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CHAPTER 1
Wrestling for Salvation
Denial, Longing, and the Beauty of Brotherhood in Go Tell It on the Mountain
The song that lends itself to James Baldwin's first novel remains genealogically elusive. Musical and cultural historians have attempted to locate both its origin and generative author, and they must resign themselves to celebrating such mystery as the product of an African American oral tradition. What history does tell us, however, is how John Wesley Work Jr. — the famed historian as well as director of the renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers — played an instrumental role in (re)composing the song and bringing it to the attention of the country. At its heart, the song "Go Tell It on the Mountain" speaks directly to a tradition of Negro spirituals, a collective medium by which enslaved Africans or African Americans articulated faith, waged resistance, and composed survival through sonic utterance. Even more, the song's focus on the Nativity, or the birth of Jesus Christ, performs a symbolic framing of Baldwin's novel wherein the ideas of birth and celebration are intertwined with a narrative about manhood, a sort of coming-of-age tale bound by patriarchy and religion, liberated by a beautiful expression of brotherhood. Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain offers its readers the opportunity to witness the birth of Black manhood within spaces committed to its denial, resolving itself through a profound rendering of Black male vulnerability and intimacy required for salvation.
Born originally as "Crying Holy" circa 1944, Go Tell It underwent several transformations, including the change in its title to In My Father's House, before becoming the 1953 work. When Baldwin first began writing, the preoccupation with the tense relationship between him and his stepfather colored the text. Nearly a decade later, however, it had evolved to include a plethora of relationships that spoke to a more holistic portrayal of James Baldwin and his young protagonist. To this last point, some context might be necessary. Like many authors, Baldwin's Go Tell It inevitably draws upon his personal life, transforming an autobiographical impulse into a work of art. And while these slippages might engender a favorable reading of the novel as autobiographical fiction, the central grapple of Salvific Manhood will be to highlight the larger thematic concerns of the text. Most of these concerns can be excavated from a treatment of the same-sex male relationships within the novel. Therefore, I argue that one of the fundamental aims of the novel is neatly embedded within John's relationship with God, Gabriel, Elisha, and self. Interestingly, women within the novel serve critical functions in John's pursuit of salvation; they are, after all, the ones who fortify him upon the threshing floor. Nevertheless, they remain peripheral to the larger play of manhood and masculinity. This identifies how patriarchy constructs gendered webs of exclusion, on one hand, and how the pursuit of an actualized manhood pleads for an understanding of exclusion because of it, on the other hand. While most of the women are presented as subsidiary characters whose stories are told for the purpose of contributing to John's and Gabriel's, this is also true of significant male figures like Elizabeth's Richard, Florence's Frank, and Gabriel's Royal and Roy. Beyond this consideration of gender, there are several elements that inform how Baldwin constructs or mediates relationships. To these, from the religious to the familial, we are asked to bear witness.
As early as the title, Baldwin's novel anticipates its own religious engagement. Such engagement is both guaranteed by the title and demanded by the subject. Baldwin could not have possibly explored the intricacies of a gendered and queered salvation without pulling from the doctrines responsible for so much of his moral self. And thus, quite naturally, many scholars enter the discussion of Go Tell It through the gates of the holy. In James Baldwin's God: Sex, Hope, and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture, Clarence Hardy advances a reading of Baldwin's first novel that is heavily grounded in a discussion of religiosity. According to Hardy, the novel "depicts a Black holiness culture that harshly restricts individuals' opportunity for growth." While Go Tell It does in fact reveal an individual's war with a religious institution or the constraints of that institution, Hardy's assessment of John's relationship to the church is somewhat limited. This is noticeable in the assertion, "Even as he enters into this religious world of holiness culture, John is not sure he wants to be trapped in such a narrow, parochial tradition separated from the joyful pleasures and thrilling demands of the world." Such a thought captures the bulk of scholarship surrounding John's relationship with the church and serves as a basis for how the novel has come to be viewed. As Hardy continues to trouble John's religious relationship, however, he fails to explore the other symbolisms of the church and/or God within the novel. This, of course, was not his goal, but it provides an excellent space of intervention, where a new perspective may add to the breadth of criticism.
