CliffsNotes on Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain

Cliff Notes

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• eBook ISBN: 9780544181748
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

Part One: The Seventh Day

Summary

The novel begins in New York City on the 14th birthday of the central character in the plot, John Grimes. The reader is told immediately that the people in John’s life all expect him to become a preacher when he comes of age, just as his father did. John’s memories reveal bittersweet Sunday mornings as the Grimes family prepares for church services that are held in a store front church called “The Temple of the Fire Baptized,” which is just a few blocks up the street.

Despite expectations for John’s future in the ministry, he is not the best Sunday school student. He often becomes distracted, forgets his lessons, and is reprimanded by his Sunday school teacher, Elisha, an older boy of 17 whom John greatly admires. While John’s lapses bring him the anger of his father, his brother Roy’s utter disinterest is generally expected, and “[e]veryone was always praying that the Lord would change Roy’s heart.” John is expected to be a good example to his younger brother.

Although church services at first appear to be very free, emotional, and spontaneous, there are strict standards and expectations that must not be violated. One Sunday, Father James calls Elisha and Ella Mae before the congregation and reprimands them for the time that they have been spending together, warning them against “the sin he knew they had not committed yet,” “a sin beyond all forgiveness.”

The first of his family or his neighbors to wake that Saturday morning, John is greeted by a silent house. He feels an immediate sense of foreboding and recalls that he has sinned. His thoughts jump to wondering if his birthday will again go unremembered and uncelebrated.

John falls back asleep with his thoughts and awakens again after his father, Gabriel, has left for work. He goes to the kitchen to join his family and sees, as though for the first time, what the room really looks like: immured in dirt and poverty. His entrance interrupts an argument his mother and Roy, his brother, are having, and he is intensely disappointed to see that no special breakfast has been prepared to celebrate his birthday. The argument, about Gabriel and what kind of father and man he is, continues, and we see that it is one that Roy and Elizabeth have had before. Elizabeth defends her husband on the grounds that he is a good provider, while Roy derides him for beating his children. Despite the serious subject, the argument ends on a light note, and Elizabeth sends her sons off to do their weekly cleaning chores.

John’s duty is to clean the front room, mainly to sweep the decaying rug in the front parlor—a Sisyphean task that John detests, because all his labor brings such a small reward and no personal satisfaction of accomplishment for him. The rug is perpetually dirty. When he has finished with the rug, John starts wiping dust from the mirror. In the midst of cleaning, he sees his own face and is shocked to see that he has not changed. He tries to see himself as his father does. He tries to find the features of the devil on his own face, those that his father has told him time and time again are there.

Giving up on trying to discover himself in his features, John reviews the family’s possessions on the mantel. A malevolent green metal serpent sits in the midst of family photos and greeting cards. A photo of his father taken long ago in the South where Gabriel and his sister grew up reminds John that this is not his father’s first marriage and makes him realize that, if Gabriel’s first wife had lived, it would have negated John’s entire existence. John wishes that he could ask this long dead woman, whom he believes Gabriel had loved, how he, John, could win his father’s love.

John is called to the kitchen where his mother is doing laundry. To his surprise, she gives him money so that he can buy himself something for his birthday. He chooses to go to the movies, an activity forbidden by his father and, upon returning home, is told that his brother has been stabbed.

Although there is a great deal of blood, it is immediately obvious that Roy is in no mortal danger. While tender with Roy, Gabriel lashes out at Elizabeth verbally and then physically. After Roy calls his father a “black bastard” for slapping his mother, Gabriel removes his belt and beats Roy until Florence, the boys’ aunt and Gabriel’s sister, stops him.

John opens the church to clean before Saturday night Tarry Service and is shortly joined by Elisha, John’s friend and youth minister, who has come to help him. The two argue playfully and then wrestle, a match that, for the first time, ends in a draw. Elisha speaks to John about salvation and foregoing earthly pleasures for the promise of Heaven. John is warned against sin and is urged to ask for the help of Jesus to overcome the devil. Soon other members of the congregation begin to arrive. John sees his parents and aunt walk in. He is shocked because he has never seen Florence in that church before and wonders what other strange happenings the night will bring.

Analysis

The title of this section has certain thematic significance: “The Seventh Day” is a biblical allusion referring to Genesis 2, verses 1—3: “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it. . . .” The biblical seventh day is a respite and a day of reward, a holy day of celebration and rest from the previous days’ work in which God had completed his creation, and “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”

Baldwin uses this creation-birth-rebirth image throughout the novel: The novel opens in March, the beginning of spring, associated with new life and birth. It is John’s 14th birthday, “birthday” itself suggesting some significance in this regard and the special significance of the 14th birthday connoting puberty, that is, the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood. Elizabeth, John’s mother, is pregnant. The home and church pressure “unit[e] to drive [John] to the altar,” that is, drive him to “being saved” or “born again.” Perhaps most significantly, the image can be seen in the symbolic new beginning that virtually every adult character in the novel seeks in moving from the oppression of the South in search of something better in the North. The image appears even in the title of the novel; the “It” in Go Tell It on the Mountain is “Jesus Christ is born.”

