Go Tell It on the Mountain

There are live wires when dealing with any political (or politicized) topic in art.  When discussing race, religion, and sex, an author runs the risk of oversimplifying the issue, of sacrificing honesty to present the topic in a falsely positive or negative light.  Moreover, when two of these topics appear in the same work, one may be sacrificed to the other.  For example, Ralph Ellison is interested in race and power in Invisible Man, and he has little to no interest in how gender plays into that mix.  As a result, the female characters make fleeting appearances at best and generally fall flat, skipped over for the Ellison's larger interest.  Any one of these topics, then, is difficult to handle honestly, and with each added topic in the same work, the difficulty increases exponentially.

James Baldwin pulls off the amazing feat of handling not one, not two, but all three issues of race, religion, and sex without sacrificing any issue to the other two, all the while being honest about all three.  The result is an incredibly insightful representation of the lives of African Americans in the mid-20th century.


Go Tell It on the Mountain is the story of John Grimes.  It is a coming of age story as John travels from boyhood to manhood all in the course of the day of his 14th birthday.  In the first chapter, we meet all the major players of the novel: John, his brother Roy, his father Gabriel, his mother Elizabeth, his aunt Florence, and a young man at the church whom John greatly admires, Elisha.  We learn that Gabriel is not John's birth father, but that he has helped raise John since John was a baby.  We learn that John is a quiet boy whose heart is filled with anger towards his father, who is a deacon at their church and a strict disciplinarian.  We learn that Gabriel does not seem to like John, preferring his natural son Roy (short for Royal), though Roy has as much contempt for his father as John does.  In the final section, while at a church prayer service that night, John finds himself on the threshing floor having the religious experience that brings him into adulthood in the eyes of the church. But it is the middle section that colors our understanding of and hopes for John, for it is in the middle section that we learn the histories of Florence, Gabriel, and Elizabeth.  These stories are like overlapping short stories, and they provide the context for John's climactic experience.




In another novel, John's rising up from the threshing room floor would mark a moment of transition symbolizing a great rebirth.  But in Baldwin's hands, John's entrance into adulthood and religious revelation are not simple moments to be celebrated.  Nor are they defeats for John.  They are complicated experiences, and we are all too aware of the complexities.  When John goes home after the service, we do not expect his life to change.  We are all too aware of the rough road ahead.


One of the things I admire about this book is how it has a cumulative effect, like when your eyes adjust to a darkened room:  you find certain objects and lights immediately, and then bring more and more into view as you understand the objects you see and search to make sense of the shapes that are only just coming into view.  The first thing you see in this book is religion.  Every character in the novel struggles with the Christian faith and the Baptist church.  For every character, the religion provides both moments of anguish and moments of peace.  Baldwin sees the church as a powerful force, as destructive as it is positive, and for his black community, it is the center of power.  Gabriel himself is powerful, physically and spiritually.  But that show of power is coupled with the powerlessness of his actions--Gabriel cannot control his son, couldn't save his first son Roy, couldn't lift Deborah up as he imagined, and can't stop John from having his revelation.  This powerlessness masking itself as power is echoed by the presence of White America in the novel.  In both the South and the North, Baldwin's focus is on African American communities, but on the outskirts of those communities are the violent actions of whites:  Deborah's rape, Richard's brutalizing, Roy's stabbing.  These events are never the focus, but their pressure is felt in every thing else that happens.  Baldwin captures all this seamlessly, and it's only in actively thinking about the stories of the various characters and where their lives meet that the connections start revealing themselves.


I was most struck by Baldwin's depiction of his female characters, Florence, Elizabeth (and even Esther and Deborah).  They are every bit as complex as the men, and they are crucial to Baldwin's complete depiction of the black community he is discussing.  These women are not cowed by the threats thrown at them in the guise of religious guidance.  They are strong and insecure and looking for something they can't find.  You feel for everyone, even when you don't like them.  The book is, in short, a perfect study in character.

