Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Civil Rights, Personal Narrative, Power of the Concrete
When I was a kid, I lived in segregated West Palm Beach,
Florida. The woman who came to clean our
house every other week was African American, but she was one of the few blacks that
I saw, and I don’t remember speaking with her.
I think one of the fifth-grade teachers at Belvedere elementary may have
been African American – but I almost never interacted with African Americans. Blacks
were, therefore, fascinating to me. When
we went to New York City, I wanted to go to Harlem, because what little I knew
about African Americans was that they lived in Harlem.
This summer, reading Eddie
Glaude Jr.’s book, Begin Again, about the process of maintaining forward progress
on civil rights in a world that seems to think that they have been taken care
of them when that has most decidedly not been the case, got me interested in James
Baldwin, an author whose works I had not read.
Glaude was using Baldwin as a guide to rethink civil rights and how we
should begin the civil rights movement again.
Going to the source, I picked up Baldwin’s first novel. Surprise, surprise, it was about Harlem. One day in the life of a family, but more
particularly, a boy in Harlem. I have
read Circadian novels before, Mrs. Dalloway being the quintessential tale in a
day, but this day, though ordinary on the outside, is extraordinary at its
center.
Go Tell it on the Mountain is not an easy read. It is particularly hard to get oriented. Who are these people? What is the source – not only of their
poverty, but of their rich internal worlds that are filled with moral striving,
interpersonal conflict, and wide varieties of spiritual and emotional
experience? If I had picked up this book
instead of wishing to drive through the streets of Harlem, where I would probably
have been overwhelmed by the poverty and seen little beyond it, I would have
learned a lot more about what I was looking for. And I would have found complex, human beings
engaged in living meaningful lives not, as I would have thought, on the margins
of the world (though the violence and poverty within and around them are palpable),
but in the center of a rich culture that oddly mirrored and contrasted with my own.
I think, though, that this book is not an easy read because Baldwin
wants you to be disoriented. It is pretty
clear that this is a roman a clef (a
thinly veiled autobiography), though I think Baldwin has invented a narrative
that allows for the emotional experience of growing up in his family to be
communicated by introducing elements in the plot that are not part of his known
biography – at least as he relates it in the essay Notes of a Native Son, which
was a quick and easy read after this novel. In
the novel, he both simplifies and complicates the family – primarily with the
aim of helping us become as confused as the central character – John – by
the hatred that his father has for him.
Rather than being loved as the eldest – rather than being
loved for the apparent gifts that he has, gifts that will allow him to take on
his father’s mantle and join him in the family calling, John is scorned by his
father who dotes over his younger, wayward brother. The father, who is a laborer by day and a
preacher by night in a storefront church and who surrounds himself with angels
of the parish, is crestfallen when the younger son, Roy (probably short for
Royal) is knifed in a fight, leaving him bleeding, scarred, but unrepentant.
We are introduced to John in church, on Sunday morning, with
his family, immediately after the knifing and we find, to at least my surprise,
that he is not a believer. He has not been
taken by the spirit – he has not come forward to be embraced by Christ and welcomed into
the community of saints. He knows this –
and the rest of the congregation knows it.
He is both a member of the community and not.
I was raised in the Episcopal Church, and the rite of
becoming a Christian was formalized. You
were baptized shortly after birth – and then you went through confirmation –
where you confirmed your faith – when you were 14 – John’s age. But this was a formal procedure. It involved classes (I must have learned
something in those classes, but all I retain now is a dim memory of being
required to go to them), and then a group
ceremony where the bishop anointed you.
This felt a little like the scene in The Crown where Elizabeth is
crowned and the Archbishop watches closely to see the spirit of God enter her
at that very moment – but I don’t think anyone was watching any of us in the confirmation class all that
closely – we just stood there while the Bishop did something. Neither we nor the queen was an active agent –
the magic of God was visited upon us with, at least to me, no visible shift in our being.
That is not what happens in John’s church. If you are going to be a member, you need to choose
to be saved. You need to express a
desire and have the community respond to that desire. Part of what felt disorienting in the first
part of the book was how alone John seemed to be – and how alone I felt as I
empathized with him. Not only did he not
belong with the saints, and didn’t seem to want to, it felt that no one, with
the possible exception of his mother, was recruiting him to join the saints –
no one was encouraging or supporting him.
This led me to feel, through him, a tremendous sense of isolation – even
as he was clearly socially a member of this group of saints – and there was a
positive expectation that he would not, as his brother had done, transgress the
bounds of the community. John was a good
boy who was not welcome in the inner sanctum – and didn’t, somehow, want to be
there.
Confusing the reader is, then, a vehicle for helping the reader to empathize with the hero. The hero (John) does not understand, any more than we do, why his father hates him. Our confusion drives the desire to know, which keeps us reading, and keeps John working to make sense of his relationship with his father.
John does want to transgress some boundaries, though it is
not quite clear why – or more particularly how he would do that. He feels guilty for various homoerotic
stirrings – and we wonder whether his father, on some level senses them and
therefore is rejecting him – or perhaps John fears that his father will reject
him and so does not reach out in a way that would lead him to be loved. We are puzzled by the sins that John wants to
commit – they are not clearly articulated, so they seem willful in the sense of
being desired in order to prevent him from being pulled into the community, or perhaps he is afraid of being pulled into the orbit of his raging and inconsistent father.
In the second part of the novel, after introducing us to
John, Baldwin introduces us to Gabriel, the father. Here we discover the complicated relationship
between Gabriel and John, one that John is apparently unaware of and one that John will,
presumably, come to know later so that he can write the book. In the meantime, he (in the form of Baldwin
as author) does write some of Gabriel’s sermons, and this was the point where I
woke up to the pleasure of reading this book.
