Go Tell It on the Mountain

James Baldwin’s first novel, published in 1953 when he was twenty-eight, is a semi-autobiographical portrait of a single day-a Saturday in March, 1935-in a Harlem Pentecostal church, and the lives of the Grimes family whose souls are in contention there. It is a novel saturated with the language and rhythm of the Black church, the King James Bible, the spirituals and gospel music that Baldwin grew up in, and it uses that saturation not sentimentally but critically: the church is simultaneously a source of genuine spiritual power and a mechanism of social control and familial violence.

The central figure is John Grimes, fourteen, intelligent, terrified, in the shadow of his stepfather Gabriel’s rigidity and fury. The novel’s long central section, “The Prayers of the Saints,” moves backward in time to render Gabriel’s story and his wife Florence’s story and his first wife Deborah’s story, and in those retrospective narratives Baldwin builds the history of Black American experience-slavery’s aftermath, the Great Migration, the particular texture of poverty and aspiration in Harlem-into the texture of individual consciousness.

The prose is Baldwin’s early prose: more formal, more biblical, more consciously literary than his later work, and in some ways more beautiful for being so. He had absorbed the King James Bible so completely that its cadences infuse his own sentences without ever feeling imitative.

Go Tell It on the Mountain is not the essential Baldwin-that would be the essays, or Giovanni’s Room, or Another Country-but it is a remarkable first novel, and its portrait of religious experience as both liberation and imprisonment remains among the most complex in American fiction.