This is the first Baldwin novel I have ever read.  I have read and loved many essays and always respected him as a thinker and as a writer with the ability to get at the heart of things in a poetic and profound manner.  His novel writing is every bit as impressive, and I look forward to reading more of his novels when this project has come to its completion.

Man Oh Invisible Man!

When Ann and I first started this project two and half years ago, we looked through the list and noted which books we had already read.  When I got to Invisible Man, I hesitated.  I thought I had read the book, but I wasn't sure.  If I had read it, I thought I liked it.  If I hadn't, then it was something I always wanted to read.

I know for certain now that I had not read it, because if I had, I would have remembered such an incredible novel.  Holy moly!  Like Grapes of Wrath, this is a perfect novel in my eyes.  Even though the book is nearly 600 pages long, it never once sags or drags.  It comes out firing with a riveting and poetic prologue, introducing us to the narrator, smart, angry, and possibly a little bit crazy, living in his secret hole beneath New York City. We are instantly aware that this is a book about character, about politics, about race, about the relationship between individuals and organizations.  And like Orwell, Ellison never lets his political art become more political than art.  This is first and foremost a work of imaginative fiction, beautifully written and constructed with the tightness of a drum skin.

In an ideal work of fiction, character is plot and plot is character.  What happens is decided by the character we follow and the decisions he makes (as well as the decisions that are made for him).  Similarly, the character is constructed by the events that unfold around him and batter him about.  In Invisible Man, plot and character are inseparable.  On the one hand, it is an intricate character piece, and on the other hand, it is a heavily and tightly plotted story.  Moreover, it is the very specific story of one specific character, but the novel resonates because it is simultaneously the story of a generation of American black men in the 1940s and '50s, and beyond that it is also simultaneously the story of all Americans.  In the end, Invisible Man is a story about the individual and his place in society.  (I use the male pronoun there purposefully, since the novel is not overly concerned with the struggle of women.)  The Brotherhood is a specific organization, but the narrator's experiences with the Brotherhood are laden with meaning beyond that specific relationship.  The narrator is on a search for self-discovery, because "if I discover who I am, I'll be free," and like one of his professors said of Stephen Dedalus,

[his] problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face.  Our task is that of making ourselves individuals.  The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record . . .  We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important:  We will have created a culture.

Ralph Ellison tackles exactly how difficult it is to create "the uncreated features of our face" in a world where we are not seen for who we are, in a world where people don't see beyond your clothes or the color of your skin.  We are all invisible to each other when our inner eye tells our physical eye what to see.  And on top of that, the organizations and groups that exert their forces upon us don't care at all who we are.

That problem, the problem of discovering who we are, sounds airy and philosophical, but Ellison keeps his novel grounded in details and the specific world that scrapes against the narrator.  But the theoretical, the philosophical, hovers right behind the physical in all things in this novel.  Every description does double duty, both anchoring us in the physical moment of the scene and alluding to the meaning of the image.  Take this passage, in which the narrator finds himself alone with a beautiful white woman who has designs on our protagonist.  She is on the phone and they are standing in her bedroom:

I nodded, seeing her turn without a word and go toward a vanity with a large oval mirror, taking up an ivory telephone.   And in the mirrored instant I saw myself standing between her eager form and a huge white bed, myself caught in a guilty stance, my face taut, tie dangling; and behind the bed another mirror which now like a surge of the sea tossed our images back and forth, back and forth, furiously multiplying the time and the place and the circumstance.

Ellison wastes not a single moment, not a single image, and not a single word.  It is truly stunning to read, and I found myself wanting to read slower and slower to feel each word and image move between the fingers of my mind just to admire their texture and power.

Finally, this book, perfect in its execution and elocution, would fall flat were it not for its unflinching honesty.  This novel tackles so much about our world, and it does so with a crazy sense of control.  I never once doubted that Ellison had thought this novel and its subject matter through down to every detail.  But for all that confidence and deft handling of his material, Ellison has no pat answers to the dilemmas his narrator faces.  The mystery of life is perfectly articulated and poignantly unsolved.

If you are only going to read a handful of books from this list of 100, Invisible Man should be at the top of your list.