T Magazine|What the Church Meant for James Baldwin
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James Baldwin addresses a congregation in a New Orleans church, circa 1963.Credit...Steve Schapiro/Corbis, via Getty Images
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This essay is part of T’s Book Club, a series of articles and events dedicated to classic works of American literature. Click here to R.S.V.P. to a virtual conversation, led by Ayana Mathis, about “Go Tell It on the Mountain” on Dec. 17.
Like John Grimes, the 14-year-old protagonist of James Baldwin’s 1953 debut novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” I was raised in the heat and fervor of the Pentecostal church. My family and I had given our souls and hearts to Jesus. We prayed for those who did not know Christ, and for our own souls that we would not lose our hard-won faith. We did not dance or listen to secular music. We did not play cards. We did not drink alcohol or go to movies. We went to church twice on Sundays. Between the morning and evening services there was a Sunday afternoon feast — I recall these as among the finest meals I have ever eaten — that left us drowsy and contented. On Wednesdays we went to prayer meeting, and on Thursdays to Bible study. Every day, there were prayers before bed and prayers when we rose in the morning and Family Radio always murmuring in the background.
When I read “Go Tell It on the Mountain” at 19, I discovered that Baldwin had written an accounting of my young life. Baldwin was himself raised in the Pentecostal faith and was a preacher until the age of 17, when he left the church to become the man he was destined to be. I grew up in Philadelphia in the 1980s, many decades and hundreds of miles from the 1930s Harlem dwelling of the Grimes family, but in Baldwin’s pages I found my every inarticulable anger, my chafing at the limitations of that church life, my shame and my pride — all illuminated in his pages. I found, too, the strangeness of my family’s religion — this sense that sin was all around, crowding in on us like an enemy at the gates. There was an urgency about our faith, and a joy, too. We were in a relationship of fierce belonging to one another. It was an extraordinary existence. Baldwin’s sentences leapt off the page, as though I were huddled in a quiet corner with him, whispering about things only he and I could know. “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is, in other words, among my beloveds.
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THE NOVEL RECOUNTS the 24 hours of John Grimes’s 14th birthday in March 1935. The Harlem of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is a difficult place, riddled with dangers — the white cop, the pool hall, the knife fight — that might overtake a young Black person. It is difficult to describe the book by means of the usual play-by-play of plot because the happenings are significant but few. It is a novel about subjugation to racism and to religion. It is about salvation from whiteness and from sin. It is about race shame and class shame. It is about its protagonist’s struggle with these realities, and about the possibility of a measured triumph over them. It is about prideful belonging to a community, which in John’s case is his church: The Temple of the Fire Baptized.
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