鮑爾溫小說《山巔宏音》中的黑人教會與黑人社群

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(1)⊕ 國立中山大學外國語文學系碩士論文. 鮑爾溫小說《山巔宏音》中的黑人教會與黑人社群 Black Church and Black Community in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. 研究生：李春滿撰指導教授：張錦忠博士. 中華民國九十八年八月.

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(3) Acknowledgements Someone has told me that nobody reads Acknowledgements. As a perverted reader, I seldom skip Acknowledgements of a book. I often enjoy reading Acknowledgements, for I like to contemplate what kinds of people they are who have helped a writer go through some lonely or painful moments and eventually accomplish a task. Though this thesis may or may not be an accomplished task, I appreciate those who stood by me to see me make it to the finish line. It would have not been possible to complete this thesis without the support of the people around me. Let me begin with my advisor, Professor Tee Kim Tong, who let me know the importance of discipline and independence, whose tough questions and kind suggestions always pushed me to go further beyond the scope I had perceived. His sometimes amusing sense of humor and sometimes “oddly” intellectual satire enabled me to laugh at my own excessive nervousness and unneeded anxiety. Next, my sincere thanks go to an attractive and charismatic scholar, Professor Hsinya Huang. I want to thank her for her insightful suggestions and in-depth feedback. Her compliments on my work will surely feed my self-esteem for a while. Then, I want to express my gratitude to Professor Shuli Chang. She was the major reason that I stayed and continued my study. She brought me out of the valley and showed (and still shows) me that there was always hope up the hill. I admire (sometimes my heart aches for her) the way she cares about her students and the love she continually gives to her colleagues and pupils. She is, and will always be, my role model in my life. Several good friends have helped me walk through the valley of my life. First, I want to thank Edward J. Bolden, a long lost friend, whose insider’s reminders extended many areas of my research (though I still cannot make him read James Baldwin). My old friend, Patrick Song, accidentally (unluckily) became my computer consultant and music research assistant. Without his generosity and first-aid assistance, this thesis would not look as beautiful as it does. My heartfelt thanks are also due to my close friends, Melody (Li-Ling) Wei and Su.

(4) (Su-Hsiang) Chung. Melody explicitly told me how petrified she was and worried about my brave and stupid decision of quitting a perfect job for study, while Su implicitly made me understand that the road I decided to take was rough. Nevertheless, both were there to share my enthusiasm or disappointment and pampered me with big dinners (for they were afraid that I might, like the decision I had made, become masochistic). My life long friend, Li Hsieh, acted as my gratuitous book supplier in the U.S.A. She called me from time to time to see whether I needed new books and, in return, was forced to listen to my complaints. Finally, this is for you, mom, you have proven to me that there is Angel in this world..

(5) 論文名稱：鮑爾溫小說《山巔宏音》中的黑人教會與黑人社群校所組別：國立中山大學外國語文學系研究所畢業年度及提要別：九十八學年度第二學期碩士論文提要研究生：李春滿指導教授：張錦忠博士. 論文提要：本論文嘗試探討詹姆士.鮑爾溫第一本小說《山巔宏音》中的黑人教會及黑人社群，特別是試圖了解為何宗教(基督教)對非裔美人產生沉重的陰影。筆者主張鮑爾溫一方面藉由引述聖經典故、章節及教會歌曲生動地描述了一個活生生的虔誠黑人社群，另一方面，他卻藉由如藍調般充滿憂傷又詼諧的敘述口吻沉靜地控訴一個靈魂空洞的黑人教會。第一章以《山巔宏音》為主要文本，而與其自傳性短文《下回是火》比較閱讀，探討鮑德溫與神永不休止的爭戰。第二章說明黑人教會之興起與發展，試圖解釋黑人社群為何及如何接納當初默不關心的白人上帝成為他們的上帝。第三章，就哈林位於資本主義大城市“紐約”內的地理位置，探討哈林黑人社區縮影的重要性(以及無力感)。第四章討論黑人教會的表演藝術，和黑人教會之外的世俗音樂。鮑德溫聰明地借上帝的矛和盾--聖經語言和黑人音樂--作為他的書寫工具。最後，筆者斷定《山巔宏音》為鮑德溫作為一個世俗世界的寓言，因為在《山巔宏音》中，他已經像唱藍調福音般地對世界講述一則寓言。.

