Secret Life of Books

Go Tell It On The Mountain: growing up Black, poor and gay in 1930s New York

• Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole • Season 1 • Episode 15

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Go Tell It On The Mountain is one of the great incendiary debuts of the 20th Century. Published in 1953, James Baldwin’s autobiographical novel follows a fictionalised avatar of his younger self as he navigates his way through an ordinary day in 1930s Harlem. Baldwin showed readers life as he knew it as a black, working-class gay teenager in a racist society. 

Baldwin disliked what he called ‘protest’ novels. His interests ranged from classic white writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James to many of the giants of Harlem Renaissance, like Countee Cullen and Richard Wright. He counted Miles Davis and Toni Morrison amongst his friends, but also Norman Mailer and ultimate playboy Hugh Hefner. To write a book about New York, he ultimately needed to leave America - first to Paris, then to a Swiss village, where he - against a backdrop of Alpine hills and the tinkling of cowbells - he brought it to a close. 

Go Tell It On the Mountain was respected on publication, but hardly sold like hotcakes. Sophie and Jonty ask why it is that Baldwin, who wrote his greatest works in the 1950s and 1960s, and died in 1987, has become only more relevant in the last decade, with  intellectuals, novelists and film-makers adapting or responding to his work. 

Content warning: discussion of violence, domestic abuse, racism; mention of rape.

Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

Further Reading and Watching:

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, (Penguin, 2002 edition, first pub. 1953)

James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” in Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Classics 2015)

David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography, (Skyhorse, 2015)

Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters, (New York Review of Books Classics, 2024) 

Colm Tóibín, On James Baldwin (Brandeis University Press, 2024)

Eddie Glaude, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, (Crown, 2020)

New Yorker article about Baldwin and Richard Avedon’s collaboration Nothing Personal: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/13/richard-avedon-and-james-baldwins-joint-examination-of-american-identity

Barry Jenkins’s film adaptation of “If Beale Street Could Talk” 

Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro”



Speaker 2:

Every book has two stories. The one

Speaker:

it tells. And the one it hides. Welcome to The Secret Life of Books.

Speaker 2:

I'm Sophie G, academic and writer.

Speaker:

And I'm Jonty Claypole, broadcaster and producer.

Speaker 2:

In this podcast, we tell the story behind the story of the literary classics everybody wants to read, feels they should read, or has already read and loved.

Speaker:

Today, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin.

Speaker 2:

Jonty, Go Tell It on the Mountain was published in 1953. It was the debut novel of the great African American novelist, essayist, and thinker, James Baldwin. It's a book that captures the freedom and it captures the violence of New York's Harlem in the 1930s. One of Baldwin's school teachers later described how he and his family had lived in the worst poverty she had ever seen in Harlem. And in this episode, we're going to look at how Baldwin managed to escape the streets of New York to become one of the most revered writers of the 20th century and on into the 21st century, and how in order to do so, he needed to defy Not just the prejudiced of a white supremacist society in the aftermath of Reconstruction and the Great Migration, but also the religious and intellectual giants of the Harlem Renaissance who mentored him in his youth. But first, let's get into the text and get a feel for how it sounds.

Speaker:

Go Tell It on the Mountain revolves around a 14 year old boy called John Grimes. And just to introduce the text, and also John himself, I'm going to do this passage from when John Grimes, on his birthday, has headed downtown in New York To give himself a birthday treat. John had read about the things white people did to coloured people. How, in the South, where his parents came from, white people cheated them of their wages, and burned them, and shot them, and did worse things, said his father, which the tongue could not endure to utter. He had read about coloured men. being burned in the electric chair for things they had not done. And yet he walked here and no one raised a hand against him. But did he dare to enter this shop, out of which a woman now casually walked carrying a great round box? Or this apartment before which a white man stood, dressed in a brilliant uniform? John knew he did not there, not today, and he heard his father's laugh, no, nor tomorrow neither. For him, there was the back door and the dark stairs, and the kitchen or the basement. This world was not for him.

Speaker 2:

So this is the centenary of Baldwin's birth, 2024. He would have been a hundred years old. In fact, he died in 1987, and the great writer, Toni Morrison, gave the eulogy at the funeral. At his funeral. Jonty, how was it for you reading this book?

Speaker:

first read Baldwin when I was in my late teens. I got a copy of Another Country, which is a later book, his third novel. And for me, a white middle class kid in London, a complete eye opener into another world. and Through Another Country, I discovered jazz music and All sorts of other things and ideas I didn't know about. So this is the first time I've come back to Baldwin as a writer, and I, I was just amazed by the power of his prose, by his writing, and by the story he tells.

Speaker 2:

It's incredibly confronting at many moments. I mean, the violence is, is very real. There's something about the way he writes it, through the close up third person and first person of modernist storytelling that really allows us to be very intimate with the violence in the novel and also really allows us, I think, to be intimate with the emotion of the novel and the, the loyalty and passion that these characters feel for one another. It's very powerful.

Speaker:

Just after we did To Kill a Mockingbird,. two weeks ago. I read it, straight after then and, and realized, of course, that Go Tell It on the Mountain is set in the same year that, To Kill It a Mockingbird is. It's set in 1936.

Speaker 2:

Oh, wow. I actually hadn't picked up on that. Yeah.

