Go Tell It On The Mountain

I've been writing this blog for about five months now, yet you wouldn't be able to tell I have a deep passion and love for African-American literature—especially from the 40s-60s. There was a time I couldn't get enough of works by Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin—and though their work came after the 60s, I'll go ahead and include Toni Morrison and possibly my favorite of all, Gloria Naylor. I find all these writers to have exceptional talent at crafting the written word, but they also can strangle the reader with deep emotion. Reading about the racism hurled at these writers' characters bring to life the issue in a way that changes you. It makes you more empathic and aware of the atrocities of our country; it's a lesson in humanity.

Yet for all my love for this 'genre' I had not yet read James Baldwin's famous Go Tell It On the Mountain. It wasn't because I didn't want to, or hadn't tried. I must have checked out the book from the library a dozen times over the years. I even cracked it open once or twice, but couldn't get past the first page. I decided to give it another shot—just twenty pages; Baldwin had twenty pages to pull me in or I was walking away. But I was his by page ten or so.

Go Tell It On the Mountain tells the story of a preacher and his family, spanning the lives of four characters over two generations. It's a difficult book to sum up quickly without giving too much away, but like other books by the authors I mentioned, it contains a portrait of racism and the black experience before the Civil Rights era. I enjoyed the book a lot. It's been about seven years since I read a book by Baldwin. (The first and only book I had read by him was Giovanni's Room.) I don't plan on letting so much time pass before picking up another book by him.