Go Tell It on the Mountain 199edge his son Royal humanizes him in the eyes of
the reader. Gabriel’s effort to connect with Roy is
clarified by our understanding of his secret, past fail-
ure as the father of a rebellious child. We also come
to understand that Elizabeth is sustained in her
strained marriage by her secret memory of the deep
love she shared with Richard. Elizabeth’s tender
affection for John reflects not Gabriel’s harsh view
of the boy but, rather, Elizabeth’s idealized view of
John as a reflection of Richard and his love for her.
Joe Skerrett, Jr.
sex and sexuality in Go Tell It on the
Mountain
Baldwin’s novel brings together issues of religion
and issues of sexuality. The main character, John
Grimes, is the illegitimate child of Elizabeth, who
has married a Pentecostal preacher who thinks of
John as the emblem of her sexual sin. John’s religious
stepfather, however, has his own sexual sins, which
he has never revealed to his wife. Unfaithful to his
sexually unresponsive first wife, Deborah (herself
a victim of rape), Gabriel, too, had an illegitimate
child in his southern past, but he abandoned the boy
and his mother, Esther, with whom he had had a
volatile sexual relationship though he was a married
man. Further, he denied Royal when Deborah, his
childless wife, would have accepted the son of his
mistress as her own. Gabriel’s sister, Florence, knows
this history and threatens to reveal it if Gabriel does
not treat John and Elizabeth more kindly. She has
herself lost a husband to a secular puritanism of her
own, an attitude that judged her fun-loving and
careless husband for lacking drive and propriety.
Outside the family circle, John witnesses how
the church represses and stigmatizes the blossom-
ing of sexuality among its younger members. When
John’s buddy Elisha, an older teenager, is observed to
be infatuated with a young girl in the congregation,
they are hauled before the assembled “saints” and
warned of the spiritual dangers of sexual expression.
John is thus quite clear as to how the homosexuality
that he realizes is his destiny will be received within
the community.
Baldwin is very cautious in asserting the specif-
ics of John’s sexuality because of the rigid attitudes
toward homosexuality that prevailed in the 1950s
when the novel was published. In a suppressed sec-
tion of the original text—later published as the short
story “The Outing”—John openly expresses his
romantic attachment to another male. But careful
reading of the novel will clearly demonstrate that
John’s sexual imagination is homoerotic. He has a
masturbatory fantasy about the boys at his school
who engage in pissing contests in the toilet. His
homosexuality is most forcefully manifested in his
attraction to Elisha. John clearly has a crush on the
slightly older boy: “John stared at Elisha all during
the lesson, admiring the timbre of Elisha’s voice,
much deeper and manlier than his own, admiring
the leanness, and grace and strength and darkness
of Elisha in his Sunday suit.” Further, later in the
text, John wrestles with Elisha as they prepare the
church space for the evening service, and John’s
response to Elisha is one of sensual pleasure: “And
so they turned, battling in the narrow room, and the
odor of Elisha’s sweat was heavy in John’s nostrils.
He saw the veins rise on Elisha’s forehead and his
neck; his breath became jagged and harsh, and the
grimace on his face became cruel; and John, watch-
ing these manifestations of his power, was filled with
a wild delight.” Wrestling has often been used as a
metaphor of spiritual struggle, as in the biblical nar-
rative of Jacob wrestling with an angel, but it has also
served as a symbol of suppressed homosexual feeling,
as in D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love.
Here the wrestling scene serves both those purposes,
as John struggles with the nature of his burgeoning
sexuality as well as with his realization that the world
of the church community will not satisfy him.
Caught, then, between the demands of his reli-
gious community and the demands of his psycho-
sexual nature, John experiences an anguished “flood
of fury and tears” as he tries to decide what he must
do. If, as the family and community assume, he will
follow Gabriel into the church and ministry, how
will he handle his forbidden sexuality? If he accedes
to the demands of his mind and body and aligns
himself with the profane world of desire, how is he
to be saved? At the end of the novel, he accepts the
conversion experience that marks his adulthood in
the church, even as he knows he cannot make the
church his refuge from the wider world forever.
Joe Skerrett, Jr.