Shame, Rage, and Endless Battle: Systemic Pressure and Individual Violence in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain

Florence, the aunt of James Baldwin’s protagonist in Go Tell It on the Mountain, has little faith in the transformative effects of religious conversion. Near the middle of the novel, she says, “These niggers running around, talking about the Lord done changed their hearts—ain’t nothing happened to them niggers. They got the same old black hearts they was born with” (182). She uses her brother Gabriel as her prime example of this failure to change. Florence repeatedly challenges Gabriel’s assertion that he has changed, saying that he “was born a fool, and always done been a fool” (38–39), that he is “born wild, and [he is] going to die wild” (44), and that “he ain’t thought a minute about nobody in this world but himself” (84). It is not only Gabriel’s abuse of his family that leads Florence to believe that he does not and cannot change, but also the secret he keeps from his family and from members of the Temple of the Fire Baptized. While Gabriel claims to be sanctified and living a holy life, he has committed adultery, fathered an illegitimate son, and then abandoned the woman and his child. To Florence, he is the same man he was before his conversion experience: selfish, lustful, and oppressive, “no better than a murderer” (84).

Critics tend to share Florence’s negative perception of her brother. Depending on their perspective on Christianity, Gabriel is either a personification of a vengeful, misogynist, and even racist God (see Macebuh; Warren; Ikard; Csapó), or an example of a “bad” Christian who uses religion as a front to bolster his own power while secretly engaging in “sinful” activities that he preaches against in public (for example see Lundén; Hardy; Porter). Both Trudier Harris and Vivan May take the latter line of critique a step further, suggesting that Gabriel fakes his conversion in order to gain tyrannical authority over those around him. Even more sympathetic readings of Gabriel end up condemning him. Peter Powers sees Gabriel’s struggle against his sexual desire as sincere but interprets his conversion as a “gimmick” that enables him to maintain a position of social power in the face of a racist society, ultimately emphasizing Gabriel’s failure (800). I want to suggest that these scholars misread the novel’s critique of the African-American Christianity in general and the Black Holiness Christianity in particular.¹ I argue that Go Tell It on the Mountain does not portray Gabriel simply as a villainous character who commits emotional and physical violence against his family but as a committed participant in a religious system that fails him. As a result, the novel explores the tension, and interconnection, between individual and systemic failures. In this way, Baldwin avoids that trap of focusing on “concrete individuals and their ‘evil’ intentions” to the exclusion of systemic “evils” that Slavoj Žižek warns against (Violence 11, 13).

It is not uncommon for Baldwin to explore the tension between the individual and systems, especially in his early writing. In “The American Dream and the American Negro,” Baldwin takes aim at the racist “Western system of reality” while humanizing Jim Clark, an Alabama sheriff who repeatedly committed acts of racially motivated violence (714). In Amen Corner, the focus becomes more personal. Sister Margaret, whom Baldwin explicitly links to his mother in his introduction (xv–xvi), is a “tyrannical matriarch” with a “merciless piety” (xvi). Yet, Baldwin argues the racist society in which she lives dictates “her sense of reality” (xvi). Her tyranny is a form of “love” for her husband and son, whom she wants to “protect . . . from the bloody consequences of being a man in this society” (xvi). Perhaps the most relevant example, however, is “Notes of a Native Son.” In this essay, Baldwin wrestles with the actions of his step-father, whose life closely resembles that of Gabriel. Baldwin tries to understand the systemic pressures that drove his step-father toward such hatred. In each instance, Baldwin is interested in the...