The centrality of religion in Go Tell It on the Mountain has influenced the ways in which readers understand and appreciate John's relationship with Gabriel. For many, Gabriel's relationship with the church cannot be separated from his relationship with John. This is a safe argument. For, as Michael Fabre points out, "The child [John] represents Elizabeth's sin to Gabriel's eyes, but also a means of projecting and of rejecting his own guilt." The guilt alluded to speaks to Gabriel's first son, Royal. Royal, conceived in infidelity and subsequently rendered bastard by Gabriel's unwillingness to acknowledge fatherhood, is one of the many tragic characters in the novel. Also, Gabriel's distance from John is a matter of bloodline. In being merely a stepson, John is unable to fulfill God's promise to his stepfather. None of this is to be disputed, at least not in this instance. The reader, however, must also come to know that what forms Gabriel's relationship with John is not necessarily what shapes John's relationship to Gabriel. This is to suggest that while Gabriel's problem is hindered by some twisted spiritual investment mediated by an irresponsible history, John's issue is rooted in something far less religious. Thus, any analysis of the father–son relationship must take into account how very differently each man comes to understand the conflict. If one accepts the idea that "the novel can even more significantly be seen as an eloquent record of Baldwin's struggle to break away from his stepfather's God," then one must also question what that God represents, how it comes to be understood as such, and the effects it has on young Baldwin or his autobiographical protagonist.
Probably one of the most fascinating and often-written-about relationships from Go Tell It on the Mountain is the relationship between John and Elisha. Offering a wonderful contrast to the discordant tie between John and Gabriel, this relationship magnifies a beautifully peculiar bond held between two of Baldwin's most endeared characters. Like the other relationships within the novel, John's connection to Elisha is tremendously influenced by the permeating rhetoric of religion. This in turn colors common readings of the relationship while obscuring the possibility of others. To be clear, most scholarship on John's unique brotherhood with Elisha reduces it to Baldwin's grappling with issues of sexuality, arguing that the ambiguity is, again, largely due to the strict confines of what Hardy terms the "Black holiness culture." The field almost unanimously writes John's attraction to Elisha as a flirtation with the homoerotic and homosexual, completely ignoring the possibility of pure homosociality or something that penetrates below the surface of sexual desire. Yet, while submitting that "Baldwin suggests a kinship between religious pursuits and sexual play throughout his work," the discourse is firm in its reading of both the physical closeness and spiritual connectedness of John and Elisha. For instance, in the infamous scene between the two young men, most agree that "though they do not have a name for it, John and Elisha are wrestling with homosexual desire." I mean not to propose that this moment between two adolescent men is not somewhat sexual, especially given Baldwin's autobiographical threading. However, there is more at work in this physical moment. And if we are to understand the significance of this "sexual play" within a religious space by two men in the nascence of their manhood, then we must pay particular attention as to what this means for John alone.
Geta LeSeur, writing in Ten is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman, places Go Tell It convincingly within a tradition of coming-of-age novels written by African Americans. Citing John's push toward the limits of identity, she argues that the novel differs from crises of identity found in the white literary tradition as the particular dilemmas faced by Black youth are unique to their racial and sometimes class experience. Louis Pratt underscores this basic premise and asserts that, in a sort of Whitmanesque fashion, "Baldwin's novel becomes an exorcism, a purgation, a necessary constriction which leads, ultimately, to the unlimited expanses of self-identity." Both LeSeur and Pratt capture the essence of the novel, as it is indeed the narrative of a boy who comes of age through a powerful pushing of identity. But, more than that, Go Tell It on the Mountain reveals how love, its absence and presence, and the search for it mediate John's existential crisis. In this regard, it is more than a reformed bildungsroman, more than an exploration of identity. John is neither lost nor invisible in the ways that such literary reasoning suggests; he is struggling because of a particular absence that his spirit ordains him to search for — a journey that continues in each novel Baldwin writes after the first.
If Go Tell It is in general a novel of human interactions, then it is in particular a narrative of male relationships. Above anything else, the most profound exchanges experienced by the protagonist, John, are had with the characters of Gabriel and Elisha. These two men represent something totally different for the peripatetic John, with Gabriel being a symbol of his departure and Elisha being a sign of his destination. This suggests that Go Tell It complicates the notion of the bildungsroman. The young protagonist does not simply come of age; in fact, the novel's chronology barely reaches past twenty-four hours. And while some may argue that John undergoes a spiritual transformation, I submit that the spiritual transformation is linked with a more symbolic travel. John's rebirth is less a matter of coming into a certain manhood and more an issue of demanding that which his manhood needs — namely, love. The rebirth is climactically connected to his fourteenth birthday because it coincides with Baldwin's entrance into the ministry. It is not, however, meant to boost the significance of a boy's search for identity and his ultimate cross into manhood. LeSeur was right; Go Tell It troubles the way existential crisis is patterned in the larger American literary tradition. However, it also muddles the ways in which it is displayed in Black literature. Inevitably, John's struggle, while magnifying certain identity markers like race, class, sexuality, and kinship, is definitively shaped by a desire of love. This is what defines Baldwin's novelistic corpus — the fictional writing of his philosophy of love. It begins, quite naturally, when he first began to work through it in his real life — in that moment of his youth when he danced on the cusp of manhood.
