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CHAPTER 1
Prophetic Commissioning
It came to him that he must testify: his tongue only could bear witness to the wonders he had seen.
— Go Tell It on the Mountain
Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.
— Isaiah 6:8
The subject of Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), is the commissioning of the prophet. As readers know, the protagonist, John Grimes, a young man of intellect and individuality in Harlem in March 1935, initially longs for escape from the miserable circumstances of his community and his family life, especially from the strictures of his stepfather's churchliness and the general expectation that he himself will be a minister one day. In the novel's climax, he undergoes a carefully foreshadowed, yet dramatically unexpected, religious conversion experience. Concurrently, though this point is not explicit in the text, he has been moving toward a homosexual awakening that, in the aftermath of his religious experience, he accepts, though it is not clear how fully he understands it yet. These circumstances set up the most obvious parameters for John's future development: will the conversion prove illusory or temporary, leaving John free to explore his own nature, or, alternatively, will commitment to an antisexual religion ultimately crush both John's emerging sexuality and his individuality? These are real possibilities and Baldwin explores them in portions of this and other books. Here, however, Baldwin sketches a third path. In the moments following his awakening, it comes to John, with conviction, that he must "testify" to "the wonders he had seen" (210), and his determination to do so grows in the remaining pages.
The evidence of Baldwin's text is that John's life will follow neither of the courses just indicated, but he will speak both the external and interior truths he has witnessed and continues to witness, testifying as well to some version of the conclusion his vision has persuaded him of — that the faithful will one day find "a city out of time, not made with hands" (207, paraphrasing 2 Cor. 5:1). John will be free in one way — from social convention — but bound in another, fated to speak what he alone can speak. In biblical terms, John has been called, or "commissioned," as a prophet — not through God's command but through inner sureness. However, the evidence is that John's future will not fall within bounds his church would bless but will take him in paths it would see as profane, and that he will fill the emptied vessels of church prophecy with new content. The novel only hints — but does hint — at this content: victory and transcendence for the bloodied multitudes in John's visionary experience (206–7), victory and transcendence for the dishonored body; the two great premises of Baldwin's fiction.
Baldwin's central story of prophetic vocation builds on a scaffolding of Old and New Testament ideas that are assumed but not made explicit. In Old Testament tradition the prophet is selected (commissioned) by God or an agent of God, as recorded for Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Amos, and implied by the "word of the Lord" formula used for several others. His or her function is not to foretell the future — an incidental though real element in biblical prophecy — but to speak God's word of warning, judgment, or promise to the nation, often a word it does not want to hear: "Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not" (Isa. 6:9). In this mission the prophet may suffer rejection and mistreatment — may live "in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness," as Paul recalls of his ministry (2 Cor. 11:27), words Baldwin will appropriate for his protagonist.
As this tradition of calling and possible suffering indirectly indicates, the prophet's mission, at least in the important social justice strand in prophetic tradition, involves witness against those with social power and on behalf of the poor and defenseless, who are testing stones of the nation's justice. David L. Petersen comments about Isaiah specifically that he "indicts those who act unjustly to [the vulnerable] — princes, judges, lawyers, those who take bribes, those involved in illicit real estate transactions — in sum, those of high status and with access to power in the society" (The Prophetic Literature 90). These aspects of prophecy, which in historical real time vied against more complacent prophetic teachings, became central to the genre in a later process of canon formation that sought to understand Israel's disastrous history as, in part, a result of social injustice (with religious violation). In the New Testament, such statements as Jesus's "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden" and "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" (Matt. 11:28, 25:40) powerfully continue this focus on the poor and outcast, and these aspects of prophetic and Gospel tradition became central in African American thought. Yet, in contrast to this type of prophecy, canonical tradition also speaks of false prophecy — not simply untrue prediction but wrong orientations for the nation in its need. Though too neat historically, it is part of this tradition that while the true prophet speaks "things that cause himself and his audience to become apprehensive," the lying prophet "speaks the things he and the people desire" (Mowinckel 92–93). With regard to Revelation, a governing text for this novel, Christopher Rowland reminds us that in its view, "a prophet who claimed to speak for God but who also compromised with the existing order ... is to be repudiated" ("Revelation" 735).
Ultimately, as Rowland implies, prophets' roles are not limited to denunciation and warning, but extend to visions of a new existence. With the historical development of eschatological and apocalyptic prophecy in postexilic Israel and then in Greek and Roman times, and finally with the Gospel proclamations, apostolic writings, and Revelation in the New Testament, ideas of prophecy came to encompass the transition between old and new worlds and to include what Acts calls "the restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets" (3:21). Apocalyptic-eschatological prophecy becomes the word of hope for a new kind of existence, "new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness" (2 Pet. 3:13; see comparable passages in Isa. 65:17 and 66:22 and Rev. 21:1). Baldwin's novel will speak of these and prophets' other roles, evoking biblical tradition yet redefining it.
The Need for Prophecy
Go Tell It on the Mountain uses multiple fictional techniques — narrative structure, epigraphs, characters' names, and imagery — to suggest the need for prophecy in its fictional world, its protagonist's prophetic affinities, and, to some extent, the content of the prophecy he will speak. This content, which will become evident in John's visionary experience, involves a sense both of accepted membership in a community of the despised existing across time and of a future transformed time in which that community will gain dignity and honor. The fictional techniques just mentioned treat these prophetic elements as latent dimensions of the narrative plot, suggested by implication.
Baldwin implies the need for prophecy through his novel's structure, in which the first and last sections focus on the seemingly private experiences of John's religious and sexual awakening, while middle sections delineate other characters' sexual and social lives against the historical backdrop of U.S. black experience. This structure puts John's life and conversion into a larger context, makes his fate of significance to the community, and, at the same time, suggests a long-term impasse in African American society. Tying these sections together is the novel's examination of African American Holiness and Pentecostal (or "sanctified") churches, their role as a shelter and rallying point for the overburdened, and what Baldwin sees as their narrowmindedness, antisexuality, and isolation from society. The cultural crisis turns around these churches' incapacity to lead toward the redeemed future they present as hope and aspiration, and this unmet need, in turn, implies the need for an alternative prophetic vision.
The Holiness and Pentecostal affiliations of the novel's church are clear from its name, Temple of the Fire Baptized, and the designation of the saved as "saints." In Holiness thought, the precursor to Pentecostalism in U.S. church history, the "fire baptized" were those who had experienced an ecstatic reception of the Holy Spirit, and many churches with this name eventually became Pentecostal (Synan chaps. 3, 6). The use of "saints" for the saved came into Methodism from English Puritanism (the ultimate derivation is from Daniel and Paul) but was particularly common in "sanctified" churches. Holiness followers shunned "worldly" practices such as wearing decorative clothing or earrings, dancing, and watching movies (GT 32), and engaging in any sex outside marriage. "Holiness denominations," writes Peter Kerry Powers, partly drawing on personal experience, "believe that the body is the site within which the spirit is dramatically transformed [to experience] the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. ... Paradoxically, despite its attention to matters of the spirit, Holiness Christianity encourages a meticulous attention to and monitoring of the body" (788).
This concern with bodily sanctity — which eventually generates Baldwin's contrary conception of the body's inherent holiness — stems originally from John Wesley's promulgation of "entire sanctification" or "Christian perfection," his "most distinctive contribution to the Christianity of his day" (Rack 552), as a cornerstone of eighteenth-century Methodism. Though Wesley's varied glosses of "perfection" could be modest — for example, it could mean an ability to adhere to God's law in action — he came to accept that sanctification might come in an instantaneous conversion-like experience, a "second blessing" or "second work of grace," and might confer "salvation from sin" in both thought and act, though sin was only "suspended," not "destroyed" (Wesley 187–88, sec. 26). (In contrast, Wesley's great rival George Whitefield rejected the possibility of ending the "in-being" of sin in life, and Baldwin was also deeply convinced of human imperfection.) Despite Wesley's qualifications, and his not emphasizing sexual over other kinds of sanctity, many of his nineteenth-century followers turned belief in "entire sanctification," especially regarding bodily purity, into hardened doctrine, spurring the formation of Holiness groupings within an increasingly worldly Methodism, their eventual exclusion, and their emergence as distinct churches, many of which later became Pentecostal.
Disciplining sexuality was intrinsic to this stance. As John L. Peters's classic account of the Holiness development indicates, late nineteenth-century Holiness teaching evolved in part around beliefs in what an 1885 doctrinal statement called "a full regeneration of sinful habits and associations" and the "entire extinction of the carnal mind, the total eradication of the birth principle of sin" (137) — beliefs, we will see, mirrored in one of Gabriel Grimes's sermons. These preconceptions are seen in Baldwin's portrayals of Holiness or "sanctified" worship in Go Tell It on the Mountain and later works, and in some characters' lives.
