198 Baldwin, James
community, which is why he tells Elisha, whom he
loves, to remember “whatever happens, that I was
there.” Knowing intuitively that he will not remain
within the community, it is still important to John
to prove that he was the spiritual equal of his father
in his experience of conversion, acceptable to God if
not to Gabriel.
Baldwin may well have known Paul and Percival
Goodman’s Communitas: Means of Livelihood and
Ways of Life (1947), a book published while he was
working on the novel. The Goodmans’ book posits
three types of social communities: one centered
on materiality and consumption; one focused on
art and creativity; and one that maximizes human
liberty. Throughout his life’s work, Baldwin criti-
cized American society for its materialism while
presenting the protagonists of his fiction as artists
attempting to bring into existence some new world
order or community that would make people more
spiritually free. John Grimes’s journey in Go Tell It on
the Mountain is clearly the first of many.
Joe Skerrett, Jr.
Family in Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin’s novel is richly inscribed with a vari-
ety of issues about family: family love, family social
and sexual history, family psychological dynamics,
and family secrets all are in play. The protagonist,
John Grimes, is an African-American boy, just
turning 14 on the day of the novel’s action, who is
embedded in a nuclear family that consists of his
mother, Elizabeth; his father, Gabriel; his brother
Roy; and other younger siblings. But, as Baldwin
makes clear, this nuclear family is embedded in an
extended history of family relations that all come
to bear on John’s life. For example, although John
does not know it, Gabriel is only his stepfather. His
biological father, Richard, died a suicide before he
was born. Gabriel, influenced by his fundamental-
ist Christianity, rescued the pregnant Elizabeth
from disgrace but holds her sexual sin and John’s
illegitimacy over their heads, preferring and protect-
ing his rebellious son Roy. Unaware of this history,
John struggles to find ways to please the disapprov-
ing Gabriel, who is admired by the little religious
community in which they move. On this, his 14th
birthday, John is beginning to see the limitations of
following, as the community predicts he will, in his
father’s footsteps into the church.
Gabriel’s sister Florence tries to protect Eliza-
beth and John from the worst of Gabriel’s funda-
mentalist Puritanism. Florence knows him for what
he really is. She knows that behind Gabriel’s profes-
sions of piety and his patriarchal posturing there is
a history of human failure as a son, a husband, and
a father. She witnessed Gabriel’s abandonment of
their sick and dying mother in the South many years
earlier, an abandonment that left her to bear the
burden of caretaking alone. She also knows about
Gabriel’s infidelity to Deborah, his first wife, and
his adulterous liaison with Esther that produced an
illegitimate child, Royal. She knows that Gabriel’s
preferential love for the rebellious Roy is a guilt-
driven effort to compensate for his failure to be a
parent to Royal, now long since dead.
Florence—who, like John’s father, Richard, is one
of the few characters in the novel whose name does
not have a biblical resonance—is a secular person,
not one of the “saints” who attend Gabriel’s church.
Like her name suggests, she is a natural force, not a
religious one. Her insights into life are more psycho-
logical and intuitive than religious or dogmatic. She
faces the realities of her life without the consolations
of religion and has developed a tough exterior that
enables her to stand up to the overbearing Gabriel,
as Elizabeth, an altogether more gentle woman, can
rarely do. Florence’s compassion for Elizabeth is in
part a reflection of her memory of Deborah, the rape
victim whose love Gabriel abused in his youth. Flor-
ence interferes in the family dynamics of Gabriel’s
household in the hope of preventing Gabriel’s
spiritual destruction of Elizabeth—in hope, that is,
of preventing a repetition of the cycle of family dev-
astation caused by Gabriel. Facing imminent death
from cancer (which she conceals from the family),
Florence now understands and regrets the way she
destroyed her own marriage through an overem-
phasis on bourgeois proprieties that drove away her
fun-loving husband, Frank.
Of course, the novel does more than juxtapose
Gabriel’s fundamentalism and Florence’s secularism.
The dynamics of this family are driven by the secrets
of their past lives. The exploration of Gabriel’s pas-
sionate affair with Esther and his failure to acknowl-