Go Tell it on the Mountain, 1940s-1950s
James Arthur Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924 at Harlem Hospital to Emma Berdis Jones, who worked as a cleaning woman and laundress. She married David Baldwin in 1927, who James believed was his biological father until he was a teenager. James had 7 half-siblings, 2 brothers and 5 sisters. James became a minister at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly at age 14. During his teenage years, Baldwin started writing seriously. By the end of high school, Baldwin had started to question the church, while growing more appreciative of the arts and aware of his queerness. He stopped preaching in 1941 at 17.
At this time, Baldwin increasingly began to challenge and question racial codes and segregation, through acts of civil disobedience and open discussion. In 1948, he moved to Paris and connected with his mentor Richard Wright. Wright introduced him to the French intellectual community, at the time dominated by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Baldwin disliked the community, feeling that they mistreated Black people, by seeing them more as exotic curiosities than equals. After a year of financial troubles and failing health, Baldwin met Lucien Happersberger. In 1951, Happersberger invited Baldwin to live at his family chalet in Loèche-les-Bains. There he was able to finish his first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, an autobiographical work inspired by his life growing up in Harlem.
Portrait of James Baldwin taken by Carl Van Vechten on September 13, 1955. The Van Vetchen Collection at the Library of Congress includes hundreds of portraits of celebrities, the majority from the Harlem Renaissance.
He would weep again, his heart insisted, for now his weeping had begun; he would rage again, said the shifting air, for the lions of rage had been unloosed; he would be in darkness again, in fire again, now that he had seen the fire and the darkness. He was free—whom the Son sets free is free indeed—he had only to stand fast in his liberty.
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
Photo: Anne Knafl
“Like John Grimes, the protagonist in Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin sometimes seems torn between the desire for transcendence and the need for worldliness. Yet, I think that most of the time he appears as a protean and cosmopolitan humanist who takes nothing for granted and who is fascinated in the confrontation with the unpredictability of the human being and with the demands of life.” Ulf Schulenberg, Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture.
UChicago Library copy of Go Tell It on the Mountain