(6) Abstract. This thesis aims to investigate the black church and black community in James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Particularly, it probes how and why the religion, namely Christianity, casts a loaded shadow for African Americans. I argue that Baldwin, on the one hand, vigorously illustrates a bodily pious black community by bombarding us with heaps of biblical texts and church songs; on the other hand, he serenely indicts a spiritually hollow black church by narrating a blues-like comically sad tone. I discuss Baldwin’s relentless wrestle with God in Chapter One. I suggest reading Go Tell It on the Mountain together with Baldwin’s essay, The Fire Next Time, to flesh out the weighty issue of religion in the text. Since black community and black church generally symbolizes each other in the early history of Africa American lives, I make a detour to explore the emergence and development of the Black Church in Chapter Two. It is also an attempt to explain how the white God in the U.S.A. becomes black and how and why black community eventually accepts the then indifferent God to be their own. In Chapter Three, I look into the importance (and impotence) of the epitome of black community—Harlem—in terms of its geographical location, position, and structure within the capitalist metropolis, New York. This chapter travels with John Grimes, the protagonist, to see the white man’s world and to investigate the impossibility and oxymoron of “black flâneur.” Then I discuss in Chapter Four the performing arts of the Black Church, as well as the secular music outside of the Black Church. Baldwin intelligently borrows God’s spear and shield—the language in the Bible and the music played inside (and later outside) the Black Church—as his writing tool to tell a gospel-like parable. At last, I would conclude that GTIM serves as a parable of the secular world for Baldwin has sung a blues gospel to the world.. Keywords: black church, black community, Harlem, racism, landscape, black music..

(7) Table of Contents. Introduction. 1. Chapter One Baldwin’s Wrestle with God: Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time. 17. Chapter Two “I am the LORD Your God”: The Crippled Almighty God and Black Church. 40. Chapter Three The Black Boy Looks at the White Man’s City: A “Black Flâneur” from the Valley. 59. Chapter Four God’s Spear and Shield: Language and Music in Go Tell It on the Mountain. 84. Conclusion. 109. Works Cited. 113. Appendices. 123.

(8) Lee 1. Introduction. “Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak: O LORD, heal me; for my bones are vexed.” --Psalms 8:21. “The essential religion of Black people comes out of something which is not Europe. When Black people talk about true religion, they’re ‘speaking in tongues’ practically. It would not be understood in Rome.” James Baldwin Standley and Pratt, eds. 182.. When Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s very loud “God Damn America” sermon was released and disseminated all over the States (and the world) during the 2008 U.S. Presidential Campaign, the outdated issue of religion, like hibernated snakes, started crawling out of the caves of Americans’ minds. While some modern and liberal Americans have long proclaimed the unimportance of religion, suddenly religion comes back to haunt everyone and everyone is anxious to search for an interpretation of the significance of that religion Rev. Wright represents. The phenomenon suggests that it is not only a religious matter but a political, social, and cultural one: Barack Obama has to be a “white” Christian because he is a politician. Or to put it short, religion mattered and still matters in the U.S.A. It not only matters but also complicates American culture and society.2 1. 2. The biblical passages and texts cited in this thesis are from The Holy Bible: King James Version.. Viewing from the fact that this sermon was delivered on April, 13 2003, the imminent popularity of Jeremiah Wright’s radical sermons can be seen as political strategies and manipulation. Rev. Wright’s sermons were from then categorized (sadly) as hate speech and he is (over-simply) accused of being a racist and an Anti-American advocate. The part of this famed hate speech being repetitively played is “No, no, no, not God bless America. God damned America. That’s in the Bible […] for killing innocent people. God damned America for treating our citizens […] less than human. God damn America!” Wright’s speeches stir.

