This is by James Baldwin (1924-87), and it's his first novel. It was published in 1953, but it had taken him ten years (and a nervous breakdown) to write.

My audio-version was narrated by Joe Morton. Absolutely brilliantly. I really think you have to HEAR this book before you read it: Hear the rhythms and cadences of the Black vernacular; hear the biblical references and the evangelical jargon.

I wasn't reading it because it came out at No. 81 on The Guardian's recent list of the "100 best novels" (I was already halfway through it at that point).

I was reading it, rather, because Giovanni's Room was so good. And because Baldwin is one of the writers who influenced Tash Aw. And because Ocean Vuong recommended it: "The novel that Baldwin claims he 'had to write if [he were] ever to write anything else' is a masterclass on how potent and vital an autobiographical text can be for a writer of color... It says, essentially, that a writer of color does not arrive at the literary table, as is often believed, in spite their geographical and cultural roots, but because of them, that those origins, complex and rich with joy and challenges, were foundations within their praxis -- not shackles that denied them an imagination."


James Baldwin, 1964

Baldwin was born and raised in Harlem. It was not an easy life: "His stepfather, an evangelical preacher, struggled to support a large family and demanded the most rigorous religious behavior from his nine children... As a youth Baldwin read constantly and even tried writing; he was an excellent student who sought escape from his environment through literature, movies, and theatre. During the summer of his 14th birthday he underwent a dramatic religious conversion, partly in response to his nascent sexuality and partly as a further buffer against the ever-present temptations of drugs and crime. He served as a junior minister for three years at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, but gradually he lost his desire to preach as he began to question Black people's acceptance of Christian tenets that had, in essence, been used to enslave them."

Much of this life history resurfaces in Go Tell It on the Mountain. In fact, Baldwin couldn't finish the story until he had left the United States, and his move to Paris in 1948 had helped him gain perspective on his life: "Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean," he told the New York Times, "I could see where I came from very clearly, and I could see that I carried myself, which is my home, with me. You can never escape that. I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both."

He subsequently moved around between Paris, Switzerland, and Turkey, eventually retiring to St Paul de Vence in the south of France, which is where he died.



***

There's a detailed summary of Go Tell It here, but briefly, the story features John, a Black kid, who is just turning 14 in the Harlem of 1935. His preacher stepfather (Gabriel) is constantly on his case, but he is a bright boy, and his teachers encourage him (to Gabriel's disgust). To add to his confusion, he is also tormented by his nascent feelings for a lad at church, Elisha, who's 17, and already "saved".

We open on the day of John's birthday, but there's little in the way of celebration. Instead, there's a big family argument over Roy, John's younger half-brother, who comes back bloodied from a fight with white boys that he has aggressively sought out. Gabriel blames his wife, Elizabeth. Gabriel's sister, Florence, defends Elizabeth, and blames Gabriel, who ends up beating Roy savagely, and slapping Elizabeth.

And then they all go to church... More specifically, to a charismatic community called the Temple of the Fire Baptized. Ecstatic singing and dancing are par for the course here. Feet pound, hands clap, voices moan.


Pere Lachaise, Paris, 2024. Baldwin lived in the French capital for nine years

Over the course of the next three subsections, we learn more about Florence, Gabriel, and Elizabeth. They're all sad stories.

Gabriel had no father figure as a role model. After a riotous youth, he converts, becomes a preacher, and marries. This doesn't stop him fathering a child by another woman, Esther. He offers her no support, so she moves away to have her baby. She dies. The child is brought back, but Gabriel still won't acknowledge paternity, because he fears this admission would wreck his reputation as a man of God. The boy, Royal, grows up wild, and is eventually killed in a Chicago tavern.

After the death of his first wife, Deborah, Gabriel marries Elizabeth. Her boy, John, is illegitimate (his father died before he and Elizabeth had the chance to marry). Gabriel promises to love John, but doesn't. In Gabriel's eyes, Elizabeth has not truly repented of the "sin" that brought John into the world, and he disparages him accordingly. Yet John is the one with religious sensibilities. His actual son, Roy, couldn't give a damn. The stepson, unsurprisingly, "lived for the day when his father would be dying and he, John, would curse him on his death-bed".