Speaker:

And what a difference. What a difference. And when we were talking about To Kill It a Mockingbird a few weeks ago, we talked about the The extent to which the book which is such a classic, has in fact dated in that, it presented of civil rights for a kind of white middle class audience. And so Baldwin's a slower burn. I think it's become easier to read Baldwin as the decades have passed. And a much richer experience, where To Kill a Mockingbird in comparison, I felt after reading this, felt like quite a two dimensional novel.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it feels much more like a sort of press release or a whitewashing, of America's racist past. It's really Baldwin who has become this champion, of African American literature in the Black Lives Matter era

Speaker:

and we'll find out why as this episode goes on. But Sophie, tell us what happens in the book. So

Speaker 2:

Go Tell It on the Mountain takes place within 24 hours and it's structured in three parts., it's set in this family, the Grimes family, who are attending their local church called the Temple of the Fire Baptized, which is a Pentecostal church. And you know, it's probably worth explaining to readers that Pentecostal churches in New York throughout the 20th century, actually, are these. Immersive cultural institutions for African American families. You go to church, but the services are very long. This particular one goes all night. and families who were members of Pentecostal churches, it was their whole lives., they thought about it all the time. It was completely part of their home culture. They didn't really, Consume popular culture in the way that other families would've been doing. And as we find out in this novel, John Grimes has very mixed feelings about coming from this background as his. Aunt Florence who we also meet does. So it happens in three parts and we follow John Grimes on the morning of his 14th birthday and it's a kind of stream of consciousness as he reflects guiltily on the fact that he's feeling these homoerotic desires for other boys, he resents his brutal violent father who's in fact his stepfather Gabriel and he's completely devoted to his mother Elizabeth. eventually as a birthday treat to himself with a tiny bit of money that he's given, he walks downtown to the movies., and when he comes home, he discovers his younger brother, Roy, has been injured in a knife fight. He's been stabbed. And this prompts a huge family argument and Gabriel ends up whipping Roy with his belt. It's a very violent scene. The second part of Go Tell It on the Mountain describes a series of internal meditations, which are called prayers, among the older generation of the Grimes family as they are at the church. So we hear from John's aunt Florence, who remembers her youth in the deep south and her flight to New York City. we hear the point of view of Gabriel, the violent passionately father who remembers his awakening as a preacher, and his early, very sinful life and fathering of a bastard child. And then we hear from John's mother, Elizabeth, who remembers her love affair with an idealistic man named Richard, who ends up suiciding, and the birth of her son, who is John, the narrator of the novel. And then her marriage to Gabriel, who saved both Elizabeth and the son. And then the third part of the novel describes a long and very strange,, quite surreal religious vision and rapture that John has while praying overnight, and results in his being saved., And after this has happened, he and the family walk home. The ending of the novel is, deliberately inconclusive. It speaks about heading into kind of a new world and a new life, but we're very much caught by this novel in the past, in the story that's just been told. So it's a very intense novel, packed into this very short space of time. Jonty, why do you think it's a classic?

Speaker:

First of all, it's a classic because it's just an incredibly brilliant piece of writing and an incredibly brilliant piece of art. It's one of the most self assured debut novels there is Baldwin loved Henry James. He loved Dickens. He also loved the novels and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and I think in this book he's fusing these different traditions together. It was a very revolutionary book the time because Baldwin had turned on what he called the protest novels of the generation before him. People

Speaker 2:

like Richard Wright. People

Speaker:

like Richard Wright who had mentored him and Baldwin. adored and still did adore to a degree, but he felt that those sorts of novels, and not just written by black writers, but also white writers in the 1940s, had a tendency to become quite two dimensional, that in pushing a message of social justice, they created characters who were too neat so in Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin rejects that tradition and, in John Grimes, sets out to create a better world. hero who is neither a two dimensional victim nor a symbol injustice, but a three dimensional character just trying to get through 24 hours of life in 1930s Harlem.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and we see so much of the minutiae of his teenage psyche, it all, it comes across in this very vivid detail through the book. Yeah, I think it's a classic because it fuses the modernist techniques that are probably most familiar to readers at the time from European writing. Late James, novels like The Ambassadors or. The wings of the dove, but also, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner in the American context. So it takes these modernist techniques, which are very much about getting very closely embedded in someone's mind and following They're thinking and they're feeling and I think that what Baldwin does that's so brilliant is to fuse that with the language and the feeling of African American spiritualism and Christianity. You know, obviously through the device of the church, but more generally through this motif of the language of the King James Bible, which the whole novel is kind of written in this very overwrought biblical, uh, Idiom. and,, I think that is a testimony of survival and the claiming of sovereignty and identity, in the face of violence and oppression. So I think that's what makes this novel so classic. what's the secret?

Speaker:

For me, the secret, or one of the secrets, is he wrote this book to stop himself from killing somebody. He rewrote and rewrote different versions of Go Tell It on the Mountain over, over ten years. And all through this time, he was experiencing this. Phenomenal rage at the racist society in which he lived and talked about the urge he had to kill somebody and he was channeling that rage into, into this book. So it's a book that emerges from rage, but I don't want to present it as an angry novel because it's a very beautiful novel. It's

Speaker 2:

a, it sort of transforms anger. And I think the rage is, is partly the rage of being a black man in 1930s New York or black child, but it's also, the rage toward his stepfather and towards his family for the circumstances that he's brought up in and the psychological and often physical violence that was going on in his, in his family.