(9) Lee 2. James Baldwin’s first novel, the (semi)autobiographical Go Tell It On the Mountain (hereafter GTIM), published in 1953, may be seen as his response to his own struggle with Christianity, namely the Black Church and “his” community. Among his other such as gay novels and various essays and short stories, this novel is a very important work to Baldwin because, in his words, he could not write the other novels unless he had finished this one as he had to reconcile the relationship with his father before he could reconcile to himself and to the world (Standley and Pratt, eds. 204). In addition, GTIM is Baldwin’s only work that openly deals with the anxiety and doubt of religion and black community, i.e., Harlem the ghetto. His other subsequent acclaimed or controversial works such as Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, and Just Above My Head concern people’s desire for (forbidden) love like homosexuality or fear of homophobia. None of his other literary texts has vehemently described the impact (good or bad) of religion on characters or put God as the central pole of a work except GTIM. For such reason, the work was once largely labeled a religious novel. In The Fire Next Time (hereafter Fire), published in 1963, another significant autobiographical and political essay to be read as part of GTIM’s annotation, Baldwin describes how he met Mother Horn when he was in a “prolonged religious crisis” (Fire 5) at the age of fourteen. When he saw the “proud, handsome” woman, she asked him ‘”whose little boy are you?”’ without any hesitation, he answered from the bottom of his heart, ‘”why, yours”’ (Fire 27, 28). The fourteen-year-old black boy instantaneously and irresistibly yearned for protection and inclusion in Mother Horn’s church. Instead of roaming in the street with other headless and poor black boys, Baldwin ran into church for shelter to save him from falling. In other words, it was Mother Horn who picked him up from the street anti-American sentiment and disturb anti- anti-American sentiment, as well as being used as propaganda game. Yet, to understand better about Wright’s position, one has to take the context into consideration, for Wright was preaching Jesus’ way and condemning the historical atrocities European imperialist and colonialist countries had done or failed to respond in Jesus’ teaching. A full sermon can be retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV-oI__bHA4&NR=1..

(10) Lee 3. and relocated him in church. Baldwin recalls how he was “on the floor,” experiencing the sensation in Mother Horn’s church. While he was on the floor, he saw “vertical saints,” and it seemed that “Heaven wouldn’t hear me” and the God he saw was white (Fire 29-30). Baldwin calls this sensational experience a “spiritual seduction” (Fire 28). Later, Baldwin pondered the sensational experience and wondered and still could not understand why “human relief had to be achieved in a fashion at once so pagan and so desperate […] so unspeakably old and so unutterably new” (Fire 30). He felt that he was saved on the one hand; he knew immediately that he could not remain in the church “merely as another worshipper” on the other hand (Fire 31). Consequently, he became a young preacher to better his father. Yet in no time he also sensed the hatred, fear, dishonesty, and hypocrisy in the church, and compared the role of the preacher to “pimps and racketeers” in Harlem street (Fire 37). He suggests that three principles—Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror—govern the church. Above all, blindness is “necessarily and actively cultivated” to refute the other two (Fire 31). His sheer observation and genuine introspection luminously contrasts the pretense and ineptitude the church practices. Soon he was ready to get out of the “seduction” (merely literary, I would argue) and walk into a real world. Without doubt, a reader can obtain diverse interpretations of GTIM from different angles. On the one hand, unlike his other novels in which bi-racial relationships or racial conflicts and social injustice are the themes the protagonists confront and attempt to overcome, GTIM basically deals with conflicts and struggles of a group of people within a black community. Hence, it is generally not viewed as a novel about race or racism. On the other hand, GTIM brilliantly depicts a black church within a unique black community that the church can be evidently used as an epitome of any black community in a White America. Thus, the understated part, i.e., the materialistically wealthy world adjacent to the financially-stricken Harlem, becomes a shadow ineradicably attached to its body. People.

