Go Tell It on the Mountain: A Novel

Written by James Baldwin and Roxane Gay

Narrated by Roxane Gay and Joe Morton

James Baldwin's haunting coming-of-age story, with a new introduction by Roxane Gay.

Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9780593950432

James Baldwin

James Baldwin (1924 1987) was an African American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels. His 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son helped establish his reputation as a voice for human equality. Baldwin was an influential public figure and orator, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States.

Reviews for Go Tell It on the Mountain

[Edd62 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In this somewhat cumbersome novel, Baldwin uses divergent themes from the autobiographical concept. The central point is the condition of being a poor black person, and the role that the church plays in sustaining this situation based on a biblical interpretation of redemption, forgiveness, and acceptance.

He explores the sexuality of the poor conglomerate in his native Harlem, where promiscuity, deception, and prostitution are the ordinary reality, a situation that deprives, permeates, and sustains itself as it constitutes one of the few escapes from a marginal society three times over: for being black, for being poor, for being religious (perhaps one should also add homosexuality, although in this story there is only a glimpse of it in the relationship between John and Elisha).

Situations that are shocking due to the abundance with which the author shelters them in religion as the sole source of salvation, despite the fact that the characters' behavior could not be further from what is supposedly dictated by the sacred scriptures.

The separate stories of the characters converge, their personal journeys that lead them to end up reunited after not a few negative actions and particular sufferings.

In the narrative, John, Baldwin's alter ego, stepson of a preacher whom he hates and despises, seems destined to follow in his footsteps. The time jumps lead us to learn about Gabriel's life, John's stepfather, his father, and his multiple relationships with women, his unsanctified life both before and after becoming a preacher. The role of the women in his life, the children, whether acknowledged or not, the functioning of Pentecostal churches among the marginalized black population which demands much but contributes little. John's conversion, through a religious, dreamlike, fantastical ecstasy, redeems him.

Religion and poverty go hand in hand, though never in equal circumstances, never to remedy the latter. (Translated from Spanish)