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2018年03月04日
  Take John’s mother Elizabeth. Look at the shape of her thoughts on the page, as broughtout in Baldwin’s third-person narrative:
  ‘I sure don’t care what God don’t like, or you, either,’ Elizabeth heart replied. ‘I’mgoing away from here. He’s going to come and get me, and I’m going away from here.’
  ‘He’ was her father, who never came. As the years passed she replied only: ‘I’m goingaway from here.’ And it hung, this determination, like a heavy jewel between her breasts; itwas written in fire on the dark sky of her mind. But, yes – there was something she hadoverlooked. Pride goeth before destruction; and a haughty spirit before a fall. She had notknown this: she had not imagined that she could fall master of business administration hong kong.
  When reading this novel I am always aware of the charge that sex gives to religion, a bond thenovel explores and confirms. We think of Baldwin as a figure of the 1960s, a literary embodimentof outrage in the face of American segregation, but actually, Baldwin, in his novels, writes more ofsex and sin than he does of Civil Rights. Gabriel, a preacher speaking fiery words from the pulpit,is actually a secret sinner, fallen in ways that are known to his sister Florence, and known to hiswife Elizabeth too. When younger, ‘he drank until hammers rang in his distant skull; he cursed hisfriends and his enemies, and fought until blood ran down; in the morning he found himself in mud,in clay, in strange beds, and once or twice in jail; his mouth sour, his clothes in rags, from all ofhim rising the stink of his corruption’.
  The novel tells the story of how John comes to know this. Gabriel uses the church not toraise but to conceal his true character: his hypocrisy is everywhere around him, and nowhere morethan in the minds of the women who had suffered him, and increasingly, too, in the mind of John,his ‘bastard’ son. Florence’s lover Frank was similarly corrupt, yet he, at least, in ‘the brutality of his penitence’, tried to make it up to Florence. It is John’s terrible fate – and everyone else’s – thatGabriel can neither inspire forgiveness nor redeem himself. He goes on with his lying. He inspiredfear. He is hated.
  Novels about the sins of men often turn out to be novels about the courage of women apartment central hk.
  Florence, Elizabeth, Deborah, and the tragic Esther, who is made pregnant by Gabriel and sentaway to die, are the novel’s moral retainers, keeping faith with humanity, whilst all around themFaith rides on his dark horse, cutting down hope and charity. Florence says something for all thewomen in the novel, and for James Baldwin, one suspects, contemplating the fate of the women inhis early life, when she looks at the face of Frank. ‘It sometimes came to her,’ Baldwin writes,‘that all women had been cursed from the cradle’; all, in one fashion or another, being given thesame cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.’ Florence remembers the beginning of herown cruel destiny. It began with the birth of Gabriel. After this her future was ‘swallowed up’, andhe life was over: ‘ in that house, and it was Gabriel’s – to which, sinceGabriel was a man-child, all else must be sacrificed.’
  Baldwin is unusual – and controversial, for more traditional black writers, as well as thecountercultural ones ahead of him – in making the African-American bid for freedom complicated.
  For Florence, and for her nephew John Grimes, ‘free at last’ would have to mean several things,not only free from the Old South, or free from the evils of segregation, but the freedom to enter theworld outside, and freedom from the hatreds of the family kitchen. ‘And this because Florence’sdeep ambition: to walk out one morning through the cabin door, never to return.’ But the novelknows there is a price to be paid for this too. Elizabeth, a long time away from the South, enjoyedwalking in Central Park, because ‘it recreated something of the landscape she had known apartment for rent’.
  Baldwin never got over his religious crisis at the age of fourteen. He didn’t forget. ‘Thatsummer.’ he writes in The Fire Next Time, ‘all the fears with which I had grown up, and whichwere now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between theworld and me, and drove me into the church.’ He surrendered to a spiritual seduction, falling downbefore the altar, and thereafter preaching for three years. Baldwin recalls his father one dayslapping his face, ‘and in that moment everything flooded back – all the hatred and all the fear, andthe depth of a merciless resolve to kill my father rather than allow my father to kill me – and Iknew that all those sermons and tears and all that repentance and rejoicing had changed nothing’.
  Baldwin put the essence of all of this into Go Tell it on the Mountain. Gabriel has thepreacher’s traditional love of helplessness, and traditional anger in the face of self-sufficiency. Yetthe central issues of Gabriel’s life are his hypocrisy, and the sexual desire that accompanies therejoicing of religious life. His treatment of Esther combines the two (‘I guess it takes a holy man tomake a girl a real whore,’ she say) but only Florence seems aware of the truth after Ester is dead.
  At the close of the novel she seeks to name the tree by its fruit. And John, who is not strange fruitof that tree, might live to curse all lies and go free into the world.
  Baldwin, all his writing, insisted he wrote only from experience. That was the kind ofwriter he was: he meant every word. There would always be something of the pulpit on Baldwin’swriting, and something too of the threshing floor. Go Tell It on the Mountain is a beautiful,enduring, spiritual song of a novel, a gush of life from a haunted American church. Like manywriters with a religious past, the young man who wrote this novel was stranded in the space between his own body and the body of Christ, and strung between the father he hated and theFather who might offer him salvation. John Grimes finds the beginning of his redemption in thevery place where his father lived out his hypocrisy, the church, where Gabriel spawned so much ofthe trouble in their lives. Here, at last, after all is said and done, John Grimes can go in search ofthe Everlasting, ‘over his father’s head to Heaven – to the Father who loved him’.
  Andrew O’HaganAndrew O’Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968. He is the author of The Missing, a bookabout missing persons, and Our Fathers, a novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a WhitbreadAward, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award. He isa contributing editor to the London Review of Books.
  For My Father and Mother They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength;they shall mount up with wings like eagles;they shall turn and not be weary,they shall walk and not faint.
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