The sermons were beautifully written, and I suspect a point of pride for
the author. Though they were attributed
to the father, they clearly flowed out of the pen of the son.
It turns out that Baldwin did become a preacher – and these
sermons are certainly his. And they may
be both an homage to the father – and the glory of his father's early preaching, when he
was a fiery force to be reckoned with – and they are, I think, a point of personal pride
– they are saying to the one who withheld his love, look what I can do. What I can do is every bit as good as what
you did – and perhaps a mite better (I
just heard the childish jingle, “Anything you can do, I can do better” ring in
my head).
A friend who was reading the book with me commented that the language in the book became somewhat repetitive and almost hypnotic. We posited that the source of the author’s linguistic abilities was in his reading of the King James Bible, and the vehicle of self-expression was in first hearing and then, for some, the delivery of sermons. I began to think of the church as being not just the spiritual home of many African Americans, but also of its being their intellectual home. This would, I suppose, mirror the ways in which the church helped bring Europeans out of the middle ages and into the renaissance.
After we are introduced to the rest of the family and the
characters, already broadly known, take on nuance and three dimensionality, we
return to the church, for the evening service.
John opens the building up to prepare for the service (he does a lot
of work for a non-saint, I’m just saying), and he cleans the building and wrestles with
Elisha, an older teenage boy, one who is saved, but in danger because he is
interested in a girl at the church.
Again, the excitement of wrestling with another man, the theme of
homosexuality, is a prelude to this final act.
The family, and a few other saints, gather in the
church. The service begins – and so does
John’s awakening. I don’t want to spoil
this moment for you – or compete with Baldwin’s writing if you have read
it. Just let it suffice to say that to
get to heaven, John has to go through hell.
And part of that hell is moving from being confused and isolated by that
confusion to becoming furious – tapping into the reservoir of anger and hatred
that has built up over a life time of being unacknowledged. And wrestling with this anger takes the place
of wrestling with Elisha. He is now
wrestling openly with God and the devil, and doing it in the aisle of the
church as those around him look on, realizing that he is in the midst of a
terrible struggle.
Perhaps the wish to sin that he has been holding onto is driven in large part by the wish to express his anger directly at his father – to confront him, wrestle him – perhaps to murder him. The desire to transgress is strong within him, despite his being the dutiful son – the one who, on the surface, is without apparent passion. But the passion is apparent in what one would assume would be his physical writhing - the others in the church can see his conflict express itself through his body - but we get to observe it from the inside - and the turmoil is intense.
The outcome of the struggle is as powerful (at least to me)
as the struggle itself. We are rooting for
him to express the wish to be saved – we fear it will not arrive – but when it does, he is able to achieve it
without giving up or succumbing to the father.
The competition that I saw play out with the writing of the sermon becomes
a preview of the integrity that he maintains in his acknowledgement of his need to be saved. He will become a saint with
integrity – and the wherewithal to protect that. He is not his father’s son – doing his father’s
bidding – he is his own person, embracing his own belief – one that he can own
on his own terms, not the terms of his complicated and, ultimately, corrupt
father. He finds his own way to becoming part
of the community while retaining the position of one who stands apart.
At this moment, there would be a lot of directions to go in discussing this
book. The relationship of the father and
son is very rich psychodynamic material.
I could reduce it by generalizing it – showing that it fits under a
particular Oedipal umbrella. And while
that would work, and might even be edifying, and would be worth discussing, it
would also leave us without the texture of the very particular struggle that John
has gone through, and something essential would thus be lost. Such a process would also be a second
reduction. The rationale that Baldwin
gives for his father’s hate in Notes of a Native Son is that his father was
increasingly psychotically paranoid as he aged.
The beauty of this story is that the richness of the
struggle of the son to be confused, to be angry, to be afraid is preserved by
the anti-diluvian process of complicating the father – not washing him clean with
the clinical diagnosis of paranoia, but filling him with a backstory of sin,
betrayal, and brokenness that leads him to harbor secrets from the son, secrets
that the son fills in with his own explanations, and his own judgements of the
shortcomings of the father – explanations that are only hinted at, only poorly
articulated, but that are deeply felt, expressed and wrestled with as the son
comes to grips with becoming a man and a man of faith.
Creating a narrative, changing the facts of his upbringing,
allows Baldwin to own the essential, felt nature of being the son of the man his
father was – and the son of his mother – and the 14 year old in contact with
the world that he was in contact with – not as that world, including his mother and father, existed in an objective
sense, but as it was constructed by him as a subject – a very particular subject with
a keen sense of what is right and what is wrong.
When I was wrestling with this book – trying to like it – I complained to the reluctant wife about the difficulties of reading it. She suggested that the book on Baldwin is that his essays are where his brilliance lies and where he best expresses himself. She was somewhat surprised that I had chosen to enter his world through the novel. Having completed my own mini version of his conversion, I am glad that I chose this entry point. Whatever is in the essays (which I may or may not get to), springs from this fountainhead. His understanding of the injustices that necessitate a Civil Rights Movement spring from the lived experience of mad and crazy father – one who is rich with contradiction, with a moral compass and a rigid and errant sense of justice; one who can see in others the rot that he cannot see in himself and sometimes unloads his own rot there rather than discovering. It is not a great leap to see the white patriarchy in this country as a version of Baldwin's father.
I am now in danger of doing what I said I would not – reducing this story, as Baldwin might have done were he to have become a psychoanalyst and presented the case of his paranoid father – and a country with paranoid tendencies – to a gathering of other psychoanalysts. We would together come to a better understanding of the puzzling aspects of the current political climate, but I think that conclusion would not have been as useful as his political essays were at the time they were written and, according to Eddie Glaude, Jr., as they can be now.
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