Go Tell It on the Mountain 197to control a spouse, accepts the price and uses her
knowledge of Gabriel’s own sexually sinful past to
protect Elizabeth and the children.
John’s struggle with his father’s angry disapproval
of his interest in “the world” (education, reading,
movies) is interlaced with his growing realization
that he is homosexual, for John feels love and physi-
cal attraction for Elisha, a member of the church
community. His story climaxes with his experience
of religious conversion, which will inevitably free
him from his father’s condemnation.
Go Tell It on the Mountain develops a variety of
themes: family, sex and sexuality, community
are prominent, but also identity, religion, guilt,
and race.
Joe Skerrett, Jr.
cOmmunity in Go Tell It on the Mountain
While James Baldwin’s novel focuses on the birth-
day experiences of John Grimes, its 14-year-old
protagonist, it also develops John’s place in interre-
lated racial, economic, and religious communities. A
community is any group of people with shared social
conditions, ideals, beliefs, and practices, especially,
but not exclusively, those who live in proximity to
one another.
John shares with the members of his family
unit a community of racial identity as an African
American that has more than a personal or indi-
vidual meaning, because his country has made race a
marker of value. In Baldwin’s novel, John experiences
his racial identity and community almost only as a
negative value. The overwhelming aspect of it in
his developing consciousness is its imposition and
definition by the white society that surrounds and
contains him. He does not celebrate his blackness
in song, story, humor, or music. He is mostly uncon-
scious of race within the family and neighborhood,
but very conscious of race and color when he ven-
tures out of Harlem to Central Park or downtown to
a movie (in which, of course, whites are exclusively
featured).
John is similarly unselfconscious about his eco-
nomic condition. His localized community is com-
posed not only of African Americans but specifically
of poor African Americans. John knows that his
family is poor. His individual expectations about
birthday celebrations or gifts are not high. The
shared struggle to maintain dignity and economic
control is figured in the novel in the form of John’s
sweeping of the carpets as part of his Saturday
chores.
But the most important community in which
John exists is his religious community. He shares—
or is expected to share—with the other members
of the Church of the Fire Baptized (“the saints”) a
faith, a worldview, and a set of rituals and practices.
The church in which his father, Gabriel, is a deacon
is an evangelical African-American Protestant sect,
not identified in the novel as part of any larger
denomination. Such institutions, often referred to as
“holiness” churches, stressed a theology of personal
salvation that could be witnessed in the church
community through the expression of ecstatic prayer
and spiritual possession. Stylistically distant from
Catholic and Orthodox liturgical worship, but also
clearly distant from the quietism of Quaker Protes-
tantism, the “holiness” churches incorporate aspects
of African religious ritual into their practice of a
Protestant Christianity heavily influenced by Meth-
odist “enthusiasm.” Thus, John’s experience in “The
Threshing Floor” section of the novel, where he falls
into a faint brought on by his anxiety over the com-
munity’s expectations that he will be a minister of
God like his father, is both a conversion experience
in the Protestant tradition and a version of African
spiritual ecstasy.
The worldview of the church community denies
the importance of the public sphere. The church
community is organized to foster and nurture the
spiritual salvation of its members, who are encour-
aged to “walk holy” in their daily lives. This means
that they should have no interest in the temptations
and distractions of “the world” such as sexual plea-
sure, education, entertainment, and worldly ambi-
tion. The church’s beliefs and practices make the
attainments denied to African Americans by white
society and the compensatory alternatives to them
equally irrelevant or inappropriate. In the novel,
John witnesses the disciplining of Elisha and his
girlfriend for appearing to the “saints” to be flirting
with sexual desire. In the face of this puritanical
obsession, he realizes that his own homosexual ori-
entation will never be acceptable within the church