A Struggle for Salvation: James Baldwin and “Go Tell It on The Mountain”

Salvation is a recurring theme in Baldwin’s literary oeuvre, oftentimes attained successfully through suffering, contrition, and unsavory struggles such as John’s struggle in Go Tell It on The Mountain. Being a Harlem writer, Baldwin blends Go Tell It on The Mountain with a literary style of high caliber, yielding an individually authentic and communally enticing narrative. The novel patently articulates an African-American struggle wherein a fourteen-year-old protagonist, John Grimes, persists in attaining salvation. John incessantly seeks to make his own way towards the light of salvation. However, the path towards this light is not bereft of tumult. The novel’s preoccupation with the trope of salvation is relentless. John is described as a “weary traveller” who is enmeshed in a struggle for salvation in the vortex of contingent and imminent ordeals and catastrophes. Yet, how can John attain salvation while being caught up in the grips of tumult and sin? Does he embrace his fate as a weary traveller who is destined to struggle for salvation? And how does his struggle toward salvation fare? This present essay sets out to scrutinize the novel’s engagement with the central theme driving the narrative. To this end, this paper conducts a thematic analysis of the novel to showcase how characters, particularly John, ultimately arrive at salvation.

At the outset of the novel, everyone in John’s community, particularly his father Gabriel, has high hopes and great expectations for him. John is expected to eventually follow the consecrated path of Gabriel, his mother Elizabeth, and his aunt Florence. However, John incessantly exudes qualms about the possibility of him gleaning a glimpse of salvation and holiness that his surroundings seem to evince. He wonders whether he can live up to his father’s and the community’s expectations, questioning the possibility of leading a life of holiness: “John stared at Elisha all during the lesson, admiring the timbre of Elisha’s voice, much deeper and manlier than his own, wondering if he would ever be holy as Elisha was holy.” This preceding excerpt reflects the inherent struggle towards salvation that permeates the novel as a whole. The fact that John wonders if he can ever match Elisha’s holiness indicates that he yearns for a spiritual awakening and salvation. Although John does yearn for spiritual salvation, he inevitably falls low and commits a sin “He had sinned. In spite of the saints, his mother and his father…he had sinned with his hands a sin that was hard to forgive.” Notwithstanding, John nonetheless exhibits signs of repentance throughout the course of the narrative as he realizes that he is destined to lead a life that is not so much laden with sins and decadence but a life that is replete with repentance and characterized by being holy.   

As the novel progresses, it becomes evident that the upshot of John’s perpetual struggle toward salvation is, in fact, “a holy life.” John seems to realize the special life that awaits him: “John first realized that this was the life awaiting him realized it consciously, as something no longer far off, but imminent, coming closer day by day.” John is highly cognizant of this imminent life that lurks behind on the horizon. He is not only willing to take extremely difficult ends to have a fitful glimmer of salvation, but he is also willing to embrace it. His mother and aunt also realize the fully-fledged contingency of his salvation. They sense that John will eventually follow their paths. On his fourteenth birthday, his mother tells him: “You’re a very bright boy, John Grimes” This gives John a resurgence of his unrelenting quest for salvation. He realizes that “he had in himself a power” and that “he could use this to save himself, to raise himself.” Nevertheless, resurrecting oneself internally and making one’s way towards the light of salvation is not without grinding predicaments, such as the problem of sin, which befalls the inner lives of the central characters.

The problem of sin is pervasive in John’s insular community but, more fundamentally, in his family. Although he is burdened by his family’s constant insistence on abstinence from sins, he is not altogether plighted by this fear of sin that imbues every undertaking of his family. Through this kind of constant insistence on personal problems and upheavals and how characters respond to them afterward, novels, as Lukács writes, generally tend to “demonstrate the risk which everyone runs and which can be escaped by individual salvation but not by aprioristic redemption.” This corroborates that such struggle towards salvation in itself and for itself is by no means bereft of perils. This struggle is inherently marked by the sins of character; they are perpetually stricken by their sins, but they still exude contrition and repentance. This repentance after sin, even if the sins are venial like in John’s case, is the precondition and the preliminary step for salvation in this decaying world. Since the scope of the novel extends well beyond John’s life, this becomes evident in the second part of the novel which consists of polyphonic points of view of John’s family. These perspectives are presented as flashbacks of events that Florence, Gabriel, and Elizabeth experienced, each on their own. Gabriel’s flashback, or “Prayer” as it is titled in the novel, offers a new perspective of Gabriel as a character who used to wallow in sins. This flashback also reveals how he oscillated between a life of faith and a life of grave sins and mistakes. His mistakes led him to be mired in an extramarital affair which resulted in an illegitimate child.

However, Gabriel becomes extremely repentant after his sins. As he attains salvation, he sees that it is an endless process that cannot be attained without retribution, without any vestige of pain, and a firm belief in God as the only savior: “For God had a plan. He would not suffer the soul of man to die, but had prepared a plan for his salvation.” Accordingly, salvation is all the more possible when one firmly believes that God has not forsaken them yet and that everything that threatens them will eventually fall asunder. Gabriel is a staunch believer in this ecclesiastical creed; he refers to it as: “a knowledge of the truth.” He sees that it has become incumbent upon himself to uphold moral percepts in his congregation to help them arrive at this knowledge of the truth or the belief that God will ultimately bestow salvation on them like in Florence’s and Elizabeth’s case.  

