by Azar Nafisi
Near the end of the story, when Holden finds graffiti in various places (on two of his school staircases, and on a mummy tomb in a museum) saying simply “Fuck you,” it makes him sick and angry. “That’s the whole trouble,” he informs us. “You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any.” You might think you have a peaceful place, but then “somebody’ll sneak up and write ‘Fuck you’ right under your nose.”
Holden is driven crazy by this and wants to kill the person who wrote it, because Phoebe or some other child might see the graffiti and wonder about its meaning and then “finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days.” So we can conclude that Holden, who seems unable to sustain meaningful relationships with adults, even kids his own age, connects only to children, whose innocence he is eager to protect. Their differing attitude toward innocence is in fact what sets John Grimes, Baldwin’s protagonist, apart from Holden Caulfield.
• • •
Go Tell It on the Mountain is a semi-autobiographical novel that focuses on the coming of age of a young African American boy while narrating his emotions, reflections and reminiscences over the course of twenty-four hours, from the morning of his fourteenth birthday to the next morning, and his spiritual rebirth on the threshing floor of his community’s storefront church. Between those two mornings, we follow John’s movements—at home, around the city and finally at his church—and discover stories about him, his family and his community; each one becomes part of the puzzle that is John. Holden Caulfield might have felt the past and his personal background are “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” Not for John. “Go back to where you started,” James Baldwin advised his nephew, “or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.”
The similarities between John Grimes’s life and Baldwin’s are quite obvious. Both were illegitimate. In John’s case, he is the only character in the book who is a child born of love. His parents have eloped to New York City, where his father, Richard, would commit suicide after a brutal and humiliating incarceration on a trumped-up charge. Richard is a self-made man. When Elizabeth, John’s mother, discovering he has barely had any schooling, asks him, “‘Then how come you got to be so smart? How come you got to know so much?’” Richard tells her, “‘I just decided me one day that I was going to get to know everything them white bastards knew.’” Then he adds, “‘I was going to get to know it better than them, so could no white son-of-a-bitch nowhere never talk me down, and never make me feel like I was dirt.’” The irony, of course, is that he commits suicide because those sons of bitches, by framing him, make him feel like dirt. All his books and learning could do nothing to protect him from that pervasive sense of shame. John’s mother then marries a fanatical and abusive preacher who promises to take care of her son like their own and whom John calls father, but instead he self-righteously attempts to humiliate and destroy the boy. Gabriel, John’s stepfather, says he is going “‘to beat the sin out of him.’” A reformed womanizer, he is a reminder of Baldwin’s claim that “nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”
Baldwin and John Grimes share something that goes beyond the facts of their lives: their stories begin with a fundamental crisis of faith. “It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once,” Baldwin wrote. “I date it—the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress—from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.” Go Tell It on the Mountain is a meditation on John Grimes’s “crumbling of faith” and all the forces of authority that have held him back, that have kept him in darkness: racism, religious fanaticism, blind faith. “John’s heart was hardened against the Lord. His father was God’s minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.” He promises himself that “he would not be like his father, or his father’s fathers. He would have another life.” That new life would offer him a new spirituality, no longer tethered to a rejection of his own body and his body’s desire for love.
Sensuality, as Baldwin saw it, was the essence of life; to be deprived of it would mean missing out on living. “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.” For Baldwin this was a serious matter, one that he would make the main topic of his second book, Giovanni’s Room. Anyone who has lived like I did for eighteen years under fundamentalist rule, or in a secular totalitarian state like the Soviet Union, can testify to the truth of a statement he made in an interview with the Village Voice late in life: that “terror of the flesh . . . is a doctrine which has led to untold horrors.”
When I reread Go Tell It on the Mountain after almost thirty years, I was surprised by how much I had missed: its cadences that capture the rhythms of Negro spirituals, moving with such physical and emotional force, its light and dark imagery and its theme of death and rebirth. John Grimes, like Huck, obeys the dictates of his heart, turning away from the false gods, and is reborn on the threshing floor of the very church that had suffocated him with its unforgiving rigidity. What could be closer to the cherished ideal of American individualism than to stand up to obstacles regardless of the consequences, to say no to stifling authority and face the darkness with no safety net, mastering one’s fear?