Speaker:

what was the secret for you, Sophie?

Speaker 2:

Well, for me, it was this, dense, deep network of literary and artistic and musical influences in Baldwin's life. We're, we're going to hear in a minute that he grew up in New York. He then spent much of his life in Paris and in the south of France. and he met this incredible, just, smorgasbord of the great artistic, figures, the great thinkers, the great makers of art of the period. So, quite early in his life, a great mentor to him was the African American artist, Beauford Delaney, who was a important figure in visual modernism. He actually went to high school with the fashion photographer, Richard Avedon, who he ended up co authoring a book with. He was briefly, but really importantly, friends with the civil rights activist, Medgar Evers, who was assassinated, he was involved with Martin Luther King Jr. and with Malcolm X. And at the same time, the actor Marlon Brando put up the money for him to fly from, Europe to New York to meet the editors of Knopf when he was publishing Go Tell It on the Mountain. We've already mentioned that he was friendly with the great. modernist black storyteller, Richard Wright, who wrote Native Son. He ends up having a very close relationship with Toni Morrison, but he's also friends with Norman Mailer, who's a sort of, avatar of kind of hyper white masculinity in mid century American letters. Um, he's friends with Hugh Hefner, for God's sake, in the Playboy Mansion. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Speaker:

Yeah. What was their friendship built on?

Speaker 2:

100 percent sure. Possibly has quite a lot to do with swimming pools, maybe.

Speaker:

Don't

Speaker 2:

ask. Don't ask, don't tell, yeah.

Speaker:

In your, I'm looking at your notes of the people. James Baldwin, you, and you mentioned all the names you have on your notes, except you wrote Miles Davis.

Speaker 2:

Well,

Speaker:

and I think, you know, if you say those words, Miles and./,Davis, you're going to trigger. It's

Speaker 2:

going to activate something in you, isn't it?

Speaker:

The most boring biography for me about Miles Davis so I I was waiting for you to say Miles Davis, and you didn't. You're, you didn't. You've left me on the brink.

Speaker 2:

I'm so sorry, Jonty. You slightly scared me off because you warned me ahead of time. Don't mention the people who he hadn't met when he was writing Go Tell It on the Mountain. So we didn't meet Miles Davis until

Speaker:

Oh, that's true. Yeah,

Speaker 2:

until the 1960s., so I really hope you're going to get a bite at the Miles Davis apple, Jont.,if not today, then when we do later Baldwin.

Speaker:

Okay, Sophie, James Baldwin, he's born in Harlem in 1924, but he's very much a child of the Great Migration, as it's called. Just give us some context on The Great Migration, and also Harlem at the time, that phrase, the Harlem Renaissance, you're somebody who spent a long time in America, and well,

Speaker 2:

the first thing to say is that as an American, it's the Harlem Renaissance, John D, not the Renaissance.

Speaker:

I got it wrong straight away.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So the Great Migration is a really important moment in African American history after the civil war in the 1860s,, which is largely fought over the question of slavery in the South. After the Civil War, which is won by the North, there's a period of so called Reconstruction, where slavery has been abolished, but there's still, ongoing segregation, racism, and oppression of African American and, People of color in the American South and partly as a result of the industrialization of the north, and partly as a, as a result of the shifting labor conditions during the First World War, there are these enormous waves of migration from the southern states of America up into the northern states of America and certain cities, uh particularly Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia. Washington, to some extent, Boston, become these hubs for the northern migration of African American families. It's in many ways a very exciting period, but of course it's also a period of immense struggle because the problems of racism continue in the North, even though in theory it's it's more liberated so Baldwin's mother Emma was from Maryland, which is the same place that his mother Elizabeth in Go Tell It on the Mountain is from. And his father or stepfather David is from New Orleans, which is far down in Louisiana in the deep south. they both came up to New York and, David's mother, had been an enslaved woman. So there were several members, many members, of the extended ancestry of James Baldwin's family who had actually been enslaved. so he's growing up in Harlem, which is in the east of Manhattan, of the island of Manhattan in New York. It's sort of above the Upper East Side, and it spans across the top of Central Park, which is why in the book there's a wonderful scene, actually my favorite scene, where the young John goes into Central Park on a snowy day and has this, you know, experience of being in the, in a giant city, and how it's sort of expanding his mind. So he's growing up in Harlem and, perhaps we now think of Harlem as this very impoverished black neighborhood. I mean, now it's actually been completely gentrified, but, back then we think of it as, as a poor, black, quite violent neighborhood. And those things were true. It was also the case that it was a place where immense cultural vitality and reinvention and transformation was going on. So we've now mentioned, Richard Wright many times. He was a really important mentor to Baldwin and his great novel was called Native Son. It was published in the 1940s, but the people who know Baldwin's writing well will recognize that Baldwin's, probably his most famous essay,, is called Notes of a Native Son. And It's this provocative rewriting of Richard Wright, who Baldwin ended up pushing back on as, as someone who was too obsessed with black protest, and actually, the first, piece that Baldwin ever published when he was 24 years old was a fierce takedown of Native Son, it was an essay called Everybody's Protest Novel, and Baldwin skewered race based political fiction in it, not just Richard Wright, but also Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had, up until that point, been this iconic articulation of, abolitionism. you know, So Richard Wright's one figure of the Harlem Renaissance. There, there are many others, including the painter I've mentioned before, Beauford Delaney, who, you know, is also a really interesting figure in, Baldwin's life because,, he says of Delaney, Beauford was the first walking living proof for me that a black man could be an artist. And they end up spending an enormous amount of time together. In the West Village and then subsequently in Paris. It's also the case that in this period, there was some amazing school teachers. So for example, the African American poet and writer County Cullen was a teacher in Baldwin's school and he encouraged him to write poetry and to move to France. the writer Abel Mirapole, who wrote the song Strange Fruit, was also a teacher of Baldwin's and an inspirational figure for him. And then Baldwin also had a white teacher called Orilla Miller. And she mentored him and took him to plays like, for example, Orson Welles voodoo version of Macbeth. And the last person I have already mentioned, but want to lean on a bit more is the man who would become the celebrity fashion photographer,, Richard Avedon. So they were, I think, a year apart from one another in high school. Avedon was a white man. and there's an amazing story about Baldwin and Avedon going back to Avedon's apartment, where he lived with his family on East 58th Street on the Upper East Side after school one day. And the elevator man in the building wouldn't take the boys up in the elevator, so they had to take the stairs. And when they got up to Avedon's apartment,, they went in and they told. His mother, what had just happened, apparently she was a very slight sort of small diminutive woman, she wasn't physically strong. And she, she walked out of the apartment into the elevator and she's, and she punched the elevator guy in the face. So it's this period of,, awakening, and protest and engagement with America's racist story among both black and white families. And I think that that's all sort of coming together in Baldwin's schooling and his experiences, in Harlem.

