The American Century: Literature since 1945 655told, “had filled John’s life ... from the moment he had first drawn breath.” It is the
sound of the blues, the sound of sermons, the sound of all the rhythms of African-
American life through which an entire race has found a way to express itself, to face
and transform its pain. The achievement of Go Tell It on the Mountain is that, as an
initiation novel, it works on so many levels. It records the initiation of a boy into
knowledge of his own sexuality, the initiation of a black boy into realization of his
own racial inheritance and identity, and the initiation of a young person into a
recognition of his own humanity and presence in the community. Not only that, it
registers another, parallel initiation: that of the author, Baldwin himself, into an
understanding that would subsequently shape his career, that only in accepting
himself could he express himself, only in embracing the cultural forms, the “sound”
available to him as an African-American, could he encounter and possibly transcend
his own suffering and that of his race.
While he was still working on Go Tell It on the Mountain, in 1948, Baldwin moved
to France. He was to spend the rest of his life traveling between Europe and the
United States, living in France and Switzerland but never leaving the United States
imaginatively. His second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), openly explores
homosexuality in the story of a young white American expatriate in Paris. Another
Country (1962), his third novel, uses New York, Paris, and elsewhere as settings for
several characters trying to explore issues of racial and sexual identity. Other, later
novels similarly pursue problems of race and sexuality: among them, Te l l M e H o w
Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above
My Head (1979). His first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955), was followed
by several others, notably The Fire Next Time, in which Baldwin insisted that America
could never truly be a nation until it had solved the color problem. If it did not solve
it, he warned, America would not only never become a nation, it would face
apocalypse, “the fire next time.” His play The Amen Corner was, in turn, followed by
another three: Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964), One Day, When I was Lost (1973), and
A Deed from the King of Spain (1974). Right up until his final book of essays, The Price
of the Ticket (1985), Baldwin continued to be committed to what he called
“the necessity of Americans to achieve an identity” and the questions of systematic
racism and injustice – the active denial of black identity by white America – that this
necessarily raised. “There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to
which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead,” he once wrote.
Baldwin made the gap between the illusory and the real, on a personal, racial, and
national level, his subject: insisting always, as he did so, that the only way for
individuals, races, or nations to survive was to face the truth.
For many years, and especially during the 1950s and early 1960s, Baldwin was a
political activist. He marched, talked, and worked with a number of civil rights
leaders, including the two most famous, whose speeches and other writings give
them a place in American literary history, Malcolm X (1925–1965) and Martin
Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968). Born Malcolm Little, and later also known as el-Hajj
Malik el-Shabazz, Malcolm spent his earliest years in Michigan. After his father died,
probably at the hands of a white racist group, and his mother was placed in a mentalGGray_c05.indd 655ray_c 05 .indd 655 8 8/1/2011 7:31:37 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 37 PM