Book Review: James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain

On July 23rd of last year, the United States Postal Service unveiled a postage stamp in honor of James Baldwin, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He is the third African American writer honored, the first two being Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, two of the most towering and iconic members of the Harlem Renaissance. It is a telling tribute to a writer whose prodigious literary gifts, unflinching personal honesty and seemingly boundless moral courage shook America to its core and shaped the scope of its history for the better. At his best, Baldwin's writing had a seductive mixture of grace, rage, charm , anger, compassion, thoughtfulness, indignation and last but oh-so not least, heart. In his speeches and writings, he touched on countless truths on what it means to be black in America, articulating deep wounds to a mass audience and kicking down numbers of unopened doors in the process. Even in the realm of prodigious American literary giants, Baldwin casts a palpable shadow.

There is a general consensus that when it comes to Baldwin's fiction and non-fiction, the latter is better than the former. As much is that theory is grossly exaggerated by his neo-conservative critics, I must admit that there is some truth to that statement. His most telling work was his essays, where he could find the universal in the personal, and demand the reader repudiate the nightmare of America's racist history and see the humanity of every person regardless of race, creed, gender or sexual preference. Outside of his first novel, his best fiction worked in the first person point of view (1956's Giovanni's Room, 1974's grotesquely underrated If Beale Street Could Talk) When he used the third person, he had moments of great and soaring beauty (first 80 pages of 1962's Another Country, about half of 1979's underrated yet overlong Just Above My Head) but couldn't harness together a disciplined narrative. Although I urge you to read almost everything the man has written, fiction and non, Baldwin has only one truly brilliant work of fiction.

But what a brilliant work of fiction it is. 1953's Go Tell It On The Mountain is a symphony of the post-great migration black family, their interior lives, interconnection with their southern past and ability to survive through tremendous pain. Mountain is a novel brave enough to study and examine the wounds that black people have instead of using them to either browbeat a white audience or ask them for pity. It is also a novel of ecumenical ecstasy and pathology, showing the bind religion has on the scope of African American lives and history, how it helped black people survive during their darkest hours and how black people can barely live its ruthless orthodoxies. Mountain is also a prose tour-de-force to end all prose tour-de-forces, revolutionizing the American syntactical landscape by bringing together a stunning grasp of English prose with the language, rhythms and cadences of the black church. Quite simply, Go Tell It On The Mountain is one of the finest novels written in American history.

Article Author: Robert Lashley

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