3 - The South in Go Tell It on the Mountain: Baldwin's Personal Confrontation

Summary

James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain has been appropriately designated an autobiographical or semiautobiographical work. I have previously tried to suggest how it would be useful to read the novel with a more comprehensive definition of autobiography in mind. I concluded:

One could persuasively read passages [from his stories and novels] as fictional counterparts of Baldwin's comments in Notes of a Native Son, in The Devil Finds Work, and in other autobiographical essays. But this direct referential approach, in which the “facts” of John Grimes's life are correctly perceived as mirroring Baldwin's, amounts to only a useful interpretive beginning, not a critical end. The point of view from which one scrutinizes the facts of a writer's life as a writer is also crucial. Thus, the literal facts of Baldwin's boyhood … pale in significance beside the “secrets” of his literary life embedded in the text of Go Tell It on the Mountain.

A writer writes a novel at a particular time in a specific place and at a certain moment in her or his career. Such significant factors, in addition to the fidelity of the plot and characters to the biographical details of a writer's life, are important considerations. For instance, Go Tell It on the Mountain is Baldwin's first novel rather than his sixth. That fact is at least as important as the similarity between Gabriel Grimes, John Grimes's dogmatic and bitter stepfather, and David Baldwin, Baldwin's own stepfather.