Florence, meanwhile, knows she's dying. But she's not going to go gently into that good night. She knows about Gabriel's illegitimate child, deeply resents what she sees as his utter hypocrisy, and wants to hold his past over him. She's had bad luck with men, too. Her husband, Frank, was a cheerful but completely improvident person. He left her for another woman many years before, and was killed in France in WWI.

***


Alain Locke. Baldwin was greatly influenced by his Harlem middle school teacher, Countee Cullen, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, and a contributor to a 1925 anthology edited by Locke. Entitled The New Negro: An Interpretation, it also included work by Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnston, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes. This picture (by Winold Reiss) is included in Locke's Introduction, and the book is the source of the next four illustrations

In the final section of Go Tell It, John has an overpowering conversion experience -- a combination of a dream, a fit, a trance, and a vision -- but it's all so ambiguously described that critics have drawn very different conclusions from it (more below). Elizabeth and Elisha are delighted that John is now "saved", and are supportive. Gabriel is grim and discouraging.

Florence rounds on her brother again. She hates his arrogance -- his confidence that his name is "written in the Book of Life"; his bull-headed certainty: "I know I'm going to look on my Saviour's face in glory." Florence brings up Esther... "Is you going to look on her face, too? Is her name written in the Book of Life?"

I'm forgiven, says Gabriel. Which would sound better if he came across as a changed man... But Florence is not done: "Who is you met, Gabriel, all your holy life long, you ain't made to drink a cup of sorrow? And you doing it still -- you going to be doing it till the Lord puts you in your grave." But Gabriel is utterly convinced of his own righteousness -- or says he is, anyway. Nobody but God can judge him; God chose him; and he has been "running with Him" ever since his conversion.

Florence replies: "And if you been but a stumbling-stone here below? If you done caused souls right and left to stumble and fall, and lose their happiness, and lose their souls. What then, prophet? What then, the Lord's anointed? Ain't no reckoning going to be called of YOU?" She's going to make sure Elizabeth knows about Esther and Royal: "It'll make Elizabeth to know... that she ain't the only sinner in your holy house. And little Johnny, there -- he'll know he ain't the only bastard... When I go, brother, you better tremble, 'cause I ain't going to go in silence."

John, meanwhile, is elated by his experience. But he knows he will weep again, and rage again. Now he is joyful, but he's obviously afraid he will sin again. "'Elisha,' he said, 'no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what ANYbody says, you remember -- please remember -- I was saved. I was THERE.'"


Also by Reiss, The Brown Madonna

***

Go Tell It is profoundly moving. It's another of those God's-eye views of humans that just make you feel compassion and a kind of awe. There are plenty of obnoxious people depicted here, and there's no need to excuse them. But we are at least led to understand them a little better. We all come out of something, after all. A family, a society, a history, an environment. There's never any telling whether -- in their place -- we could have done any better. There but by the grace of God go I... Except why did I get the grace, and not they?

There was also much in this novel that resonated with work I've read already:

-- Reminiscent of Toni Morrison's Beloved, for example, was the story of Florence's and Gabriel's mother, who had been born on a plantation during slavery: "By and by she had married and raised children, all of whom had been taken from her, one by sickness and two by auction; and one, whom she had not been allowed to call her own, had been raised in the master's house."

-- Like Jean Toomer's Cane, Baldwin recounts the great migration (from the South to the North), and the painful reorientation required. Gabriel was undoubtedly a bigger man in the South. John reflects: "His father no longer, as he had once done, led great revival meetings, his name printed large on placards that advertised the coming of a man of God. His father had once had a mighty reputation; but all this, it seemed, had changed since he had left the South." Like Cane, too, and like Nella Larsen's Passing, it reminds us that terrible things are still happening in the South, and in no part of the US is a Black life considered anything other than cheap.

-- The other book that this really reminded me of -- strangely, perhaps -- is James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with that lengthy sermon on what awaits the schoolboy congregation if they don't repent...


Reiss again. The School Teachers

***

There were two areas that really struck me:

1. Fathers and sons, men and women

Fathers in this novel are either absent or all too present. I can't think of a single example of a good father...