(11) Lee 4. who live and shop on the Fifth Avenue or read in the New York Public Library on the 42nd Street are recognizable, or rather unrecognizable, shadows to people who live in Harlem ghetto. The white shadow is abstractly and substantially there. It is something existing in perception only, but it theoretically and practically occupies a place. It is a premonition of something adverse, and thus, it casts a larger space than its substance. It is an indication that something has been present, thereby, it is not absent or empty; and it is a dominating and pervasive presence and an inseparable companion.3 In a nutshell, if GTIM is not a novel about race or racism, it certainly tells a story resulted from systematic and institutionalized racialization, and, thus, the racialization entails a racialized landscape naturally segregated and excluded a race. If Baldwin tells a story exclusively about “black community” in GTIM, it is a story about blacks in a white society and a black problem within a white society. Hence, it is a story about the relationship between whites and blacks, a mutual problem for whites and blacks.. The Young Baldwin’s Religious Crisis Since Baldwin declares that one of his impulses to write GTIM is to “exorcise something,” to find out “what happened […] to the family, the community” (Standley and Pratt, eds. 240) and “[their] relationship toward [their] own blackness” (Standley and Pratt, eds. 143), it is important to take a glance on the young Baldwin’s life and his relationships with his family, particularly his parents and the community. Baldwin, normally introduced as a gay writer, is a prolific writer whose works include eight novels, two plays, and more than fifty well-known essays.. 3. Born on August 2, 1924, Baldwin was the oldest brother of. This is a perspective I borrow from Toni Morrison’s theory of Africanist presence in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, published in 1992. The book is divided into three sections— (i) black matters, (ii) romancing the shadow, and (iii) disturbing nurses and the kindness of sharks. Morrison’s view of the absence (that is, the presence) of African Americans from the American canonic works is in fact an “Africanist presence.”.

(12) Lee 5. the eight children of David Baldwin and Emma Berdis Jones. Both of James’s parents were southerners who, like many southern blacks traveling “North full of hope for a better life,” (Leeming 9) came to New York in the early 1920s. Emma Jones gave birth to James in 1924 out of wedlock, and married David Baldwin in 1927 who was “a respectable clergyman who seemed genuinely willing to accept her son as his son” (Leeming 9). Born and raised in the poor ghetto, the young Baldwin suffered the economic hardship and bore “the scars of poverty” (Leeming 12).4 When Baldwin was probably five or six years old, he started helping his mother to bathe the younger siblings and bed them down for the night, and took them to church for the Saturday-night prayer service and for Sunday School when he was old enough. He began school at the age of five and was a frail but brilliant child to his teachers. By the time he entered high school, his writing talent had won him several prizes and the church elders were already noticing “this precocious child of the ghetto” (Leeming 13). This made Mrs. Baldwin delighted, but Mr. Baldwin wanted his son to be “a preacher of the gospel” (Leeming 13), while the young Baldwin had already demonstrated his writing skills and passion in literature. Thus, conflicts ensued. David Baldwin belongs to “the first generation of free men” (Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985 [hereafter The Price ] 128) who came along with thousands of Negroes to the North to seek a better life.5 To the young Baldwin, his father was very handsome and like “one of African tribal chieftains” who “really should have been naked, with warpaint on and barbaric mementos, standing among spears,” yet he was certainly “the most bitter man” the young Baldwin had ever met (Baldwin, The Price 128). His father is “righteous in the pulpit” and “a monster in the house,” who might save “all 4. According to Leeming, “in 1929, the year of great financial crash…a doctor at Harlem Hospital had said [James Baldwin] would not live beyond the age of five.” Baldwin was five and did not die, but bore “the scars of poverty and perhaps malnutrition.” Furthermore, “[t]he smallness and the shyness made him a natural victim of his peers” (Leeming 12, 13). 5. This is one of Baldwin’s well-known and very provocative essays, “Notes of a Native Son,” dealing with the author’s trouble of black identity and the injustice and racism in America. It is collected in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985. 127-145..