In the Christian world, Sunday has been designated as the symbolic representation of the seventh day, the Sabbath, the day that Christians have set aside as a day of rest to worship and to celebrate their religion. The allusion is certainly significant here in at least two ways. First, according to the Bible, God rested on the seventh day after his crowning creation—that of man—on the sixth day. Poignantly, it is on the sixth day, a Saturday, that John, one of the major characters, is fated to end his own childhood (innocence) and initiate the biological process of becoming a male adult—symbolically the physical creation of a man. As we will learn in the climax of the novel (Part Three, “The Threshing Floor”), John will also end his religious dilemma and questioning and initiate the religious process of rebirth, symbolically creating a new Christian soul. The process of creation at least for that part of his life ends, and, when his life is taken up again the next day, John is changed and redefined.

Second, the mood, tone, and atmosphere of the Genesis creation serve as direct contrasts to the world that Baldwin describes in this section. When God created man on the sixth day, he gave him “dominion . . . over every living thing that moveth upon the earth,” and when he surveyed his creation, God concluded “it was very good.” The mood and tone are triumphant, hopeful, proud, and glorious. There is anticipation of great accomplishments and power for God’s favorite and most significant creation in a bright, new, and clean world. This, however, is hardly the world or fortune of the Baldwin characters and, especially, of Baldwin’s new man, John, who essentially has dominion over nothing and survives in a world that he views as filthy and sinful.

The opening vignettes represent the various settings—home, church, neighborhood—as dingy, drab, depressing, nearly worn out, and poverty laden. It presents the various characters—family, passersby, congregation, ministers, and authority figures—as oppressed and manipulated, highly sexual and emotional, and driven by reacting to circumstances rather than controlling (having dominion over) them. These descriptions conform to and exemplify the dirt imagery that Baldwin links to the story’s general environment. These images communicate, at different times, various meanings from filthy or squalid conditions to contemptible or vile acts to personal corruption and sin. For example, consider the scene in which John surveys the family kitchen. Dirt doesn’t just exist passively in the kitchen; it is personified: It “triumphs,” “crawls,” and lives “in delirious communion with the corrupted walls.” The rug in the parlor, once beautiful, is now frayed from use and impossibly dirty, demons adding dirt while John tries to remove it. Even the family and neighborhood church is a storefront—a used, converted (from its original intended purpose), and dust laden environment.

Religion for this community is not merely a Sunday, once-a-week happening; it is a part of everyday life. Because there appears to be no avenue of escape from one’s oppression in this world, one holds out hope it will happen in the next. Consequently, religion and religious activities are of primary importance. Because of this, Baldwin uses numerous religious and biblical references, allusions, and parallels to communicate and emphasize his themes. (The reader will do well to keep a copy of the Bible with a decent concordance close at hand.) Following are some of the more important allusions.

The phrase “Go tell it on the Mountain” is, itself, a verse from an African-American spiritual: “Go, tell it on the Mountain, over the hills and everywhere, that Jesus Christ is born!”

Many of the characters have biblical names that reflect their personalities, mirror their biblical counterparts, or add depth or subtle meaning to their character. Gabriel, for example (see the Character Analyses for further identification), is an angel in the Bible who acts as God’s messenger. The name itself means “mighty man of God.” As a minister, the character Gabriel in the novel does indeed bring the word of God to his neighbors, and he is mighty in the lives of his family members. Also, the biblical Elizabeth is a very devout woman who was a cousin to the Virgin Mary. God promised and gave the barren Elizabeth a son in her old age. Her son was John the Baptist. Baldwin’s Elizabeth is the mother of John, the central character. (There is some scholarly debate over which John in the Bible John Grimes is intended to mirror. Some argue that he is intended to be John the Baptist whose mother was Elizabeth. John baptized the holy, including his cousin, Jesus, while prophesizing that God himself would later baptize them with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Other scholars insist that it is John of Patmos whom John Grimes is intended to resemble. They argue that there are many correlations between this biblical John and the novel’s John, including several passages that are closely paralleled. Also, Baldwin’s John is helped through his struggle on the threshing floor by recalling a religious song about John of Patmos.)

