Book Review: James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain - Page 2

The story revolves around the Grimes Clan, 5 members of a highly religious black family. There is Gabriel, the father who is a noxious mixture of pallid sanctimony and moral squalor. He married a woman named Elizabeth, who he treats sadistically because she had a son out of wedlock, although he's done the same thing earlier in his life. Elizabeth's "bastard" son John is the main character of the novel, a perceptive, bright and insightful young boy when he is not being Gabriel's punching bag. Gabriel gives more love to Roy, the son he has with Elizabeth, who is more like the childlike thug Loeb to Gabriel's fatherly Leopold. Gabriel's sister Florence serves as his personal Jeremiah, one of many biblical references in the novel, reminding him of all the dirt he's done in his life. Their lives are centered around the church in Harlem and their own demons, wounds and unresolved family issues.

The first part of the book, chronicling John's observations about his everyday life, describing the ritual and ceremony of the black church and showing John's status as an outsider in New York, establishes the template for the personal insight and the lyrical beauty of the novel. But Mountain really starts to pick up when Roy comes home after being beaten up by white kids after deliberately trying to pick a fight. Filled with a potent but emotionally hollow indignation, Gabriel goes on a rant about whites and the ugliness/cowardice of his son John, bickers bitterly with his sister Florence and slaps his wife around until Roy cusses him out, which prompts Gabriel to give him a brutal beating.

From then on the novel progresses to a Saturday night prayer meeting where their life story is told in disorientingly gorgeous flashbacks, nearly biblical in moral scope, told in a language that's ornate, biblical, poetic and beautiful. The bulk of it centers around Gabriel and how he became a combination of Dostoevsky's Stavrogin and the reverend Ike. What makes Gabriel such a chilling character is that Baldwin doesn't present him as a cardboard archetype of evil, but shows the circumstances that made him who he is, and the consequences of his actions that spread that evil about. Baldwin's creation serves as his finest retort to Bigger Thomas, the famous psychopath as victim of Richard Wright's Native Son, not his essays on the subject, which are petty, overwritten, off-the-mark and highly overrated. Unlike Wright's creation of Thomas, which he used as a indicator to damm the evils of racism, Baldwin's Gabriel, while not free from the brutal damage of bigotry, is a monster primarily of his own volition.

Article Author: Robert Lashley

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