Go Tell It on the Mountain
First published in 1953 when James Baldwin was nearly 30,Go Tell  It  on the Mountainis a young man's novel, as tightly coiled as a new spring, yet  tempered by a maturing man's confidence and empathy. It's not a long book,  and its action spans but a single day--yet the author packs in enough emotion,  detail, and intimate revelation to make his story feel like a  mid-20th-century epic. Using as a frame the spiritual and moral awakening of 14-year-old John  Grimes during a Saturday night service in a Harlem storefront church, Baldwin  lays bare the secrets of a tormented black family during the depression.  John's parents, praying beside him, both wrestle with the ghosts of their  sinful pasts--Gabriel, a preacher of towering hypocrisy, fathered an  illegitimate child during his first marriage down South and refused to  recognize his doomed bastard son; Elizabeth fell in love with a charming,  free-spirited young man, followed him to New York, became pregnant with his son, and lost him before she could reveal her condition.Baldwin lays down the terrible symmetries of these two blighted lives as  the ironic context for John's dark night of the soul. When day dawns, John  believes himself saved, but his creator makes it clear that this salvation arises  as much from blindness as revelation: "He was filled with a joy, a joy  unspeakable, whose roots, though he would not trace them on this new day of his life, were nourished by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered."Though it was hailed at publication for its groundbreaking use of black  idiom, what is most striking aboutGo Tell It  on the Mountaintoday is its  structure and its scope. In peeling back the layers of these damaged lives, Baldwin dramatizes the story of the great black migration from rural South to  urban North. "Behind them was the darkness," Baldwin writes of Gabriel and  Elizabeth's lost generation, "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!" This is Baldwin's music--a music in which rhapsody is rooted anguish--and there is none finer in American literature.--David Laskin--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.