Speaker:

I was, Very struck reading Bill biography of James Baldwin that on one hand the deprivation of Harlem. There was 50 percent unemployment. And then what you're talking about is this extraordinary exposure that the young Baldwin had to really inspirational teachers and artists from a very young age. And, Baldwin talked later about the way he was drawn to culture as a way of escape. said, I read my way through two libraries by the time I was 13. I read myself out of Harlem. And I think when we were talking earlier about why he's both such an inspirational figure for,, the Black Lives Matter movement but also to white intellectuals is Baldwin was drawn to all culture and he loved the classics. He was a

Speaker 3:

Obsessed by Henry James. he loved Charles Dickens' novel of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, and he was obsessed by a character called Madame de Farge. And in the book. Madame Defarge, as presented by Dickens, is this evil, violent, revolutionary figure. But Dickens does give her a motivation. And Madame Defarge, when she was a child, her sister was raped and her brother was murdered by an aristocratic family in pre revolutionary France. And Baldwin latched on to Madame Defarge, not as a villain, but as a sympathetic character. And he wrote, I recognized in her that unrelenting hatred, for it was all up and down my street and in my father's face and voice. And in fact, it was Aurelia Miller who took James Baldwin. to see a film adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities when he was 12 years old.

Speaker 4:

That's really fascinating. I didn't know any of that. Did you want to talk about,, Baldwin's sexuality? Because one of the other kind of really compelling and, important things about Baldwin is that he's also a figure for gay rights.

Speaker 3:

That's right. And that's something that's going to come out very strongly when we get into the text of Go Tell It on the Mountain because it's in part about John Grimes's emerging sexuality and his attraction to boys, his own age. But I think James Baldwin grew up with this sense of being a triple outsider. You know, he's black in a white supremacist society, he's working class, but he's also gay. And being gay was completely taboo in America, including Harlem in the 1930s and 40s. And this meant that he faced discrimination even within his own intellectual community. So, you know, right up until the 1960s, a kind of derogatory nickname he he was given by other civil rights activists was Martin Luther because, uh, because he was gay. So his sexuality is, incredibly central to the crisis of faith he has when he's 17 years old and leaves the Pentecostal church for his father. And it's also the reason why he moves to Bohemian life of Greenwich Village and then to Paris a couple of years after.

Speaker 4:

So there's this emergent, sexual awareness, there's an emergent political consciousness.

Speaker 3:

I talked earlier about that. the rage that James Baldwin had at this time and Harlem was one of the few places in America where you could go about your daily life within a community and not encounter racism in the same way that you would if you were in the South, but yet at the same time you couldn't ever escape it. And During the second world war. A lot of white workers left from, New Jersey And that suddenly opened up a lot of jobs for young black men from Harlem. And James Baldwin went to work in New Jersey on a railroad track. And it exposed him to that structural racism in American society in a way he hadn't yet known up until that point. And he became enraged because he was constantly being turned away from restaurants where he would just be told by the waiter or waitress, we don't serve Negroes here. And he describes in one of his autobiographical essays, The rage that builds up in him until one night he deliberately marched into the fanciest restaurant he could find, waited for the waitress to refuse to serve him, and then threw a water jug at her face, which fortunately missed her and smashed against a mirror. And he wrote about this incident on his blog. I wanted to do something to crush these white faces which were crushing me. And he has to run away as fast as he can because obviously if he'd hung around he would have, being severely beaten up and, uh, so

Speaker 4:

he runs, in fact, to France, he moves to Paris, doesn't he?

Speaker 3:

That's right. He spends a couple of years in Greenwich village, is a very bohemian culture where he's able to get in touch with his homosexuality and start writing. But ultimately he's drawn to the bohemian,, Utopia of Paris as Americans saw it to be after the Second World War.

