Category: Go Tell It On The Mountain

In “Down at the Cross,” James Baldwin describes his experience preaching to children, saying, “When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?” (309). In this quote, Baldwin criticizes acceptance of present suffering in the hope of reward in the next life. His critique appears to hint at the way white Christians used this same tactic to discourage slave insurrection and revolt in the antebellum South (Field, 445). However, Douglass Field writes that Baldwin felt a similar disdain toward the black church, which fostered “a tendency towards passivity” (446). 

Over the past week, I have thought a lot about Martin Luther King Jr. and his call for love of white people, a call Baldwin similarly emphasizes in his relationships with religion. King seems to emphasize the love of Christ, rather than the fear of eternal damnation in his speeches, living out the kind of Christianity Baldwin appreciates. Yet, eventually, King’s emphasis on love, which is both active in its confrontational nature and passive in its disdain for violence, falls out of favor in the civil rights movement, replaced by a more militant approach to equality. I wonder how Baldwin views this shift. If love is the right path toward civil rights and equality, it seemingly requires a reciprocal reaction from the oppressing group, which could take a long time if it ever comes at all. Thus, the turn away from love, or at least from unconditional love, makes sense since African-Americans should not have to wait to receive the rights that fundamentally belong to them. To me, unconditional love and the fight for civil rights remain in an uneasy union and I look forward to seeing how Baldwin’s writings on the civil rights movement accept or nuance his emphasis on love shown here.

One of the recurring topics of our class has been the fact that the Christian Church in America is a tool that reinforces segregation. We first saw this in I Am Not Your Negro, in which Baldwin, in an interview with Dick Cavett, exclaims: “I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian Church which is white and a Christian Church which is Black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means I can’t afford to trust most white Christians and I certainly cannot trust the Christian Church.” I was interested in this quote, as we discussed the misattribution of it in class on Wednesday. For that reason, I did a little bit of research about the quote as well as the topic of racial segregation in Christian churches. 

Although Baldwin attributes the quote to Malcolm X, I was only able to find a similar quote from Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “I think it is one of the tragedies –– one of the shameful tragedies –– that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hour, in Christian America” (King). Baldwin reiterates King’s point in later works such as “Down at the Cross,” in which he writes “In the same way that we, for white people, were the descendants of Ham, and were cursed forever, white people were, for us, the descendants of Cain” (Collected Essays 310). 

This begs the question: has anything changed? Are churches today more integrated than they were fifty years ago? Well, the answer is complicated. According to a 2001 article, up to 87% of Christian churches were racially homogenous, with 69% of congregations being almost entirely white and 18% of congregations almost entirely Black (Vischer). But of course, such a statistic is suspect, as the study only considered Black and white Americans, without noting if a church was attended by Asian, latinx, or Indigenous populations. More recently, the Pew research center noted that “[m]any U.S. congregations are still racially segregated, but things are changing” (Lipka). According to their 2014 study, 20% of Americans attend a church in which no single racial group constitutes more than 80% of the congregation. This begs new questions: is a Church that’s 80% white, but say, 20% latinx no longer a tool of anti-Black segregation? Likewise, just because 20% of Americans attend such churches, that doesn’t mean that anything has changed. Maybe those individuals just attend a handful of “Megachurches” with huge populations. Regardless, the fact remains that Christian churches, on average, are largely racially homogenous. Until things seriously change, Baldwin’s statements reflect a vital and highly disconcerting critique that Christians of all denominations should reflect upon.

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.