Additionally, though less saliently, the novel's setting, with no present-time scenes outside Harlem apart from John's midtown trip in Part One, shows the congregation's spiritual life as inward-looking, shunning involvement with or challenge to the larger society and awaiting a future transformation in a stance of patient nonengagement. In this social dimension as in its moral-sexual dimension, Go Tell It implicitly tests the Holiness culture's capacities against the unmet needs of the novel's historical world.
Epigraphs add to the implication of the novel's structure. As will be Baldwin's practice in later novels, epigraphs are thematically important and demand knowledge of their contexts; full meaning often depends on verses preceding or following those quoted. Go Tell It uses biblical epigraphs to head the book as a whole and Parts One to Three, and these restate and concretize the suggestion of a need for prophecy. (Chapter epigraphs, taken from Gospel and hymn music, focus on individual characters.)
The general epigraph, adapted from Isaiah 40, "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run, and not be weary, they shall walk, and not faint" (40:31), is part of the redemptive promises to Israel that begin in this chapter of Isaiah. This assurance, addressed to "Jacob" and "Israel" (verse 27), general terms for the nation, promises strength and renewal to those who serve, or "wait on," God. By implication, it applies as well to God's servants the prophets: they will have the strength to continue without tiring and to mount high. The remaining biblical epigraphs enact a shift from apocalyptic promise to the prophecy needed to work for it. The first is from the closing verses of Revelation:
And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. (Rev. 22:17; GT 1)
Almost the last words in Revelation — the four final verses announce its completeness and pronounce benediction — this verse sums up the promise of the heavenly city detailed throughout the last two chapters: the city has descended to earth and in its midst is the fountain whose waters are for all (21:6). Thus, the context for Baldwin's examination of African American history, church evangelism, and their importance in his protagonist's life is the assurance of an end to suffering, a world in which God "shall wipe away all tears from their eyes" (Rev. 21:4). We do not yet know, however, whether to read this assurance as a serious sign of a transformed future or an ironic reference to false hopes.
The epigraph for Part Two is also from Revelation: "And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth" (6:10; GT 57), words spoken by "the souls of them that were slain for the word of God," who are granted robes of promised redemption and told to "rest yet for a little season" (6:9, 11). In counterpoint to the first, this epigraph denotes the present world of social and personal suffering that Part Two details in the stories of Deborah's rape by whites; Florence's failed marriage and approaching death; Gabriel's affair with and denial of Esther and his son Royal; Royal's own life, defiance, and death; Richard and Elizabeth's failed love; Elizabeth's suffering; and the continuing contexts of night riders (62–64), itinerant labor (134–36), white mob actions (140–43), and police oppression (169–70). Biblically, Revelation 6 leads on to the full disclosure of Babylon-Rome's arrogance and terror, before its destruction (chaps. 12–18); Baldwin does not deal with this material but it is felt in the gap between the two epigraphs. Not yet, this epigraph might answer its implied question and the promise of the first.
The third epigraph moves forward from this seeming impasse. Biblically, however, it moves back — from Revelation to the prophets and from the city to the event that must precede its advent, the prophet's selection. If the promise is not to be presently fulfilled, either it must be repudiated or ironized, or prophecy is required to guide us toward its fulfillment. Baldwin quotes Isaiah:
Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. (6:5; GT 193)
In immediate narrative context the words refer partly to John's sense of sexual sin — already suggested in his thoughts of boys, his fascination with his churchmate Elisha's physicality and imagined nights, and their wrestling (11, 6, 8, 48–49, 56). The words refer, as well, to the conversion now beginning, when John like Isaiah will sense God's presence. Biblically, however, the verse belongs to the genre of prophetic commissioning narratives (Ex. 3:2, 4:17; Jer. 1:4–19, etc.) and its meaning depends on its continuation, which Baldwin leaves to readers' knowledge. The quoted verse, from Isaiah's vision of himself at God's throne, registers his sense of unworthiness to see God, and leads on to his selection as prophet:
Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar:
And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.
Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. (6:6–8)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "James Baldwin and the Heavenly City"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Christopher Z. Hobson.
Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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