(13) Lee 6. kinds of souls” but “lost all his children, every single one of them” (Standley and Pratt, eds. 78). Baldwin in another interview also notes that he has to write GTIM (in a sense) to “redeem” his father, for he wanted to understand his father’s “rigidity,” and “the forces” and “experience” that shaped his father (Standley and Pratt, eds. 161). Baldwin speculated that his father’s bitterness must have “something to do with his blackness” (Baldwin, The Price 128). Though his father claimed to be proud of his blackness, Baldwin assumed that the blackness had created much humiliation and “it had fixed bleak boundaries to his life” (Baldwin, The Price 129). It was a pity, Baldwin thought, that his father “knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful” (Baldwin, The Price 128-129). Harlem in the twenties and thirties was “still multiracial” and “in many ways a southern community” that people lived “in poverty rather than hopeless isolation” (Leeming 11).6 Unlike his father who taught him to hate and distrust the whites, James Baldwin had already established equal and benign friendly relationship with his white classmates and teachers in school. This made young Baldwin doubt his father’s accusation on whites.7 He was very conscious of not falling into the vicious hate-circle as his father did, for he was frightened to see his father had lived and died “in an intolerable bitterness of spirit” (Baldwin, The Price 129). Besides, Baldwin saw the contradictions of how his father preached for love in church (if there was love in church, it still seemed that love cannot penetrate the door of the church, and it stops right there at the doorway) and practiced at home in hatred and bitterness. Furthermore, Baldwin also observed that hypocrisy and dishonesty were acted out in church and experienced how his family “suffered the presence 6. According to Leeming, the multiracial Harlem does not mean “racial conflict” free. Young Baldwin fought “frequently with an Italian neighbor […] but he also remembered sharing meals with him” (Leeming 11). 7. Baldwin recounts the incident when his high school friend—a Jew—came to his father’s house. Baldwin reflects the incident: “[h]e came to our house once, and afterward my father asked, as he asked about everyone, ‘Is he a Christian?’—by which he meant ‘Is he saved?’ I really do not know whether my answer came out of innocence or venom, but I said coldly, ‘No. He’s Jewish.’ My father slammed me across the face with his great palm, and in that moment everything flooded back—all the hatred and all the fear, and the depth of a merciless resolve to kill my father rather than allow my father to kill me—and I knew that all those sermons and tears and all that repentance and rejoicing had changed nothing” (Fire 36)..

(14) Lee 7. of a black parody of the white Great God Almighty” (Leeming 6). He witnessed the absurd white hatred his father carried on his shoulders that eventually crashed him and led him to his madness. Baldwin scrutinized that his father acted out as the victim of the whites (including the White God). In other words, the adolescent James had to confront with two fathers in his teen life: his bitter father who lived in “black parody” and the Almighty God who ultimately was a white figure. It was apparent that Baldwin did not want to be either one: he had to find his way not to be trapped, tripped; so he fought hard not to be seduced or blinded by the dominating and oppressive forces—though the forces are from his own community. Gradually and unsurprisingly, Mother Horn’s spiritual seduction came to an end, albeit the excitement of black church was still there to woo Baldwin. Then, Baldwin returned to embrace literature again. He remembered when he and his father had once “really spoken” (Baldwin, The Price 142). It was on the way to or from church, unexpectedly his father asked him whether he really wanted to be a writer rather than a preacher. Baldwin simply answered “yes” (Baldwin, The Price 142-3). This “yes” is a “no” to his father’s way: it was time for him to leave church. And much later he was to (physically and in a sense psychologically) leave Harlem in order to see the church and Harlem in a clearer and more truthful way. Loaded with vivid biblical imagery, prophetic passages, powerful sermons, and spiritual songs, GTIM secures Baldwin’s position as a great novelist. The novel is divided into three parts: “The Seventh Day,” “The Prayers of the Saints,” and “The Threshing-Floor.” “The Seventh Day” is John’s transitory escapade from the economically humble Harlem to the adjoining materialistically rich New York, a white man’s world. Before entering the city, he goes to his favorite hill in Central Park, where the sensation that he can smash the world and conquer all takes over the black boy. He delivers his own sermon to the world and pronounces his alliance with God. He feels like “a giant,” “a.