Speaker 4:

Spoiler alert, Greenwich Village is no longer a bohemian paradise, it's where Gwyneth Paltrow lives and, uh, the flagship store for James Pearce t shirts, which cost 85 each and there are a lot of very fashionable shops and restaurants,, so the character of the neighbourhood has now radically changed.

Speaker 3:

And spoiler alert, Paris is no longer a bohemian paradise either,

Speaker 4:

in

Speaker 3:

which you can only live there if you're very, very rich. Otherwise you're in the suburbs.

Speaker 4:

Yes. All these amazing bohemian paradises, including in fact, and here you're going to get your moment, Jonty., eventually he moves to the south of France,, where he lives in a village called Saint Paul de Vence. Is

Speaker 3:

this where Miles Davis visited?. You're, you're flirting with danger there, Sophie, and I'm not going to, I'm not going to rise to it. I'm not going to go hard on Miles Davis. I want to get to the book. And so the only last thing I want to say about his writing of the book is that Go Tell It On A Mountain is a novel. absolutely rooted in Harlem in the 1930s. And to write it, Baldwin felt he had to escape America to get some distance from it. And a lot of the book he was in fact writing in a Swiss mountain village, picture the snow, the tinkle of cowbells, with his Swiss lover, who, who was a Swiss painter. So, so just think about that. So actually just to

Speaker 4:

loop back to, great moments in the secret life of books, he was probably living very close to where the Frankenstein family and where eventually the creature in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein are living in the Swiss Alps. So let's get into the book itself. And as we've said, it has this interesting, quite elaborate structure. And a lot of what Baldwin is doing in the first part of this novel. There's not a huge amount of plot. He's he's taking the reader inside a world that he would have known that most of his readers would never have seen, namely what working class black experience was like in Harlem in the 1930s. There's a lot of what,, we might once have called=local= color. He describes, this. scene that shifts really quickly, so quickly that we, the reader, barely notice it. And it's a sort of a nice example of how, Baldwin is using modernist technique to do this. The scene slides really quickly from a sort of impressionistic view of a Harlem street to what we only belatedly realize is an up close, sort of sideways glimpse of, a black woman being raped in a scene of domestic violence. So I'm going to read that. These men and women, they passed on Sunday mornings, had spent the night in bars or in cat houses or on the streets or on rooftops or under the stairs. They'd been drinking. They'd gone from cursing to laughter to anger to lust. Once he and Roy, his brother, had watched a man and woman in the basement of a condemned house. They did it standing up. The woman had wanted 50 cents and the man had flashed a razor.

Speaker 3:

It was at that moment reading the book, Sophie, when I just began thinking about To Kill a Mockingbird, you know, set in the same year. And so, several hundred miles away, Atticus Finch is rather glibly telling Scalps that, you know, all people are decent underneath it all. And you have to get

Speaker 4:

inside someone's skin.

Speaker 3:

And Baldwin's on a whole other level, isn't he? Just looking at what humanity is capable of. without sentimentalizing. And, and so it was at that moment I thought this is a much more interesting book.

Speaker 4:

Yeah., and also from a technical point of view, the rape that we never see in To Kill a Mockingbird becomes the focus of the plot what's so virtuosic about Go Tell It on the Mountain is that this is an aside. You could easily read over or read past this moment and there are many other moments like it in the novel. And I think he's, again, he's using this technique of close third person is what it is. He's observing these, these figures, and we both feel inside them, but we also feel completely detached from them., it's, technically very, very skillful. We're immediately aware of Christianity being at the absolute heart of the character's consciousness. They think, as I said, in the language of the Bible, they think in the rhythms of spiritual songs and the cadences of, prayer The title, Go Tell It on the Mountain, incidentally, is an African American spiritual song. There's a great snippet of recording of Aretha Franklin singing it, actually, that I was listening to. It's a beautiful song that also has a lot of the sounds of the South about it, so At the same time, there's these stories of faith are running through John's mind is also the story of his emerging queerness, So, there's this amazing scene where he's watching a 17 year old boy who's learning to be a preacher, and he's a very virtuous, upstanding member of the community but John Grimes is watching this young man, and this is what he's thinking. 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, wondering if he would ever be as holy as Elisha was holy. But he did not follow the lesson and when sometimes Elisha paused to ask John a question, John was ashamed and confused, feeling the palms of his hands become wet and his heart pound like a hammer. It's such an amazing fusion of kind of awakening sexuality, the shame of recognizing his homosexuality, and at the same time just the kind of You know, the call and response of a church service and Elisha's immersion in the moment.

