James Baldwin's First Novel: Go Tell It On The Mountain

As I read James Baldwin's first novel I could not help but notice how much of Black Christianity reverberates throughout the novel. The struggles of Faith, the songs of hope and the longing for spiritual and political freedom. I felt Baldwin speaking and critiquing a version of Black Christianity that becomes like the "master's" and leaves Blacks oppressed. In an essay by Baldwin called Nobody Knows My Name(1961), he writes about his journey to Paris in 1948. He discusses how he had to leave because nothing good would come out of him staying in the United States. In this essay he speaks of the importance of self examination. Despite Baldwin being in Paris the cloak of oppression that he lived with and amongst in the United States still haunted him. So he had to examine his beliefs and how he would come to identify himself for himself. He needed to do this in order to become the writer he has become and in order to travel back to America. I mention this to highlight the necessity to examine one's beliefs, values and morals that I believe are evident in Go Tell It On The Mountain(1953). The leading characters are Black men and I think Baldwin does a great job at writing about the plights of Black men. He writes about black masculinity and how in that struggle for manhood and power the Black man can begin to reproduce the same oppression that oppresses him. The psychological effects of racism and oppression that plague the existence of Black men is chilling, yet Baldwin is not lamenting the Black man, he is calling the Black man to examine what he has been told to believe. To measure those beliefs, ideas and values to colonialism and see what your actions are reproducing in Black families.Black femininity in the novel is sometimes silent and submissive and sometimes outspoken and dismissive. Language in the novel becomes a point of interest because there are things that don't get said. Especially pertaining to Black women in the novel who speak through body language at times rather than through verbal speech. There are words that become entangled in webs of silence unable to be uttered. The mother tongue of Black Americans is not legitimate enough, is ill-equipped to produce the language that is required to speak to these issues of Black masculinity, histories of enslavement and oppression, Black femininity and the ontological being of blackness. The Arts have a special place in the lives of Black Americans because it allows Black Americans to produce in a language beyond the English lexicon. Baldwin uses his gift of writing as art to produce unutterable utterances for a people who need to imagine, examine, create and produce themselves outside of colonialism.