Go Tell It on the Mountain 
by 

James Baldwin

 

Jail or Church?

At age 14 I had a similar epiphany to that of James Baldwin. I too realised that my parents were only human beings, and that their fallibility left me vulnerable to the world. If I were to survive, it would have to be on terms that were yet to be determined. I recall it as a trauma. And I was neither gay nor black. But I was brought up as well in New York City to know that the world was sinful and dangerous. And “jails and churches” did bound the same spectrum of choice in my adolescent mind.

John Grimes is a Harlem Prometheus, pushing his life uphill, and endlessly having it roll back to the same point of virtual extermination. “I can always climb back up,” he thinks. Because he is young. But the unforgiving, violent gnosticism of his father is something more difficult to overcome than even the unforgiving racism and homophobia of his city. The city might give the occasional break to a talented, intelligent, ambitious black boy. But the ingrained suspicion and fear of divine judgement created by his father? Never. Hell seemed closer than one’s own family; and it had far more patience.

The only way to avoid Hell was to get ‘laid low’ by the Lord, to give up entirely - one’s ambition, one’s desires, one’s personality - in order to become saved. “You in the Word or you ain’t - ain’t no halfway with God.” For John’s father salvation comes only through pain, his first and then that of others, as much as he might impose in retribution against the violent racism, grinding humiliation and frustration he has experienced all his life. His hatred is sublimated into a desolate, suppressed existence. He can neither love nor relent in his self-persecution. A sort of racial bulimia: if the only revenge available is on oneself, that’s at least something. 

When the family lived in the South, there was at least hope of escape from the legacy of their slave-parents. The North represented real freedom. But when they got there, things weren’t any different, except that hope had disappeared. There was nowhere to escape to. “The whole earth becomes a prison for the man who fled before the Lord.” This was life as it was going to be - forever. The men feel the despair most acutely, the women most deeply, the children most thoroughly. What alternative is there to a kind of religion that preaches ‘We don’t belong here; our home is elsewhere; degradation and dereliction is the only thing we can expect.’

In such a conditions, to lead is to preach, to evoke that other place of belonging, to create the community that anticipates, longs for and deserves that other place. But preaching doesn’t erase memory - in either the congregation or the preacher. One’s personal sins are compounded by the the inherent evil, one has been taught, of one’s blackness. This can’t be escaped even if it can be rationalized. Preaching becomes a sort of politics, a politics among victims, the result of which is indeed election to a life of guilt as well as oppression. This is the only politics allowed them. Their religion has not yet awoke to its potential for anything further.

John is indeed struck down, laid low, by the Lord. He becomes powerless with fear. But not to be saved: “... salvation was finished, damnation was real.” His head is filled with the sound of rage. Visions of death make him scream for help. Until he sees the Lord and is taken up into Him and protected. The rest - his father, mother, extended family, fellow congregants - didn’t know it, but he did: the Lord had freed him... of them. There were more possibilities than jails or churches.