Speaker 3:

And we talked earlier about how Baldwin was reacting against what he called the protest novels, the slightly two dimensional protest novels of the 1940s. And what he's doing here is making John a really psychologically complex character. You know, I was only a few pages into this book and you get to this moment where John Grimes lying in bed on the morning of his 14th birthday, suddenly starts reflecting rather guiltily about the fact he had masturbated the day before in the school lavatories while thinking of the other boy's penises. And at that moment you're like, this is a book published in 1953. We're in a whole new territory here. It's the idea of queerness as psychological truth that Baldwin felt he just hadn't seen. Yeah. In other African American novels. I think that's a

Speaker 4:

really great point and tethered to that is the way that the novel takes this, I suppose the critical term for it would be to say that it takes this very intersectional view. It, it puts together different strands of what it means to be a oppressed person in 1930s America. So there's this wonderful moment early in the novel where John is observing his mother who he, he loves enormously and feels this deep, deep connection. sort of, sympathy and empathy for. And he's observing her sadness. And I think Baldwin's asking us to be aware, that the mother's sadness comes from her own past. It comes from her ancestral history, and it, also coming from her observation of her son, John, and probably her awareness of his burgeoning sexuality. So there's this gorgeous passage. At this, there sprang into his mother's face something startling, beautiful, unspeakably sad, as though she were looking far beyond him at a long, dark road, and seeing on that road a traveler in perpetual danger. Was it he? The Traveler? Or herself? Or was she thinking of the cross of Jesus? She turned her back to the washtub, still with this strange sadness on her face. You better go on now, she said, before your daddy gets home.

Speaker 3:

There's a beautiful tenderness to the way Baldwin writes about John Grimes's mother, who is basically Baldwin's own mother, Emma, as well.

Speaker 4:

And then there's this domestic violence always coming up too, isn't there? There's that very shocking scene where John's father, Gabriel beats John's brother, Roy

Speaker 3:

shall I read some of that? It comes up, after John gets back from his, saunter downtown., he comes back to find this commotion and his brother, Roy, has come back home having been stabbed in a fight. And again, this is Baldwin showing us that even in a mundane day in which not a great deal seems to happen, a place like Harlem can have an act of extreme violence that turns everything on its head. And bizarrely, despite the fact that Roy's been injured, In his pain and anger aggravates his father, Gabriel, so much that Gabriel ends up beating his son, Roy, who is bleeding from a knife wound. And it starts because Gabriel slaps, roy's and John's mother, and Roy says, Don't you slap my mother, that's my mother. You slap her again, you black bastard, and I swear to God I'll kill you. In the moment that these words filled the room, and hung in the room, like the infinitesimal moment of hanging, jagged light that precedes an explosion, John and his father were staring into each other's eyes. Then his father raised his belt, and it fell with a whistling sound on Roy, who shivered and fell back, his face to the wall. But he did not cry out, and the belt was raised again and again. The air rang with the whistling and the crack against Roy's flesh, and the baby Ruth began to scream. My lord, my lord, his father whispered. My lord, my lord. He raised the belt again, but Aunt Florence caught it from behind and held it.

Speaker 4:

Unbelievable passage, that one.

Speaker 3:

the praying while beating is very sinister, isn't it? Very The, the, my Lord. My Lord, yeah. While whipping someone. Okay, part two of the book is called The Prayers of the Saints, and it's when the Grimes family have gone down for evening prayers at the Pentecostal shopfront church. It's arranged in three meditations, essentially. We hear,, Florence, who is John's aunt and Gabriel's sister. We hear her prayer, We then hear Gabriel's thoughts and meditations and prayer. And finally, we hear Elizabeth's, John's mother. He's looking in this section of the book at intergenerational trauma because Florence, Gabriel and Elizabeth are all veterans of the Great Migration. They've all come from the South. And a lot of these flashbacks are about their childhood experiences.

Speaker 4:

And it's a very skillful weaving in of the backstory of these characters, who so far we've really only seen through a child's eyes, who seem with the exception of John's mother, quite remote, quite distant, as though they don't really have fully available emotional lives. And I think the, brilliance of this central section is the empathy and feeling that we end up having for all the characters, including Gabriel,, John's stepfather. And when you think about the fact that as Baldwin ends up saying in notes of a native son, the essay he writes about his relationship with his stepfather, who he calls his father, when you think about the level of anger and rage that Baldwin felt toward his father. The act of empathetic inhabiting of Gabriel's consciousness in the central section of this book is, is really virtuosic.

Speaker 3:

It is. And so Gabriel's story is that he has a very dissolute youth. He, drinks, gets into trouble, and eventually When he's still a young man, he is saved at a religious event and he becomes a preacher and quite a famous local preacher and becomes incredibly evangelical and his language in this section, there's a kind of Old Testament fire and brimstone. And just to give a flavor of the way Gabriel sees the world, his meditation goes as follows. And blood in all the cities through which he passed ran down. There seemed no door anywhere behind which Ballard did not call out unceasingly for blood. No woman, whether singing before defiant trumpets or rejoicing before the Lord, who had not seen her father, her brother, her lover, or her son cut down without mercy, who had not seen her sister become part of the white man's great whorehouse, who had not all too narrowly escaped the house herself. Behind them was the darkness, nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire, a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. When I was reading this central section of the novel, I was reminded of William Faulkner's novel, The Sound and the Fury, which does the same thing of being set on a single day and shuttling from one, character's perspective to another. And and the Gabriel character is probably most analogous to Faulkner's figure of Jason, a very ostensibly unsympathetic character. And Baldwin, lets us into Gabriel's heart and mind with this unbelievable compassion, there's a moment in the Gabriel section where it emerges that while he was married to a woman named Deborah, who's dead by the time Go Tell It on the Mountain is taking place, but who herself had been brutally raped by white men in a field when she's a girl. And so she carries this scar and, taboo marker of that, her whole life. while Gabriel's married to her, he ends up having an affair with, a young woman called Esther, who ends up falling pregnant and having his child. She moves to Chicago and, has a son who ends up dying. But there's this amazing description of his and Esther's infidelity starting. And there'd be so many ways to tell that story, especially through the unforgiving eyes of his stepson. You could do it, with so much judgment, particularly given what happens afterwards. But instead, it's this moment of extraordinary intimacy. So he had fallen, for the first time since his conversion, for the last time in his life, fallen. He and Esther in the white folks kitchen, the light burning, the door half open, grappling and burning beside the sink. Fallen indeed. Time was no more. And sin, death, hell, the judgment were blotted out. There was only Esther. Who contained in her narrow body all mystery and all passion, and who answered all his need. Time, snarling so swiftly past, had caused him to forget the clumsiness and sweat and dirt of their first coupling. How his shaking hands undressed her, standing where they stood. How her dress fell at length like a snare about her feet. How his hands tore at her undergarments, so that the naked, vivid flesh might meet his hands. It's amazing.