(15) Lee 8. tyrant,” “a long-awaited conqueror” and will definitely be “the mightiest, the most beloved, the Lord’s anointed” (33). The second part, “The Prayers of the Saints,” contains (I would argue) three saints’ confessions rather than prayers. Through their semi-confessional memories, we are taken back to the South where these saints have failed, fallen or lost in the past. We also hear their inner voices which include bitterness, resentment, hatred, revengeful anguish, and their deep wounds and fear. This part consists of Gabriel’s fervent sermons, church songs, heated scenes of church worshippers, and, of course, biblical allusions and metaphors. The final part of the book, “The Threshing-Floor,” illustrates John’s sensational experience of being on “the threshing floor.” It just happens, abruptly and out of blue. While on the floor, John sees various images associated with Armageddon illustrated in the Book of Revelation and catastrophic and ruined scenes in the Old Testament. Afterwards, he is commented by the church saints that he is finally saved. The time span in the novel is less than twenty-four hours: the story begins on John’s fourteenth birthday, a Saturday morning of March in 1935 in Harlem, and ends in the early morning of the next day when the sun comes in full awake.. Literature Review Critics generally offered their positive comments on GTIM and praised it highly when it was first released in 1953. They were surprised at and amazed with the young writer’s debut and congratulated to Baldwin for having effectively and truthfully depicted a vivid and spiritual black congregation. Indeed, GTIM has the sound, rhythm, and beat of black music—both the secular and sacred. Baldwin illustrates vehement and lively scenes of a black church through the unique and chanting blues-like chants and tone. Critics largely focus on the beauty and power of language Baldwin uses in the novel. Full of powerful sermons, prophetic and apocalyptic passages, moaning and shouting songs, Eleanor Traylor simply and precisely calls GTIM “a gospel” (128) for it is loaded with powerful sermons.

(16) Lee 9. and vibrant songs.8 Horace Porter praises that GTIM contains a high level of “narrative ingenuity” and “rhetorical power” (Stealing 160) while Houston Baker remarks that Baldwin is “like the streetcorner evangelist,” who shows up everywhere, “weaving a sinuous rhetoric”, and urges “us to repent because it was later than we thought” (“The Embattled” 63). Richard Barksdale suggests that GTIM is “essentially a religious novel” in which the author analyzes “the spiritual dilemma of certain people who happen […] to be Negroes” (145). He further comments that “there is no mockery in [Baldwin’s] description of almost Dionysian revelry of the ‘Saints’ . . . –no mockery of their songs and of their wordless religious ecstasy in their storefront church, no mockery of the emotional gyration before the altar of deliverance” (145-46). Further, in “Go Tell It on the Mountain: Religion as the Indirect Method of Indictment”) Fred Standley suggests that GTIM “is not primarily a religious novel” but “a work embodying a major cultural concept of which religion is only one important dimension” (190). Otherwise stated, the entrée point for interpreting this novel is “a cultural concept rather a religious concept” (Standley, “Go Tell It” 191). Thus, Standley attests that “this is not a novel about religion per se; rather it is a sociopolitical novel that subtly but savagely indicts a white controlled society that has radically delimited the lives of hopes of blacks by the pernicious doctrine and damnable practice of black inferiority” (“Go Tell It” 191).. Consequently, this in turn causes the characters’ negative. emotions such as “fear, isolation, alienation, hatred, despair, and destruction” (Standley, “Go Tell It” 191). However, not until Fire was published in 1963, ten years after the publication of GTIM, did critics start seeing GTIM as “an indictment of Christianity” or “an ironic commentary” (Field, “Pentecostalism and All That Jazz” 9).9 From then on, critics tend to read GTIM in 8. Traylor suggests this in her response to Robert B. Stepto’s “The First-Person in Afro-American Fiction,” Afro-American Literature Study in the 1990s. Baker and Redond, eds. 128-134. 9. Douglas Field presents this argument by citing Rolf Lunden’s article, “The Progress of a Pilgrim: James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain,” first appeared in Studia Neophilogica 53(1981): 113-26..