We're way after 1913, but the theme of patricide has obviously not gone away. John, before that mystical release of the conversion scene, is still trying to pray. He wonders if conversion would make him closer to his father. But actually he doesn't want to love his father; he wants to hate him: "Oh, that his father would DIE! -- and the road before John be open, as it must be open for others... The grave was not enough for punishment, for justice, for revenge. Hell, everlasting, unceasing, perpetual, unquenched for ever, should be his father's portion; with John there to watch, to linger, to smile, to laugh aloud, hearing, at last, his father's cries of torment."

Later in that scene, he feels his father looking at him: "His father's eyes stripped him naked, and hated what they saw... 'I'm going to beat sin out of him. I'm going to beat it out.'..." Then there's a kind of dream struggle between John and Gabriel. Gabriel says the boy is the Devil's son. John retorts: "I know what you do in the dark, black man, when you think the Devil son's asleep... And I hate you. I hate you. I don't care about your golden crown. I don't care about your long white robe. I seen you under the robe, I seen you!"

After the conversion, if such it is, Gabriel does not greet his stepson: "He did not move to touch him, did not kiss him, did not smile. They stood before each other in silence, while the saints rejoiced; and John struggled to speak the authoritative, the living word that would conquer the great division between his father and himself. But it did not come, the living word; in the silence something died in John, and something came alive."

If sons struggle to catch a break from the older generation, then women have even less chance, and Florence's opinion of men reflects a lot of what we see in the book: "Look like ain't no woman born what don't get walked over by some no-count man. Look like ain't no woman nowhere but ain't been dragged down in the dirt by some man, and left there, too, while he go on about his business."

Women are variously threatened, beaten, overworked, blamed, abandoned, paid off, stolen from, or cheated on. Florence has ploughed her own furrow, but at the expense of great bitterness of soul. She's close to death, but very much not at peace. Elizabeth has struggled to prevent her self-respect being hammered into the ground by Gabriel. But her life is wholly unenviable; and she has little agency. The only women who seem to get any respect are the religious women: Sister McCandless, Sister Price, Praying Mother Washington.


Jazz, by Miguel Covarrubias. John's church was probably not a fan...

2. That kind of church...

There are two potential sides to any religious community. One represents community, solidarity, comfort, and shelter, and that's the side that's particularly important to a distressed group such as the Black population in 1930s Harlem. The other side represents control, manipulation, and terror -- the kind of thing that can mess people up for life.

John's fiery, ultra-charismatic church was, according to Andrew Connolly, part of the "Black Holiness" movement. This is not a fixed denomination, more an umbrella term for churches with a shared focus in their theology and practice. One of their characteristics is "a conservative approach to sexuality that condemns any sexual activity outside of marriage".

It was a different age, and a different place, and a different society, but my experience of evangelicalism had much in common with what's described here. So much so that my skin crawled sometimes while I was reading...

I'm sure all evangelicals are NOT like this. Many have moved right on into modernity, and tailored their gospel to major on compassion. In fact, it was loving, thinking evangelicals who cured me of evangelicalism... But many of the ones I encountered in my impressionable youth were stuck in some old-fashioned idiom, a kind of Victorian God-speak designed for the ears of an Old Testament God.

The language in Go Tell It reproduced that mode of speech in a shudderingly exact way... Revival, a revival meeting; tarrying before the Lord; the hand of the Lord, God's hand is upon him; the Word, the Word; SIN; the Lord's mind in this matter; the mercy seat, the altar call; the soul that sinneth, it shall DIE; the Lord laid something on my heart, the Lord's been speaking to my heart; the Lord burdened my soul, and kept me a-praying; give your life to the Lord, give your heart to the Lord; go out into the field...

"'Praise the Lord, Deacon,' Elisha said. 'See you at the morning service, Lord willing.' 'Amen,' said his father, 'praise the Lord.'"

"For God had a plan. He would not suffer the soul of man to die, but had prepared a plan for his salvation. In the beginning, way back there at the laying of the foundations of the world, God had a plan, AMEN!, to bring all flesh to a knowledge of the truth..."

I can hear it all. It's like a script... What you learn at preacher-school.