The biblical Deborah, the name in the novel of Gabriel’s first wife, is a prophet and the only female Judge in the Bible who, with exemplary faith and courage, assisted in defeating the Canaanites and saving Israel, circa 1200 B.C. Elisha, whose name means “God is salvation,” was a miracle worker of the Old Testament and, therefore, preceded Jesus. Although he was available to all social strata, Elisha ministered mainly among the common and poor people. He was very sensitive to the needs of the suffering and performed miracles to alleviate their pain. The novel’s Elisha is much like his namesake. While he does not raise the dead or multiply food, he is still very close to his Lord and often overcome by spiritual ecstasy, falling down and speaking in tongues. He preaches salvation to the young John and acts as his friend while the boy is going through a difficult period in his life. He lessens John’s mental anguish and the pain of his solitude.

Finally, the scriptural tone and syntax of the language Baldwin uses throughout the novel demonstrates biblical influence in the everyday lives and language of the community.

In the short, opening paragraph of the novel, Baldwin introduces several conflicts and issues in the life of one of the central characters of the novel, John Grimes. These various issues include John’s conflict with religion in general and the ministry specifically (as evidenced in the narrator’s observations that “Everyone had always said he would be a preacher just like his father . . .”; “John, without ever really thinking about, had come to believe it”; and by the age of 14, “. . . it was already too late” to change this fate); the conflict between John and his father; the conflict with his society (as represented by the “everyones” in this paragraph and their collective expectation that he would become a preacher); and the conflicts associated with pubescence (he is just turning 14).

But more significantly, a few pages later, the careful reader is already sensing that there is another—perhaps, more serious—conflict present: Something is wrong in this community of individuals who demonstrate or articulate personal feelings of frustration, of helplessness, and of dissatisfaction because of their inability to control or to have significant influence over their lives and circumstances—a far cry from having dominion over all other things. In addition, there is much more here than the typical conflicts faced by just any young male facing manhood, even one who is also wrestling with his religious identity and beliefs.

Through John, his family, and his environment, Baldwin exposes the social and psychological devolution of a people who have suffered and continue to suffer the insidious affects of racism from which there appears to be no escape, save death. The characters in the novel are only slightly removed (a generation or two) from their slave ancestors. We learn, for example, in Part Two, that Gabriel and Florence’s mother was a slave, freed only by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War. The novel takes place in 1935, only 73 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation (1862) and 70 years after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant (April 1865), ending the American Civil War, and the ratification of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery (December 1865).

As a result of this proximity to slavery, the characters of the novel suffer a special set of physical, psychological, and social circumstances: As we learn later, Gabriel and Florence, for example, have siblings they will never know because, as property, their siblings were taken from their mother for various reasons (but all having to do with their slave—therefore, race—status and circumstances); the Great Migration (the journey north for many southern blacks) originally held promise of better times and circumstances for each character but ultimately resulted in only a different, often more oppressive, manifestation of the racism they were attempting to escape.

These outcomes and consequences of the American slave era and other vestiges of this period constitute the racism that Baldwin depicts in Go Tell It on the Mountain: It is second and third generation, slave-psyche racism, a racism based on the notion that one group of people is socially, genetically, and intentionally superior to another. This form of racism works its evil and malice on both the perpetrator and the victim.

Our very nature and culture cause us to defend what we do as morally right or definitely not wrong or, at least, morally neutral. Here and there, evil individuals may deliberately do evil things, but most of us feel a need to convince ourselves—and, most often, others—that what we do is, at least, not wrong. Therefore, we construct a rationale that justifies our actions. And so it was with the justification of slavery and racial categorizing. In subsequent generations, these rationales are accepted as moral or ethical truths. Hence, at some point, one or both populations may generally believe and endorse religious fabrications, such as the African-American blackness being the mark of Ham (Genesis IX, 25); distorted cultural values, such as lighter skin tones are “better” than darker skin tones; diminished expectations or standards of success and satisfaction, such as, a “storefront church” or merely “putting food on the table” or “clothes on the back” as being sufficient; or they may resort to opiates for escape, such as drinking and exaggerated adherence...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Life and Background of the Author
• Introduction to the Novel
• Introduction
• A Brief Synopsis
• List of Characters
• Character Map
• Summary and Analysis
• Part One: The Seventh Day
• Part Two: The Prayers of the Saints One: Florence’s Prayer
• Part Two: The Prayers of the Saints Two: Gabriel’s Prayer
• Part Two: The Prayers of the Saints Three: Elizabeth’s Prayer
• Part Three: The Threshing Floor
• Character Analysis
• John
• Gabriel
• Elizabeth
• Florence
• Ester
• Royal
• Richard
• Critical Essays
• Racism
• The Church
• Homosexuality as a Subtext
• Study Help
• Full Glossary
• Essay Questions
• Quiz
• Practice Projects
• CliffsNotes Resource Center
• Books