After our class discussion on how John and Gabriels’ relationship may have mirrored James and David Baldwin’s, I considered how parental relationships play a significant role in shaping who people grow up to become. Go Tell It on the Mountain encompasses many intersectional themes, including narratives on a coming of age, religious identity, sexual identity. It is evident that growing up in a racist and homophobic society outcasted Baldwin; perhaps not as evident is how the way people are raised can impact their perception and identity just as much as these other factors. We discussed how turbulent James and David Baldwin’s relationship was, noting that David Baldwin resented James and made it very clear that he wished James’s mother never had him. We often talk about how Baldwin’s racial, sexual, and religious identities ostracized him from general society, but not much about how this initial rejection from someone who was so impactful to him may have affected James Baldwin. Most of Baldwin’s work intersectionally approaches issues to observe how societal issues affect individuals. I think it is possible that neglectful, abusive parenting is a large issue at play in shaping Baldwin’s life perspective and work. Baldwin faced a lot of prejudice and oppression due to his intelligence, and identity. It is clear that those experiences affected his work; I think it is also plausible to suggest that his relationship with David Baldwin shaped James’ identity. Facing societal prejudice as a black, queer person is a painful experience that shaped Baldwin as a writer. It is helpful to understand how his personal experiences impacted his work and led him to write semi-autobiographical novels such as GTIOTM. Before Baldwin was even fully aware of all life’s burdens and troubles, he had a rough childhood. His perception of love was warped because his family displayed their love for him in manners that were sometimes violent and detrimental to him. While David Baldwin may have seen his behavior towards James doing what was necessary to get him to conform to survive as a Black man in America, I think it probably played a role in traumatizing Baldwin, thus impacting his perceptions on love, forgiveness, and relationships. I think this could be why we see those issues as recurring themes in our class so far. I submit that this parental issue is just as impactful on James Baldwin’s life and writing as the other social issues that are considered major themes in his pieces.
Category: Go Tell It On The Mountain
The Two Gabriels
Our class discussion on Wednesday made me more interested in exploring the connections between John’s father Gabriel in Go Tell It on the Mountain and the archangel Gabriel in the Bible. In one sense, both angels bring salvation to those around them. In the Bible, the archangel Gabriel tells the previously barren Elizabeth that she will have a son, who later becomes John the Baptist. Go Tell It on the Mountain Gabriel brings salvation to the life of Elizabeth by marrying her. Her boyfriend had passed away and she was left unmarried with a son. Gabriel saves her from a life as a single mother and the potential insecurity that might come along with it during that time period. This situation mirrors what Gabriel did for his first wife Deborah. She was barren and, as a result, had few prospects for marriage, but Gabriel married her when others would not.
However, there are crucial differences between these stories as well. While Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a virgin and Elizabeth was married but barren when the archangel Gabriel appeared to them, Deborah and Elizabeth in Go Tell It on the Mountain had experience with sex and pregnancy. Deborah was sexually assaulted so violently by a group of white men that she physically could not have children, and Elizabeth gave birth to a child outside of marriage without ever telling the father. None of Mary’s purity or her cousin’s desperate prayers for a child exist in Baldwin’s narrative. With these biblical parallels in mind, it is difficult to understand Gabriel the character, who we see primarily through John’s eyes. John and his father’s contentious relationship seems to contradict this connection to Gabriel the messenger of God and deliverer of good news. An answer to this uncertainty may be found in the racism that impacts Gabriel’s life and loved ones in Go Tell It on the Mountain. Baldwin’s Gabriel is not perfect like the angel but that is because he has endured immense hardship that influences how he views the world and his son John. As Dr. Kinyon posited in class, John, with his unusual personality, may remind Gabriel of white people, resulting in their rift. While the biblical Gabriel reveals much about how Baldwin’s Gabriel brought a type of salvation to his wives, other areas of connection remain unclear.
Music & Transcendence
Throughout the transition from Native Son to Go Tell It, I have been struck by the nuance that opens up a hope for redemption and union in Baldwin’s text. Both texts engage with the gritty realities of Black life in America, yet Baldwin seems intent on rediscovering some hope for transcendence. Douglas Field, in his article “PENTECOSTALISM AND ALL THAT JAZZ: TRACING JAMES BALDWIN’S RELIGION,” makes a case for this transformative vision of hope. He claims “Baldwin’s most radical rewriting of Christian—or at least spiritual identity—is to place emphasis on salvation and redemption, not through God, but through a love that is founded on the sharing of pain” (Field). Even in our readings from last week, this impulse toward radical empathy is manifest. One specific example of this could be in the woman on the screen during the movie John watches. Baldwin writes that “all of John’s sympathy was given to this violent and unhappy woman” (36). It seems that art allows John to practice a radical empathy and acceptance that his church experience denies him. This radical and nuanced empathy also provides an insight into why Baldwin incorporates so much Job imagery. Like Job in the bible, Baldwin’s text holds space for nuance, suffering, and redemption in the protest novel tradition.
After reading the Pentecostalism article, I was also particularly interested in the role music plays. Field claims that “In Baldwin’s writing transcendence or ecstasy frequently occurs outside of religious worship and is most likely to be found in the communion of friends and lovers through playing or listening to music or making love” (Field). It seems, then, that the unity of song provides an access point to transcendence. Again, Baldwin’s text seems to emphasize the important role of art. Given our discussion of Dante in class recently, I couldn’t help but think of Purgatorio. In Purgatory, art is a motive and unitive force. The songs and chants linger over the scene of striving and comfort the souls, stuck in their climb toward transcendence. This music is a shocking transition from the isolation of Dante’s hell, so the music also emphasizes a sort of participatory God, located in communion between souls. It seems perhaps that Baldwin is using music in a similar way. John shares that “their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord” (12). In this way, art holds an especial chance to discover god and one another.