Speaker 3:

It is amazing. The final, the final meditation or prayer is from John Grimes's mother, Elizabeth. And this is the moment that she really emerges as a character. And like Baldwin's own mother, Emma, she was raised in Maryland, but then, moved to New York and and this is the same story in Go Tell It on the Mountain. And Elizabeth describes how,, As a young woman in Maryland, she fell in love with a store clerk,, an African American store clerk called Richard, and they run away together, to New York. Richard is a very sympathetic character. He's intellectual. And there's a very affecting scene where Richard and Elizabeth go to the museums of New York, and this is a world that Richard wants to be a part of. he sees these cultural institutions

Speaker 5:

naively as belonging to everyone. and Elizabeth Describes concerns about this.

Speaker 6:

it gives us a little snapshot, I think, into what it must have been like for James Baldwin being brought up to kind of revere and, and admire the kind of monuments of European culture. and, and also to see the, the monuments of African American culture and, and Egyptian culture and so on, black culture in white museums that, Elizabeth says of, Richard, when they're at the Metropolitan Museum. It never ceased to frighten her, this passion he brought to something she could not understand. She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead, what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood at least that they did give him a kind of bitter nourishment and that the secrets they held for him were a matter of his life and death. That, that feels like it's Baldwin's own internal voice.

Speaker 5:

It does. And, the tragedy is that it's this desire to be part of a bigger story, a bigger cultural history and story that is Richard's undoing. And, and what happens is he is One evening, he's falsely accused of a crime he didn't do. He's arrested. He experiences this brutality in prison for a while. Eventually, he is acquitted because he literally had nothing to do with the crime. Just a white person pointed at him. But he's so disillusioned by this moment. The realization that the color of his skin means he will never be able to escape the world he's in. That he commits suicide shortly, shortly afterwards. And he is, of course, John Grimes's father. And this prompts one of the great lines from the book, which really describes the plight that All three of this older generation, Elizabeth, Florence, and Gabriel, discovered but have faced it in different ways. and Baldwin writes, There was not, after all, a great difference between the world of the North and that of the South which she had fled, that Elizabeth had fled. There was only this difference. The North promised more. I mean, it's incredibly bleak and pessimistic. It

Speaker 6:

is, isn't it? And so that sort of takes us into the last section of the novel, which we won't spend a huge amount of time on. It's called The Threshing Floor, and it's the moment of John Grimes spiritual awakening through a kind of hallucinatory trance like state, that he enters in this overnight church service that goes until dawn. Um, and You know, it's a, it's a strange section of the novel, isn't it? It's,

Speaker 5:

it's very hard to read. It's a very long vision, a religious vision that John Grimes is, retelling. it reminded me almost of certain sections of James Joyce's Ulysses. Yes, or even

Speaker 6:

Finnegan's Wake. I mean, it's pretty impenetrable. So

Speaker 5:

it's virtuosic but impenetrable. And I think Baldwin's doing this deliberately, that he's, he's tried to bring us in as kind of tourists to the world of Harlem to see how people live. But I think in taking us into John Grimes's mind here and his vision, this is Baldwin saying, particularly to white readers, you have no idea what goes on in our, in our, and you can never understand. And that's brilliant.

Speaker 6:

That's really brilliant, because it does remind me Much more of reading, say, Ralph Ellison, than it does of reading other sections of Baldwin. Baldwin usually really allows, particularly white readers, a sort of way in. He allows it to be quite visible, and this is not.

Speaker 5:

So, as a kind of white reader, Privileged reader. I feel completely cut out at this moment in reading the book. And I think Baldwin's doing that on purpose. I don't think it's unintentional at all. Yeah.

Speaker 6:

But he's also presumably describing his own sense of being both immersed in and also alienated from this Pentecostal religious tradition that he's growing up in because eventually he will leave it behind.

