Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
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Web ID: 15418855Timeless tale of American blacks & Christianity
In the early twentieth century, Harlem was the place to be for black culture. Many had recently moved northward from the South to try out city life. As much as they wanted to reinvent themselves, past culture, built on the Christian Scriptures, remained ever near. In a small Harlem church, a teenage son came to terms with his identity in a relatively short amount of time. This book starts with the beginning of his epiphany, but soon flashes back through decades of family history and turmoil. In the end, James Baldwin returns us to the opening scene as the protagonist truly comes of age and recognizes who he is. As the title alludes to, this tale spins around the topic of religion. The central character’s acting father Gabriel grew up in the South, son of a newly freed slave. His sister Florence managed to move to New York City while Gabriel stuck around to care for his mom. He was always a ladies’ man, but soon found spiritual rebirth in Christianity. He decides to become a preacher in his community. He still had to work for sustenance, but he sought to pastor people out of their sins and into faith and fervor. Like many pastors, he seemed to project his past sins onto his audience at church. And like many pastors, he never really escaped his old life, as much as he wanted to. The truth about ourselves is impossible to escape, and to Baldwin, no amount of religious devotion can change essential human nature. Gabriel’s life story unwinds, and decades later, he finds himself in New York City looking for a new life. He marries a lady and adopts her son, the central character as his son. Yet the past still doesn’t remain the past. It never does. This decades-old story veers into the domain of classics. Baldwin masters the art of long flashbacks and attends to readers’ curiosity by revealing just enough to keep the story going but not enough to solve the entire lot. This book gets pegged into the genre of African-American fiction. It’s that, for sure, but the story defies any one category. Yes, conveying necessary historical information, it peers into African-American life in the century after Emancipation but before the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Yet it also provides a deep religious understanding of how many Americans – and American pastors – operate, of any skin color. While skeptical of religious leadership and authority, Baldwin is not that hostile towards a human leaning into God. I’m glad to have seen Baldwin’s truth in this timeless tale.
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Lots to consider here. Makes for a good club read.
A beautifully written, semi-autobiographical peek into the life of James Baldwin. James Baldwin had been coming up a lot in my book club’s various social media feeds and we had not really read him before, so when it came time to select a book, Go Tell It On The Mountain was chosen. From the short blurb above, you’d think that the story follows this young boy through his self-discovery process and it does, but there are other stories told along the way. Stories about his relationship with his step-father, how religion impacted him growing up, how the misfortune of others affected his family down the line. These stories are loosely woven together but not for one big epiphany at the end. I feel that the end is left for the reader to interpret as we all had different takes on where the character would go from there. This story encouraged some thoughtful discussion so it worked well as a book club pick. I also enjoyed the writing. It had a flow to it that appealed to me as I was reading it and since it’s semi-autobiographical, I learned about Baldwin’s experience with the Pentecostal Church and how he struggled with his sexual identity. There’s a lot to consider here.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com