John’s quest towards knowledge of the truth and salvation eventually fares well, though not without challenges. Although it was laden with precipitous obstacles, John’s journey ultimately culminates in personal salvation. At first, John is caught up in a double bind of infernal tribulations, he languishes in extremis not sure whether he should accept the perpetual struggle towards the mountaintop, i.e., towards holiness and salvation “It’s a hard way. It’s uphill all the way” or if he should reject outright the church. He asks himself: “What shall I do? What shall I do?” Though these questions are at first left unanswered, they are nonetheless not forgotten. They reverberate throughout the entirety of the novel as John realizes that he should seek and long for salvation.  John’s longing for the mountaintop is eventually fulfilled. At the end of the novel and as John’s liturgy at the threshing floor comes to an end, his mother tells Sister McCandless that it was his birthday yesterday, and Sister McCandless responds rightly: “The Lord done saved that boy’s soul on his birthday! … When ye see all these things, know that your salvation is at hand.”  

Yet John’s path to the mountaintop is not altogether an easy task. It is replete with daunting undertakings. Like his mother and father, John experiences extreme tumult before salvation “John had not felt the wound, but only the agony, had not felt the fall, but only the fear; and lay here, now, helpless, screaming, at the very bottom of darkness.” This quotation further substantiates how the way to knowledge of the truth and salvation is indeed replete with great turmoil. “Salvation,” Charles Moeller writes, “therefore is not a restful undertaking, but a struggle, a combat, a risk of one’s own self.”  Nevertheless, when salvation is fully-fledged and finally at hand, it instills a profound transformation of the inner soul.

Salvation thus restores the equipoise and the equilibrium that was disrupted by the soul being enmeshed in extremis and turmoil. This idea finds itself well-steeped in Moeller’s book Man and Salvation in Literature as he asserts that: “When salvation has been lived by a soul who takes grace seriously, it gradually transfigures the world. A harmony is gradually established between man and other men, between men and the world!” When John attains salvation, his world is essentially transfigured and characterized by harmony. Harmony imbues John’s world insofar as his sole fervor is to “rise and, at once, to leave this temple and go out into the world.” (Baldwin 200). John wants to go out to the world to live this salvation that animates his world all the more intensely. At first, John was incessantly stricken by this world. He thought that it would fall down and end in tatters. John did not, however, lose faith in God, for he was cognizant of the fact that “there are people in the world for whom “coming along” is a perpetual process, people who are destined” to arrive at salvation successfully.

This perpetual process of “coming along,” or more properly, the process of salvation does not only concern John; it also involves his congregation and particularly his family. In the flashbacks of Gabriel, Elizabeth, and Florence, the seeds of the struggle towards salvation are already laid upon. Their prayers, which occur on the threshing-floor, are meant to demonstrate this process of coming along and this struggle towards salvation. These prayers also give importance and lend credence to John’s struggle for salvation. In discussing the significance of the threshing-floor and how it connects Florence, Gabriel, and Elizabeth with John, Shirley S. Allen notes that “the prayers of the saints, then, function as prototypes for John’s ordeal…setting both the religious and psychological conditions for salvation. When John’s turn comes, the reader is fully aware of the dangers and the seriousness of the test.” The prayers also give the reader a sense of hope that the corollary of all this seriousness and after all this tumult that lurks behind is a state of exuberance, namely a state of salvation.

Moreover, in considering the threshing-floor, one could also argue that it is, in fact, a stepping stone to not only repentance but also salvation. Through this, Baldwin seems to suggest that, for the possibility of salvation to be intact, one should not pay lip service to the workings of God in holy places such as the church and the threshing-floor. Rather, one should, as John does, embrace the threshing-floor as a purgatory space of repentance. After his prayer on the threshing-floor, John tells Elisha that he is saved and ready “I was saved. I was there… I’m ready,’ John said, ‘I’m coming. I’m on my way.” It is this threshing floor that reifies John’s express purpose of salvation, making him ready to rise again and go into the world without any qualms about “the Lord’s deliverance” or whether the process of coming along will finally be at hand.

In its exploration of Go Tell It on The Mountain, this article has set out to probe the novel’s great preoccupation with salvation, recognizing that the central characters struggle and grope in their pursuit of salvation. Baldwin suggests that salvation is nothing but the product of a perpetual struggle. The Grimes’, particularly John’s struggle fare better as they successfully arrive at salvation. Though John’s quest for salvation is imbued with unsavory and grim ordeals, the light of these ordeals becomes dim on the threshing-floor. Accordingly, Baldwin makes sure that John attains salvation within the realms of the church, thereby corroborating the idea that the church holds subliminal yet necessary power for attaining salvation. This is reiterated at the end of the novel. The ending is particularly revealing in that it showcases that the power of the church is necessary for John in his quest from “darkness” to salvation since this latter is a divine dispensation given by God within the precincts of the church.

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