Book Review: James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain - Page 3

After spending his teenage years and early adult life drinking, fighting and carousing up a storm, Gabriel finds religion and becomes a minister, and for a while it soothes the demons inside of him. He finds a devoted wife and tends to a congregation. But his lust overtakes him and he has an affair with a local "heathen," which results in her getting pregnant. Instead of facing up to it, Gabriel steals money from his wife to help send her away, pretends that nothing happened and acts like he is the same moral figure. It is the first of many scenes in which he uses a fake piety to buffer the memory of one of his actions, and the results, as the novel progresses, are deceit, heartbreak, treachery and death, although not directly by Gabriel's hands.

Gabriel's sister Florence and his wife Elizabeth are two sides of the same coin. Both left the south to escape the pain, madness and cruelty of their environment in search of a better life up north. Both didn't find it. Florence married a down-on-his-luck lazy drunk, and Elizabeth married a poor, yet sweet, bright and decent man, who was broken down by the police and the system. Few male writers, regardless of color, have ever written as multi- dimensional female characters as both of these women. Like Jean Toomer's beleaguered goddesses in Cane, an avant guarde modernist masterpiece of the Harlem Rennaisance, they are somewhat holy figures who have great obstacles mounted against them. Unlike Toomer, Baldwin doesn't sentimentalize and fetishize them, giving real stories to their lives and basic human wants and needs.

But in the end it comes back to John, a bright, sensitive, heartbreakingly beautiful soul, on which nothing is lost. Devoted to his mother and emotionally scarred from the viciousness of his father and environment, he distances himself from religion and buries himself in movies and school. But in the end the nightmare of the Grimes' history weighs on him and he has to either break away or join in the sadomasochistic family dance with Jesus. Seeing all the, to quote Yeats, "Terrible Beauty" of the revival meeting, he undergoes a wildly surrealistic conversion to God, bringing the story full circle. An the end the novel leaves you with so many questions. Can John brave his pains through prayer and praise? Can Gabriel reconcile his holy side with his evil side, or is that holy side just a sophisticated front to smoothen that evil out? Will Elizabeth, the Fantine of Harlem, ever find happiness with Gabriel and reconcile the death of her first husband? Can Florence find an emotionally comfortable space between the personal hell of society and her personal hell of her family? Unfortunately, or in this case not, the novel isn't particularly a vehicle to wholly answer questions, it's there to tell a story, and what a great one Mountain is.

Article Author: Robert Lashley

Visit Robert Lashley's author page — Robert Lashley's Blog