was, a gay Black man, could have gotten himself killed. I wonder if when reading this novel, as someone who himself had been a victim of hypermasculinity and the patriarchy, Baldwin was able to have this discerning eye. On the whole, I would have to agree that Native Son is not the most accessible protest novel.
Naturalism, Dr. Seuss, and Me
If you haven’t heard by now, this week Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that they will cease the publication of six classic children’s books which “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” Now, this didn’t come as the biggest surprise to me; Theodore Geisel’s racism manifested in numerous political cartoons, support for Japanese internment camps, and blackface. But that this racism had extended to the stories which so defined my childhood—stories like And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street! and If I Ran the Zoo—was a disappointment for which I was thoroughly unprepared.
And yet, as I perused article after article, book after book, the racist imagery became apparent in monkey-like depictions of tribal Africans and Asian “helpers who all wear their eyes at a slant” from “countries no one can spell” (those are real quotes from If I Ran the Zoo). I knew that I must have read those words countless times–seen the images of yellow-faced Asian men literally carrying a white man with a gun on their heads—and simply thought nothing of it.
As we learned in our readings this week, naturalism, which Irving Howe defines as a sort of scientific detachment from the subject matter, is a philosophy with which Baldwin proves particularly concerned. Of his own encounters with racism, he says, “I knew about the south, of course, and about how southerners treated negroes and how they expected them to behave, but it had never entered into my mind that anyone would look at me and expect me to behave that way” (CE 68). Clearly, Baldwin exhibits some of that same detachment from the Black condition of which he accuses Wright when Wright withdraws to Paris and ingratiates himself to the French intellectuals, falling out of sync with the Black American experience and seemingly forsaking the cause for which he once so vehemently advocated (CE 266). There is a divorce, a disjunction, an otherness which defines the relationship between both Wright and Baldwin and Black America in these instances.
I would argue that the liberals who Baldwin so distinctly criticizes in “Many Thousands Gone” fall victim to this same otherness when they assert that, “though there are whites and blacks among us who hate each other, we will not,” eager to subscribe to the dream that “the battle is elsewhere” (CE 34). And, as I’ve racked my mind these past few days trying to figure out how I could have forgiven such blatantly racist rhetoric, especially anti-Asian rhetoric, part of me wonders if I didn’t experience some of that same otherness myself. True, I was young when I last read Dr. Seuss, and I am only half Asian, and these are certainly facts which colored my perception; regardless, I can’t help but wonder if I, like Wright and Baldwin and those liberals before me, found comfort in denying my proximity to the issue, and whether this denial was rooted in shame, ignorance, or some concoction of the two. In short, I guess, the question I inevitably return to is this: is naturalism natural?