Speaker 5:

Yes. It's the moment of supposed awakening that James Baldwin had at 14, which he also, as you say, rejected when he was 17. And then the book kind of ends, it's a bit of a damp squib, the ending, John sort of comes to after hours of this vision. And the family mostly delighted because he's been saved, he's special. And they walk home together in the early morning. Only Gabriel is resentful, and we know that Gabriel is resentful because John isn't actually his child. John doesn't know this, but John isn't his child. Roy is, and yet Roy is the one getting into knife fights, and John is the one who has been saved. The sort of final pages involves Florence. who was Gabriel's sister and John's aunt telling Gabriel that she knows that he had this illegitimate child and that she's going to expose him. And then the book just sort of ends with them going back into the family home and it just ends on a moment of connection between John and his sister. Um, yeah,

Speaker 6:

So, John is actually watching this figure of Elisha, the, young man preacher walking away and it has this sort of air of both the retreating saint, but also the object of homoerotic desire. Then he turned away down the long avenue home. John stood still watching him walk away. The sun had come full awake. It was waking the streets and the houses and crying at the windows. It fell over Elisha like a golden robe and struck John's forehead where Elisha had kissed him like a seal ineffaceable forever. And he felt his father behind him. And he felt the March winds rise, striking through his damp clothes against his salty body. He turned to face his father. He found himself smiling, but his father did not smile. They looked at each other a moment. His mother stood in the doorway in the long shadows of the hall. I'm ready, John said. I'm coming. I'm on my way.

Speaker 5:

Yeah, it's, I spent a long time thinking about what's going on in that ending and I came to the conclusion that I think there's two things. I think Baldwin is saying, I've brought you into my world, reader, for 24 hours, I've shown you these characters, some things you can understand, some things you can't, and there's no neat resolution, these characters just have to go on their way and Work their way through through the future. So I think it's partly doing that. And and the other thing I felt is that the book is kind of an inaction of the Edipal myth as Sigmund Freud described it. And John is asserting his independence from his father, which is enabling him to connect with his mother. And I think it's Baldwin realizing that for him, his religious fervor in his teenage years wasn't necessarily about faith or God. It was really a way of showing his father that he was almost better at he was at his own, his own game.

Speaker 6:

And I suppose that's, that's represented in the passage itself by this juxtaposition of the son coming fully awake, but also crying at the windows, the golden robe that the light casts over Elisha, but then also the long shadows of the hall as he walks back into his mother's house. So there's this kind of back and forth between light and dark. So the book was, was important at the time, but it's really become, an iconic statement of the African American struggle, it's become this incredibly important movement book in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Speaker 5:

The film, I Am Not Your Negro, released in 2016, Barry Jenkins, film director, did an adaptation of a later Baldwin novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, but also a lot of,, people reading and returning to his essays, what is it about Baldwin that, that has made him feel so relevant so many years after his death?

Speaker 6:

I think there's, there's a lot of elements in it, but one of the most important moments in I'm Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck's documentary is where we have this glimpse of Baldwin's memory of the last time he saw Medgar Evers, who I mentioned before, was one of these really crucial, activists in the civil rights period. And before he was assassinated, Baldwin had visited him at his home where he'd gone to sign books for the family. It's a very modest moment, actually, but it's also,, this kind of symbol of Baldwin as a literary figure intersecting with the great social and political activism of the movement itself. Baldwin's both literary and he's an activist. He was Immersed in this kind of white culture, actually, the European culture of France and the south of France. And at the same time, he was, intimate with the most important figures of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers. He wanted to write a book about them, which was, going to be called Remember This House. He's almost like a conduit figure in certain ways between these two sides of American culture. I also think his queerness is important. It makes him, a really important figure for, intersectional thinking about forms of marginality and oppression in America.

Speaker 5:

I think what's very appealing about Baldwin from a white perspective is he believes in reconciliation. He articulates this at different moments in his essays, but he talks about both blackness and whiteness being a construct. When I was reading Bill Mullen's biography, I loved the fact that Baldwin had this relationship with the classic books, with Dickens and Henry James, and he's merging that with different traditions. And I love the idea that, you know, You know, to, to get the most out of Baldwin, you need to know a lot about African American history in America, but you also need to know about Dickens and Henry James. Yeah,

Speaker 6:

jonty, I think we're at our final questions. We are. The best bit and the worst bit. Actually I have a lot of favorite bits in this novel. we didn't talk about Florence very much and I'm not going to go into it now, but she's the aunt. I thought her prayer, her internal personal narrative was unbelievably compelling and this beautiful,, sympathetic portrait of a woman leaving home, rejecting her family, but also feeling deeply tied to them. I really loved that. For me, the worst bits are the, the sort of hallucination overnight trance scene that John goes into at the end of the novel, I found it pretty hard to get through frankly, but it's also a really important moment where we're just left out of the narrative, strategically cut out.

Speaker 5:

Yeah, I agree. I found that, there's a kind of heaviness at times,, which, as we've been saying, we feel Baldwin is doing deliberately, but it does make it quite difficult to get through. For me, the best bit, funnily enough, is the Elizabeth, meditation where she's looking back on that doomed relationship with. Richard and I found that incredibly moving. Yeah, it's beautiful. and then underrated or overrated.

Speaker 6:

Again, we have not talked about this. Which way are we going to go? Well, it's probably apparent already. I'm going to say that it is underrated. It's an incredible, incredible, modernist masterpiece.

Speaker 5:

I think so, and I think over the next few decades we're going to see the relevance and reputation of books like To Kill a Mockingbird dwindle and decline, and we're going to see the relevance and reputation of books like this rise and rise. So I think it's underrated too. Now what I'm going to do, just so the listener knows, is I'm going to press stop But what I, I'm going to keep Sophie in a locked room while I give her the 101 on Miles Davis's entire recording history, but I'm going to let the listener off, so you've been listening to the secret life of books.

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Jonty Claypole

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Sophie Gee

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