• • •
To be reborn, John Grimes must rid himself of the very thing Holden Caulfield wishes to preserve and protect: his innocence. “It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent,” Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time. “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” Innocence protects us from knowledge, but knowledge leads to the truth. Shedding your innocence, facing the truth, is thus the first step toward becoming a responsible individual. Of course, it is easier said than done.
“I am a preacher’s son,” James Baldwin informs us in “As Much Truth As One Can Bear.” “I beg you to remember the proper name of that troubling tree in Eden: it is ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.’” Curiosity was man’s first sin, the urge that motivated him to risk being thrown out of Paradise, and this perhaps is the great human paradox: with the urge to know comes the desire to live in safety, to remain innocent. We have heard the story so many times that we might be forgiven for forgetting how very frightening it is to be thrown out of the security of heaven, into the unknown void, into darkness.
Do we really want to be free? Is not the desire to be free different from choosing freedom? Eric, the protagonist in Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, can embrace freedom because he “did not believe in the vast, gray sleep which was called security . . . and this meant that he had to create his standards . . . as he went along.” Americans think of themselves as champions of freedom, but that does not mean that, at a deep personal level, they are ready to be free. “I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not Americans—who had any real desire to be free,” Baldwin wrote. He then added, “Freedom is hard to bear. It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels.”
All writers must take risks; all must tread into the void and darkness; all do so passionately, embracing the agony of freedom and the unknown
—that is the price of the ticket, as Baldwin would have said. “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free—he has set himself free—for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”
• • •
With Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin made his name as a brilliant “Negro” writer. Everyone seemed to be happy with that: his publisher, agent and readers—everyone, that is, but him. “I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I expect that to be my only subject,” he wrote in 1958, “but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.”
He had no fear of being thrown out of one paradise after another. So he went on to write a book about a young white male and his homosexual love affair. A writer’s job, he said, was to disturb the peace, and he was doing a good job of that. Needless to say, this book made his agent, Helen Strauss, panic. Her motherly advice to the young author was that, rather than risk a bright future, he should simply burn the book. Baldwin reported that his publisher, Alfred Knopf, had informed him that as a Negro writer he had reached a certain audience. “You cannot afford to alienate that audience,” he told him. “This new book will ruin your career.” Baldwin’s response was short and to the point: “I told them, ‘Fuck you.’” Then he went to England and sold his book there, before selling it in America. He was not about to compromise his freedom as a writer in order to market his book. For the benefit of those who would now categorize him as a homosexual writer, he said Giovanni’s Room “is not about homosexual love, it’s about what happens to you if you’re afraid to love anybody.” Later in life he would say that the novel was for him a “declaration of independence.” After which he added, “And then I was in some sense, if not free, clear.”
• • •
I read an article recently in the New York Times about how the teaching of Baldwin was on the decline in public schools. He is too complex, or too controversial, it was suggested, and besides, there are now other great African American writers to choose from. All his life, Baldwin struggled to be a writer, not a Negro writer, but with the best of intentions we have put him back into the box he was so desperate to escape. Nowadays we treat our writers and artists like fashion accessories: once a new trend is set, the old one is relegated to the dustbin. (Baldwin and Twain, incidentally, are not on the Common Core reading list.)
Baldwin is becoming old-fashioned not because of his writing but because of his race—otherwise why focus only, as the article did, on African American students and other African American writers? Don’t other students need to read him, too? Should we interview young white male students to find out if they are reading Saul Bellow or John Cheever, or decide that those older white males don’t matter so much anymore because there are now other white male writers to choose from? Surely any writer wants to be known simply as a writer, acknowledging that his or her work is rooted in particular circumstances but hoping that it manages to vault beyond those narrow constraints. This attitude is particularly disturbing when applied to Baldwin, who believed that race was a political construct used to enslave people: “As long as you think you’re white,” he once said, “I’m forced to think I’m black.” Literature was to his mind a vehicle for escape. He was promiscuous when it came to literary influences and felt that all literature belonged to him: “When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score,” he wrote. “I haven’t thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech—and something of Dickens’ love for bravura—have something to do with me today; but I wouldn’t stake my life on it.” On another occasion he said, “What the writer is always trying to do is utilize the particular in order to reveal something much larger and heavier than any particular can be.”
