Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

James Baldwin's first novel is thinly disguised autobiography that ultimately reads more like a personal excoriation of fundamentalist Christianity, laying bare its hypocrisies and general foolishness in acid terms. It's a short novel but full of backstories and the complexities of blended and extended families. Set in Harlem, the preacher Gabriel Grimes and his family undergo convulsions of grief when the second son is killed stabbed in the throat. It's Gabriel's second marriage. His first was in the South and produced no children. In fact, the family history is so complex, and so central to all the themes, that exposition often feels like it's running breathlessly to keep pace with the narrative of Roy's death. The novel is full of Bible stories and biblical language, starting with the reason-for-the-season Christmas carol in the title. For teenage John Grimes, the novel is more about climbing the mountain than it is about saying something, and the climb is not easy, which makes the joyfulness of the carol referenced a little weirdly distracting. Much of the narrative comes directly from Baldwin's life—same kind of father, same kind of relationship, same turn to Jesus at 14, etc. For all the artfulness of Go Tell It on the Mountain—and there is plenty—it feels more like something Baldwin needed to get out of his system. Its freewheeling structure and experimental passages produce isolated remarkable fragments, such as a night-long conversion experience, but it's uneven. My favorite character is Gabriel's sister Florence with her lifelong seething resentment of Gabriel. I think a better novel might be the same story written from Florence's point of view by a woman. Obviously that is not the novel we have. Gabriel, for his part, is just too easy to judge and dispense with. As Florence points out, he is too often the cause of problems in the lives of others. I didn't think anyone in that family should want to have anything to do with him. That's my judgment, but the result was I got quickly tired of him and his catalog of sins. Florence is the only one who sees him clearly in this novel, and she does exactly what I would—puts him behind her, moving to the North. When he shows up there 20 years later, after he has caused a lot more grief down home, there's little she can do. Of course he causes more in the North, all of it predictable. There's a lot that's good and even great in this novel, but it's hard for me to agree it's the best thing Baldwin ever did, let alone one of the great novels of the 20th century.

In case it's not at the library.

I Am Not Your Negro (2016)

James Baldwin gets the writer's credit in this stirring must-see documentary about Baldwin, directed by Raoul Peck. The credit is probably fair enough, even though Baldwin died in 1987—the picture is based on letters Baldwin wrote to his literary agent about a book he never finished called Remember This House. The book was to be about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., all of whom Baldwin knew personally. This film uses what exists of that unfinished manuscript and those four figures—Evers, X, and King, as well as Baldwin—as a springboard into a meditation on the state of African American progress in the United States, during Baldwin's time and after. As Baldwin himself says, with an image of him standing in what appears to be the ruins of the South Bronx in the late '70s, it's not a pretty picture. Actually, that's Samuel L. Jackson doing the voiceover, and actually, it's a remarkable job of staying out of the way of Baldwin's words. He is completely believable as Baldwin himself, in all his tangling beautiful eloquence and contradictions. The state of race relations is not a pretty picture, we are reminded as the greatest hits of the past century go swimming by onscreen: lynchings, Jim Crow signs, Montgomery, Birmingham, Watts, Rodney King, Ferguson, and many recent victims, such as Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner. It's not a pretty picture and Baldwin is not at all sanguine about any immediate improvements, and this movie is here to tell us so urgently. Thirty years after his death, Baldwin looks chillingly prescient. This is a stark and compelling consideration of how far we have not come in 400 years of history in this hemisphere. It's not possible to overstate the blunt force of its images and their stories, as framed by Baldwin. Obviously, it's also a great tonic, a point of relief, from the Trump regime miasma settling in—we got through the '60s, didn't we? (didn't we?)—and because it makes the connections with clarity to so much we are seeing today, when we're willing to look. A stiff dose of reality. Trump's America is an old America, one that Baldwin knew well, perhaps better than us. Baldwin is a complicated figure, never fully at ease in his relations with, or his disaffection from, the US. But it's the kind of unease we seem to be living with on a daily basis now. He's got some helpful pointers for survival here.

"Sonny's Blues" (1957)

Read story by James Baldwin online.

James Baldwin's classic meditation is made up of equal parts brooding memoir, artful fictional devices, and, perhaps most surprising, a turn toward music criticism. Sonny is the younger brother of the first-person narrator by seven years, a jazz musician and on-and-off heroin addict. Their parents died before either was 25. They were raised in Harlem. The carefully unnamed narrator is a judgmental moralist, a high school algebra teacher embarrassed by indigenous African-American culture such as jazz. Interestingly, Sonny, who is a Charlie Parker follower, is embarrassed by the mention of Louis Armstrong, in one conversation where the narrator tries to connect with and understand him. "No. I'm not talking about none of that old-time, down home crap," Sonny retorts about Armstrong. The relationship between the two brothers is complicated as all family relationships are, with the additional burden of the African-American context. Here is where Baldwin is at his best in this story. He has concocted a voice for his narrator that balances delicately between stuffy erudition, reflexive contempt, and rage, dictating his words with an icy clinical precision. He's ashamed of Sonny's heroin addiction and legal troubles, but he made a promise to their mother the last time he saw her alive (a promise he hasn't kept very well) that he would look out and be there for Sonny when Sonny needed him. To the narrator, it's one more aggravating responsibility in a life of drudgery and frustration. Though he has a happy and good marriage, the narrator and his wife recently lost their 4-year-old daughter to polio. In the end, however, grudgingly and mostly against his will, he agrees to step into the nightclubs he detests to see Sonny perform. That performance is a revelation for the narrator and reader alike, as the music connects with the narrator in extraordinary ways. It's a wonderful voice in that moment, full of its own intelligence but with barely a vocabulary for the way the music moves and plays and develops. As he describes what the musicians are doing and the various elements of the song and arrangement, it evolves into as effective a description of real-time jazz as I've encountered anywhere. It's shorn particularly of Mezz Mezzrow hipsterism, because that is exactly the kind of thing the narrator loathes. In turn, that leads him to understand Sonny and fully see him for the first time. Really good stuff.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks