James Baldwin - Go Tell It On The Mountain

Rookie Season: Debuts | Week 1º

May 16, 2024

Extra seasoning for your everyday food for thought

Genre: Fictional Autobiography, Coming-of-Age, Classics

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage, almost all of the time1 . . . And part of the rage is this: It isn't only what is happening to you. But it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country.”
— James Baldwin

Back Cover (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.):

“Go Tell It On The Mountain is a parable of progress, and its brilliantly conceived retrospective chapters engage the reader powerfully as they follow the members of the Grimes family in their wanderings from the ancestral South to the tenements of Harlem. The book centers on that moment in the life of young John Grimes when he awakens in a blinding flash to the harsh realities of the world.”

Go Tell It On The Mountain, the 1953 semi-autobiographical debut novel by James Baldwin, tells the story of John Grimes, an intelligent Black teenager living in 1930s Harlem, and his troubled relationship with his church going family.

Like his protagonist, Baldwin (born in Harlem, the eldest of nine) experienced a troubled and strained relationship with his own strict Baptist stepfather. Baldwin once remarked, “I knew I was Black, of course, but I also knew I was smart. I didn’t know how I would use my mind, or even if I could, but that was the only thing I had to use.”2

Initially entitled Crying Holy, Baldwin’s debut was written shortly after he gave up being a youth preacher and left the church to pursue writing, full-time. Working on his novel for over ten years (including while he was living in Greenwich Village and Paris), he finished his manuscript in 1952, sometime after moving to Leukerbad, a small village near the Swiss Alps.3

Notably, these experiences, outside of the US, would later influence his reflections on racial identity; for example, his mere existence in a remote Swiss village would have been shockingly profound given the likelihood of him being the first Black man that many of the residents of Leukerbad would have ever encountered in person:

“In the village there is no movie house, no bank, no library, no theater; very few radios, one jeep, one station wagon; and, at the moment, one typewriter, mine, an invention which the woman next door to me here had never seen.”
— James Baldwin, “Stranger In The Village”

Credit: **George McCalman,** **Illustrated Black History**, 2022

“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.’”
— James Baldwin, Go Tell It On The Mountain

Did You Know?

Did you know that the final lines of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On A Mountain (quoted above) were written on an actual mountaintop?

Tell Me More . . .

James Baldwin completed his debut novel in Leukerbad, Switzerland, a small village with about 1,500 inhabitants nestled in the Valaisan mountains. Leukerbad is internationally known for its many hot springs.

Ex: **Walliser Alpentherme** is Europe's largest and highest Alpine medical and wellness sanctuary located at Dorfplatz, Leukerbad

Baldwin lived in Leukerbad for three months in the early 1950s, invited by his lover, Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger.

While typing out the closing lines in the remote, mountainous region, Baldwin was swept away by a “tremendous sense of elation.” Legend has it that along with his novel’s triumphant completion came an epiphany, casting aside original title Crying Holy for a more potent one: Go Tell It On A Mountain—which seemed oddly appropriate as he typed away from a Swiss mountaintop with a profound sense of hope for all things to come.4

Some Food For Thought:

“I want American history taught. Unless I'm in that book, you're not in it either.”5
— James Baldwin

Less than a decade later, in the summer of 1957, James Baldwin chose to return to the US during the civil rights movement, risking his health and safety as a Black gay man to contend with the (violent) racial crimes of the 1950s and ‘60s. As a result of this commitment, Baldwin is remembered as a significant voice for civil rights, worldwide. Even so, he rejected the label of, “civil rights activist” in favor of his self-proclaimed role as one “bearing witness to the truth.”6

I Am Not Your Negro

BTW - Do You Know Why? (We No Longer Say “Negro”?)

Some claim Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture) was responsible—turning the tide from the usage of “Negro” to “Black”—given the 1967 publishing of his landmark book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America.7

“But the question of, why do Black people, why do white people in this country associate Black Power with violence? And the question is because of their own inability to deal with “Blackness.” If we had said ‘Negro Power’ nobody would get scared.”
— Stokely Carmichael, 1966