In "Go Tell It on the Mountain", author James Baldwin describes the course of the fourteenth birthday of John Grimes in Harlem, 1935. Baldwin also uses extended flashback episodes to recount the lives of John's parents and aunt and to link this urban boy in the North to his slave grandmother in an earlier South. The first section follows John's thoughts, the second mostly his aunt's, the third his father's, the fourth his mother's, and the fifth again mostly John's. In "Go Tell It on the Mountain", author James Baldwin describes the course of the fourteenth birthday of John Grimes in Harlem, 1935.
Baldwin also uses extended flashback episodes to recount the lives of John's parents and aunt and to link this urban boy in the North to his slave grandmother in an earlier South. The first section follows John's thoughts, the second mostly his aunt's, the third his father's, the fourth his mother's, and the fifth again mostly John's.
Mural - Elisha
The title page to the 1611 first edition of the Au...
The translators of the King James Version of the H...The title "Go Tell It on the Mountain" comes from a Negro spiritual. The novel is steeped in the language of the King James Bible, and the Bible is a constant presence in the characters' lives; thus, if the reader has a familiarity with Biblical stories then their understanding of the text is more enhanced. The biblical allusions even surfaces with the names of the characters. The names John, Gabriel, Elizabeth, Roy, and Elisha all are some form of biblical allusion. John, Elisha, Elizabeth, and Gabriel are all names of profound people in the Living Word. The name Roy has its own significance to the Holy Bible, a significance which has to do will hope and a great ministry.
John turns 14 on the morning the story begins. Both attracted and repulsed by the church, his father, and everything his...