More jazz

"He said in the last days evil would abound..." And I remember people who rejoiced in this. Rejoiced that every horror in the world was a sign that the end times were drawing nearer, and Jesus would come and close down the whole shit-show, and we'd be in a better world. "We". The chosen. God knows what would happen to the others. I always rebelled against this kind of idea. I loved this world, embraced it, wanted to make the most of it, didn't want to see it as just a stop en route for heaven...

In the evangelical scene I knew, everyone was so awfully certain that there are only two sides to anything. And that they were on the right side. Except, underneath, many are NOT so certain they're on the right side... Hence much emotional and spiritual and psychological turmoil.

So there was always lots of stuff about sin... And the thing was, it was always sexual sin... No-one seemed too worried about anything else... Actually, that's not quite true. We were all supposed to be nice...

But as for righting the rampant injustices in the world, doing something about the crippling poverty that blighted the lives of so many millions, attempting to counteract the racism and sexism and classism that sullied our societies -- well, there wasn't so much about that. Abstaining from sex until after marriage, on the other hand, and making sure it was heterosexual sex -- well, THAT was what really mattered. Or so it seemed.

Of course, you wouldn't expect a church to preach damaging promiscuity. But prioritizing love, respect, humility, and consent in relationships, and putting the whole sex thing in a broader context -- as one element of life among many, many other joys and trials -- surely, that's not incompatible with Christian faith? Because if you relentlessly bang on about your version of sexual purity, it's like putting your congregation on a diet, with the predictable effect that the more they're told they can't eat, the more all they can think about is food...


Pere Lachaise, Paris, 2024. Wright, Baldwin's mentor and "spiritual father", also became the object of the younger writer's sharp criticism

These skewed priorities are super-relevant to Go Tell It. Connolly argues that the novel "does not portray Gabriel simply as a villainous character who commits emotional and physical violence against his family but as a committed participant in a religious system that fails him". It's true, he says, that the "system" of racism hovers constantly in the background, and makes life more difficult for every single character, but the really pernicious system is the church-sanctioned pressure that's placed on people regarding their sexuality. When every sexual stirring is immediately condemned as "sin", you're not going to grow up undistorted.

"The Black Holiness system that Baldwin describes," Connolly continues, "offers Gabriel relief from fear and guilt through conversion and sanctification even though it is responsible for creating and fostering the same guilt and fear." Yeah...

And yes, that sanctification thing... Conversion means you're forgiven, and all your sins are washed away. But what about the rest of your life? Well, sanctification, the story goes (and it's admirably retold by Elisha), means you no longer WANT to sin, and have the power to resist. Except it doesn't seem to work... You don't wake up the day after your "conversion", and suddenly find yourself a better person. As the weeks and months go by, you're not noticing much difference in the ungenerous and unloving traits of your character that you never liked from the beginning. It all starts to feel like a con... Or are you just doing it wrong?

So far, so cookie-cutter-evangelical. But in this Black Holiness context, says Connolly, there's an extra twist of pressure, because the spiritual power of sanctification offers you protection from the racist world outside. And pushing the stakes up still further is one of Gabriel's dreams, in which God tells him that "the elect" will be safe from harm, and "so shall thy seed be": "The promise that his son will inherit both the power and protection that Gabriel believes he enjoys as a sanctified believer motivates Gabriel and ultimately becomes part of the systemic pressure he feels when he fails."

In his relationship with Esther, Gabriel fails. Big-time. But the individual failure is compounded because the systemic pressure of the church means he can't admit it. So he covers it up, stealing from his wife, and packing the young woman off to an uncertain fate (thereby becoming, according to Florence, responsible for her death). Even after her death, he refuses to step up and acknowledge his son (so that he, too, runs off the rails, and ends up dead).

And, of course, all those multiple layers of failure, pressed down and denied because they're too painful to look at, end up breaking out in the form of violence and cruelty towards his family. His actions are inexcusable; Florence's accusations are correct. But Gabriel, Connolly suggests, is not the ONLY one to blame: "Without absolving Gabriel of his violence, the novel points to the systemic pressures that push him to become bitter and angry."

John is in a much worse boat. The sexual leanings he is discovering are not going to find accommodation in the church in any shape or form. So perhaps Gabriel is not just being bitter and negative when he appears scathing about his stepson's conversion: "He is also providing a legitimate warning based on his own experience: conversion and sanctification are not always enough to erase sexual desire and the accompanying guilt and do not eliminate the systemic pressure both characters experience."



***

There's another interpretative possibility in Go Tell It that I had completely failed to notice, but found very interesting once it was pointed out by Miller Wilbourn. That's existentialism. Baldwin probably didn't consciously embrace this philosophy, but the two were around at the same time, and things do tend to get into the air, as it were.

The heart of existentialism is the idea of choice. Humans are first born, and then define themselves. Contrary to concepts like human nature or divine sovereignty, nothing is pre-determined. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, "man is condemned to be free". That doesn't mean irresponsibility. People have to take into consideration what their choices entail; and as any given person's freedom depends wholly upon the freedom of others, we are all obliged to desire the liberty of others as much as we desire our own. What all this boils down to, though, according to Wilbourn, is this: "The future is what we make it -- that is to say, we can and must make it -- and we cannot hide behind hope in God. We are our own only hope."

The visionary culmination in Go Tell It therefore represents "a kind of existential conversion beneath the surface of the religious imagery that pervades it". Between John and his self-realization stands the need to face his history: "The legacy of American slavery, as well as the continued injustice visited on Black people, has an alienating effect, Baldwin argues. If one cannot come to terms with the history of American racism, then one cannot hope to confront one’s own experience."

By highlighting this corporate aspect, Baldwin is adding to Black existentialism's critique of its European equivalent, which is seen as "insufficient for those who are subject to the ubiquitous anti-Black violence of a racist world". In a world like that, "it is impossible to follow Sartre's advice and simply assert an essence... Black existentialism answers Sartre’s claim that 'existence precedes essence' with an assertion of the value of the individual’s relationship to the collective."

In the second stage of John's conversion, then, he encounters the symbol of the 'cloud of witnesses,' which represents the community and history through which he must come to self-knowledge".

Wilbourn insists we're not talking about a classic Christian conversion here, arguing that the author "said explicitly on many occasions that he had left the Church and abandoned Christianity, and his notes for the novel confirm that John’s struggle culminates with religious disillusionment of some kind at least". Rather, John has a different task: "John’s struggle in this scene is to overcome the curse -- the alleged damnation of himself and his community -- and to be 'saved' by finding his own identity, independent of racist or religious definition imposed by society and Gabriel. In order to do so, John must confront his family's history and come to terms with his place in the community... The result of Baldwin’s existential innovation is a bipartite vision in which the author’s historically focused hindsight informs his self-realizing insight."

I found Wilbourn's a very plausible interpretation of the conversion scene -- perhaps because I know the rest of Baldwin's story. In the last interview he ever gave, in 1987, he declared: "I was not born to be what someone said I was... I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only." Sounds pretty existential...



Interestingly, Brian Hamilton's account, while not naming existentialism, expresses similar ideas:

"What John faces on his fourteenth birthday is not simply the confusion of youth. It is the question that sits beneath the novel’s entire architecture: what does it mean to become oneself when the past insists on shaping the future?...

"Baldwin describes John’s experience in language that echoes the ecstatic rhythms of Pentecostal worship. Yet beneath the religious imagery lies something more complicated: a confrontation between inherited belief and personal identity. Is John truly saved? Or has he simply found a momentary release from the pressure of guilt and expectation? Baldwin refuses to provide a clear answer. John rises from the floor transformed, but the nature of that transformation remains open. Faith may have claimed him. Or he may simply have learned how to survive within the system that shaped him...

"By the novel’s final pages John Grimes stands at the threshold of adulthood, surrounded by the voices of his community singing and praying. The future remains uncertain. But Baldwin has revealed the landscape John must navigate -- a terrain shaped by history, belief, and the persistent desire to become oneself.

"That is why the novel continues to matter. Baldwin does not tell us what salvation looks like. Instead, he shows us the moment when a human being begins asking whether the life prepared for him is the life he must accept."

Which is probably a good place to close...