Baldwin called the simplification of complex issues—this categorization of human beings by race, gender, religion and ethnicity—“the death of the paradox.” As long as we each remain in our separate categories and are outraged only when something is said about us, as long as we read only about ourselves and go around only with other people like us, we will never grow or learn. “Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of meaning,” he wrote in “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” “Those categories which were meant to define and control the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos.”
Baldwin’s independence of mind won him many friends and quite a few enemies, black and white. He retained this independence all through the course of his involvement in the civil rights movement, taking sides with Martin Luther King Jr. while appreciating and admiring Malcolm X and always remaining wary of Elijah Muhammad. He feared being defined by whites. Like Zora Neale Hurston, a black writer was not what he wanted to be: he wanted to be defined simply as a writer, even if a bad one. “You read something which you thought only happened to you,” he said in an interview, “and you discover it happened a hundred years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.” Then he added, “This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”
When, in 1937, Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God, the story of a young black woman’s search for freedom, she was reproached by many prominent black intellectuals and writers, such as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, for having written a novel that was not about race. Wright dismissed it as a “minstrel” novel. Their Eyes Were Watching God is in fact about freedom on several levels: freedom from slavery is the first step that leads to other forms of freedom—individual freedom and the freedom to control your own body and mind. I always felt it should be taught alongside Pride and Prejudice, as both center on a woman’s right to choose. Hurston’s heroine, Janie, defends her right to choose her own lover, a man seventeen years her junior, remaining true first to the demands of love. Because that notion was preposterously new and threatening and insufficiently political for men who wanted more pointed considerations of injustice, it was scoffed at.
• • •
In Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin describes how he and a friend once went to a diner in New York and were refused service. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” they were told. Back outside on the street, he was so angry, so overwhelmed, that he walked ahead of his friend into a fashionable restaurant and sat down. When approached by the “frightened waitress” and told again, “We don’t serve Negroes here,” he became so enraged that he threw a glass of water at the waitress, shattering the mirror behind the bar. He got away, but it made him reflect not simply on the fact that he could have been murdered for what he had done but on how he himself, in that instant, had been ready to commit murder. “My life, my real life, was in danger,” he writes, “and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.” He believed the greatest danger for African Americans was not hatred of what had been done to them, but the risk of surrendering to that hatred. For as Baldwin so poignantly wrote in one of his later essays, “The object of one’s hatred is never, alas, conveniently outside but is seated in one’s lap, stirring in one’s bowels—and dictating the beat of one’s heart. And if one does not know this, one risks becoming an imitation—and, therefore, a continuation—of principles one imagines oneself to despise.”
All his life, Baldwin was afraid of becoming like his oppressor, taking on his attitude in reverse. He was afraid o
f being a prisoner forever despite the illusion that he was fighting for freedom. Because the most difficult part of the fight is not taking aim at the enemy but rejecting his definition of you. If white racists had segregated blacks—if they tried to convince themselves that the two were different—should blacks isolate themselves and emphasize that difference in return? This was what many were doing at the time, like Elijah Muhammad and his Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers. Some even spoke of wanting to go back to Africa. Baldwin felt that to abdicate his American heritage would have meant doing exactly what the white racists wanted him to do. “Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country’s destiny,” Baldwin said in “Many Thousands Gone,” and in so saying he had taken the first step toward being in control of his own destiny. “They have no other experiences besides their experience on this continent.”
The impulse for total rejection was understandable, but clinging to anger was more dangerous than letting go. Baldwin, from the start, understood that he was not African—he was and would always be American—and that meant that he would have to channel the heritage of his fathers and capture what they had salvaged from Africa and brought with them to America, and synthesize this with the culture that whites had claimed as their own. His forefathers, when forbidden from performing their rituals and forced into their masters’ Christianity, had secretly blended in spirituals and field songs, trying to re-create something of the experiences of their ancestral home. In his first novel, Baldwin aimed to do the same thing: he juxtaposed narrative traditions culled from the Bible with his own favorite writers, like Henry James and James Joyce. In his essay “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” he explains how at first he was “dubious about Othello” and “bitter about Caliban,” just as “some Jews bitterly and mistakenly resent Shylock.” He attributed this to being a victim of “that loveless education which causes so many schoolboys to detest Shakespeare.” He rediscovered Shakespeare when he read him again in France, where he came to peace with the English language, having earlier rejected it because he felt it reflected none of his experience. In France he came to see that the “greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love—by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.”