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James Baldwin

Lovemore  Ranga Mataire
“GO tell it on the Mountain” is James Baldwin’s first novel, which instantly became a world-acclaimed text because of its supposed objective artistic representation of the effects of racism on both the perpetrator and the victim. Typical of first novels, it relies largely on autobiography for its basic framework.

The novel’s protagonist John Grimes – just like Baldwin – grew up in Harlem under a strict, religious father.
Baldwin’s father David Baldwin, like Gabriel Grimes, was a Baptist lay-preacher.

In real life, David Baldwin’s mother had been a slave, and he had left the South in the 1920s. James, like his fictional nemesis John, experienced a powerful religious conversion at the age of 14.

He became what Americans call a minister at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly where he preached for three decades.
The terrible father-son conflict so central to the novel is reflective of the similarly crippling paternal antagonism and filial hatred in the life of the society existing at the time.

Baldwin describes the course of the 14th birthday of John Grimes in Harlem, 1935. He employs extended flashback episodes to recount the lives of John’s parents and aunt in order to link this urban boy in the North to his slave grandmother in an earlier South.

Consequently, the first section follows John’s thoughts, the second mostly his aunt’s, the third his father’s, the fourth his mother’s and the fifth mostly that of John.

So what is Baldwin still telling on the mountain almost 90 years after the publication of this novel?
The recent demeaning and sordid caricaturisation of the United States President and his wife in a Belgian newspaper De Morgen with graphically enhanced facial features depicting apes is a clear illustration that the irrational delusions of racial superiority still pervades the white establishment to this day.

This is exactly what is depicted in “Go Tell it on the Mountain” as it focuses on the devastating effects of systematic racism and the inhumanity exposed to the second and third generation of the era of the American slavery that took place from the period of colonialism throughout the American Civil war.

It is pertinent to note that this novel is not far removed from colonisation and slavery for it 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 in December 1865.

Thus the characters in the novel are only a generation or two from their slave ancestors. It is the result of this proximity to slavery that the characters suffer both physically and psychologically because in the case of Gabriel and Florence they are siblings that they were taken away from the mother as property of the slave owner.

The migration to the North was supposed to bring better fortunes but instead they were confronted by an intolerant and oppressive system still steeped in racial segregation.

The effects of slavery and other vestiges of this period constitute the racism that Baldwin depicts in “Go Tell it on The Mountain”.
One thing is apparent. The author is dealing with the second and third generation slave-psyche based on the idea that one group is socially, genetically and intentionally superior to another.

This form of racism affects both the perpetrator and the victim.
The philosophies that enable and defend the subordination of one group of individuals to another based on propagating and advocating artificial values and ethics for economic reasons tend to infect both the victims and the oppressors.

It is sad that the same ideological framework that was used to defend that which the white establishment viewed to be morally right have not been diminished in the mental faculties of succeeding generations.

Some sections of this white establishment are still convinced that what they do is not wrong.
However, when issues of great enormity for or against one population to the advantage or detriment of another population are given some kind of raison d’être in defence of their existence that justification is normally steeped in arrogance and insensitivity on the part of its proponents, establishes and propagates irrational delusions of righteousness and natural superiority coupled with false standards of value and ethics in subordinate population.

The lesson derived from “Go Tell it On the Mountain” hinges on the painstaking impossibility of psychologically dealing with inherent stereotypical representation of other races based on irrational delusions of racial superiority.

Baldwin therefore boldly instructs us to continue telling it from the mountain top.