Everybody Plays the “Fool”
As we approach the end of Go Tell It on The Mountain, I want to think further about two disputes that Baldwin considers in the text, both which can be represented by the word “fool.” First, in his rant to Elizabeth about his father, Roy scoffs at his mother’s claim that the children are lucky to have a father like Gabriel, saying, “Yeah, we don’t know how lucky we is to have a father what don’t want you to go to movies, and don’t want you to play in the streets, and don’t want you to have no friends…We so lucky to have a father who wants us to go church and read the Bible and beller like a fool in front of the altar” (Baldwin 22). When Roy uses the word “fool,” he critiques churchgoing people who praise God energetically. Though this critique seems directed at religion, or at least Pentecostalism, generally, it is embedded in a generational dispute. Repeatedly in Go Tell It on The Mountain, children want different things for their lives than their parents do; for example, Florence rebels against her mother’s wishes and Elizabeth hides her life from her family. The relationship between the parent and child around goals for the child’s future is an interesting trope in this book and it will be interesting to see where Baldwin falls on this dispute.
However, Gabriel is not the only “fool” in the novel. Later in the text, John uses the word when he remembers that “the fool has said in his heart, There is no God” (Baldwin 77). This use of fool here refers to religion. As the saying goes, the disbeliever is foolish. Yet Roy’s earlier quote seems to assert the opposite, claiming that the believer is the foolish one. One can easily recognize fools among both religious and non-religious circles, but the central question deriving from these two uses of the word “fool” is whether Baldwin sees religion itself as foolish. Though he seemingly has a more nuanced belief about religion, his positioning on this issue is unclear at this point in the text.
“the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked”
In class we discussed at length the passage of John contemplating his sin of masturbating to older boys in the school bathroom (16). After reading Field’s piece on Baldwin and his religion, as well as trying to find connections between the bible and Baldwin’s text, I noticed another element to the scene that didn’t initially catch my attention. When John is recalling his transgression, he is waking up in his bed. On a typical morning, the house would be filled with the sounds of “his mother singing in the kitchen,” his father “muttering prayers to himself,” pots and pans, the radio, and “folk near by.” But on this day, nothing could “disturb the silence”–a theme that emerges continuously throughout the novel. In this moment, the silence is leaving him alone “with his sinful body,” making him keenly aware of his transgression. In the bible, when Adam and Eve commit the sin of eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, they become aware that they are naked, and with this awareness comes overwhelming shame, guilt, and the need to hide from God so as to not feel exposed for what they have done and their nakedness: “…she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves” (Genesis 3:6-7). I feel as though this scene in John’s room resounds some of this imagery. His eyes were opened in a figurative sense, as designated by the silence making his awareness of his body and his sin inescapable. God could be comparable to the inescapable silence as he is omnipotent and omnipresent, and sudden awareness of Adam and Eve of their nakedness could be comparable to John’s awareness of his body.
Field describes nakedness in Go Tell It on the Mountain as “both foul and terrifying” (452). Though John was not necessarily naked in this scene, he seems bare to some extent.
I’m not sure if this connection is fully there, but this is just something I have been thinking about.
Hate the sin, not the sinner
The theme of racism and its effects hold my interest while reading Go Tell It on the Mountain. Baldwin examines Reconstruction era America and the lasting hold of slavery from different generations, arguing that while people are no longer actively shackled and working on a cotton field, slavery has consequences that continue to resonate in the present and has serious implications for the future.
Though the throughline of slavery started much earlier, Go Tell It on the Mountain begins with Gabriel’s mother, Rachel, who was enslaved for thirty years in the South. Rachel endured many “tribulations,” including beatings and murders, simply because they were black. She was even raped by her white master (a story we see repeated with Deborah) and was denied the child that came out of that savagery. Through the stories of the remaining characters, Baldwin shows that the abolishment of slavery didn’t mean an end to the suffering and tribulations of black people in America.
The deep-seated racism and hatred continued to plague Rachel’s descendants and is reflected deeply in Florence’s relationship with black men. Black women are doubly oppressed — they endure the oppression pf a racist and sexist society. While the racism comes from the hands of the dominant culture, the sexism also comes from black men as well. Women are considered fragile and made to depend on men and the men, hardened by a racist society, are often cruel and abusive — relieving the pressure of their experiences on women. Florence states: “ain’t no woman born that don’t get walked over by some no-count man.” Florence grows to resent black men — especially Gabriel. As he was a “manchild,” she had to sacrifice many of her desires — school, clothes, food. As a result, Florence grew to resent her brother: “I hate him!” she would yell. “Big, black, prancing tomcat of a n—-.” I found Deborah’s response to this exclamation of hatred interesting. She said, “the Word tells us to hate the sun but not the sinner.” While she may have been talking about Gabriel’s actions, I also think that she may be referring to Gabriel’s blackness as a sin. This belief of blackness as a sin reflects how deep the claws of racism are –entrenching itself into the very being of black people to cause them to also internalize it.
John’s Faith (Despite his Best Efforts)
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.
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.