According to Colin MacInnes, Go Tell It on the Mountain "is a densely packed, ominous, sensual doom-ridden story, lit by rare beauty, love and human penetration. The theme is life and religion and how both, wonderful and terrible, can create and destroy." MacInnes's idea of how "life and religion" are sources of creation and destruction aptly describes the life of the novel's protagonist, John Grimes. Thus, it is more so a novel relaying the story of John, whose dysfunctional relationship with his father (stepfather) leads him on a journey to fill a void. The metalanguage of paternity informs not only John's relationship with other family members in the novel but also the nature of his quest and the relationship he develops with Elisha. The metaphoric space-in-between John and Gabriel informs the young man's spiritual struggle. It is, in a sense, the proverbial fraternal crisis. It is the metalanguage of paternity, coupled with the rhetoric and religiosity of the novel, that shapes the notion of the fraternal. It, as explained earlier, relates to an idea of brotherhood. However, I suggest that my concepts of the fraternal and fraternal crisis, though deviating from more historical and literal understandings of "brotherhood" within the Christian and African American religious traditions, nonetheless serve this project well.
In addition to showing how God's love is absent from John's relationship with Gabriel, Go Tell It reveals the subsequent journey that John partakes of in order to find the love he so desperately seeks. This search for the fraternal is what many critics will conflate with a coming-of-age narrative. However, as shown later, it resounds with a more emotional element that Baldwin hopes to make clear. Consequently, as John begins his search, he is led to the figure of Elisha. Elisha emerges as a symbolic antithesis to Gabriel, as the former becomes a male embodiment of love John passionately longs for throughout the novel. I argue this as the criticality of Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Go Tell It begins with the proclamation of how everyone prophesied preaching as a part of John Grimes's future. He was to follow in his father's footsteps, to uphold the strong religious and ministerial tradition that consumed his father, Gabriel. The opening is framed in a week-old recollection of the Grimes's church and introduces, albeit in cursory fashion, many of the characters that will later move the novel's narrative. Nevertheless, it is after this brief contextual introduction that the novel truly begins, with the protagonist John Grimes waking up on his fourteenth birthday on a Sunday in March of 1935. The waking mood captures the crisis that will unfold throughout the day and hints toward the very schism that underwrites the entire novel.
The reader is launched into John's psyche as the thought of no one remembering his birthday plagues him: "For it had happened, once or twice, that his birthday had passed entirely unnoticed, and no one had said, 'Happy Birthday, Johnny,' or given him anything — not even his mother." John's thoughts reveal one significant aspect of his struggle as a member of the Grimes household. He is tormented by the state of feeling invisible, unloved. Even more, the day is dramatized by the idea of birth, John's birth in particular. As readers continue, they learn that the silence surrounding John's birthday symbolizes the "problem" with his birth and the nature of his relationship with his father. Yet, before the reader experiences the tension directly, Baldwin uses an introspective John to build more dimensionality into his personal struggle.
As John lies in bed, the struggle with familial invisibility is coupled with the remembrance that he has sinned. And it is this unique combination of invisibility and sin, of lovelessness and religion, that colors the first section of the novel. He remembers,
He had sinned. In spite of the saints, his mother and his father, the warnings he had heard from his earliest beginnings, he had sinned with his hands a sin that was hard to forgive. In the school lavatory, alone, thinking of the boys, older, bigger, braver, who made bets with each other as to whose urine could arch higher, he had watched in himself a transformation of which he would never dare to speak.
For John, his coming-of-age is marked by a complicated or complex transformation unearthing the death of boyhood and the birth of a different type of longing. Not only does he become man through the symbolic sexual act, he becomes or begins becoming a different iteration of man. Thetransformation alluded to in this passage is one of the first indications of how John's crisis is one of manhood and masculinity. The reference of "the boys, older, bigger, braver" is layered. On one hand, it is a simple capturing of a boy on the brink of adolescence, a mentioning of the natural process of budding masculinity; after all, boys are rarely cemented in the doctrines of American heterosexual manhood despite their many practices. There are always these elisions, these moments when young men bend ego, wonder, or competition into the space of the homosocial. When that bending dares a more intimate dance, it approximates the other way this moment must be read: as an expression of a subtle homoeroticism. John's guised masturbatory moment is stimulated by the thoughts of young men playing with their sexual organs and signals that John's announcement of the birth of his manhood might also be potent with silences around how it is constructed. Additionally, the shame John feels is not simply the consequence of religious indoctrination. The thinking of other boys is not necessarily suggestive of homosexuality or homoeroticism. For, as John wakes cloaked in the shame of his sin and burdened with the feeling of being forgotten, what he recalls to the reader is that, on this day marking a cross from boy to man, his transformation happened alone. There would be no witness to his new masculinity, no one to share how he has grown. This is precisely the crisis that he faces — Who will help him settle into this transformation? And more importantly, who will usher him the love that his new manhood demands?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Salvific Manhood"
by .
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