(17) Lee 10. more variously complicated and complex ways. Clarence Hardy III asserts that Baldwin dramatizes the tension between an “increasingly ephemeral rural past” of an old generation and “a new sensual urban reality” filled with countless opportunities that seduce someone, like John Grimes, to seek very present pleasures (14). The title of the book per se, suggests Hardy, implies that Baldwin sees a hope and a crisis at the heart of black holiness culture (14). For Baldwin, hints Hardy, to deal with the crisis is to deal with black sexuality; even the religious ecstasy of conversion rituals reveals “the very flesh and blood of black life,” a sexual desire the church both “fears and depends upon” (15-16). Baldwin depicts a close kinship between “religious pursuits and sexual play” throughout the novel, argues Hardy (22). Trudier Harris otherwise points out that black church is an “oppressive church” which can “effectively kill women” like Elizabeth in GTIM and lead to many “intrafamilial problems” (Introduction 20, 21). Michael Lynch also echoes Harris’s viewpoint and suggests that GTIM is “an either-or” (30) story that illustrates a war between “spiritual vision” and “political reality” (“A Glimpse” 31). Keith Clark hails GTIM as “a new departure” from “a tradition of black masculinist writers” (128, 127). He regards GTIM as a novel that represents a “de-formed and de-centered subject: one who exists on the margins of not only white society, but of his native community” (131). He also suggests that Baldwin provokes the “paradox of communitas” (133) within and without black church and makes it clear that in black community “a white patriarchal ideology” (141) adopted from “white patriarchal, popular culture” (137) is unconsciously and wrongly practiced. Furthermore, the more recent critics probe into subtler or understated issues in GTIM, such as political morality, homosexuality, and cultural inventions. Brian Norman, William Spurlin, and Babacar M’Baye concern GTIM’s relationship with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, nationalism and “accused betrayal” resulted from the Cold War, and the cross-cultural and transnational significance associated with Africa. Generally speaking, they suggest that Baldwin’s depiction of the Black Church and the injustice the characters.

(18) Lee 11. are embarrassedly forced to face in GTIM serve as catalyst for political agendas in the 60s.10 Csaba Csapó, Margo Natalie Crawford, and Carol Henderson further investigate gender and homosexuality issues in GTIM. They look into the tensions between Christianity and race, Christianity and gender, and Christianity and sexuality. Jermaine Singleton inspects the social criticism in the novel, asserting that racism and sexism collide within the African American Pentecostal community and religious dogma is built to maintain African American’s gender order (116-117).11 Further, Sherry Truffin reads GTIM as a gothic novel, in which “the tyranny of the past” (e.g., a family curse) is invoked. She argues that GTIM deals with the similar themes a gothic story does: “history, identity, gender, and power” (135).. The God’s Child is to Preach After a short-lived preaching career, Baldwin renounced Christianity and “never” went back to church. When Elijah Muhammad asked Baldwin who he was, he could not give Muhammad the answer he had given to Mother Horn years ago that he was ‘God’s child.’ Instead, he told Muhammad he was merely a writer (Fire 70). Nevertheless, whether he can divorce himself from the Black Church is another story. Like Richard Wright and his contemporaries, Baldwin was, one way or the other, was invented as the spokesman for his race. Having been burned by “the scar of poverty,” Baldwin is doomed to carry the Black Church and Harlem on his shoulders, despite his renouncement of Christianity and exile from the Black Church. He nonetheless is still deeply influenced by the elements of the Black Church. The performing arts, for example, are ineradicable from his works. His later 10. I have adopted Dale P. Andrews’s distinction between “Black Church” and “black church.” Following his suggestion, I use “Black Church” to refer to “the institutional presence of black churches in the black community or American society”. Otherwise, the lower case of “black church” or “black churches” is to “include the various traditions in African American Christianity” (Andrews 8n31). 11. “Negro,” “black” (or “Black”) and “Afro-American” were the terms loosely used during different periods of time in the U.S.A. When citing passages, I keep the original term(s) used by the writers or critics; but I use “African American” in the thesis when I elucidate or paraphrase ideas or express my own thoughts..

(19) Lee 12. works still betray the tone of a black preacher, the beat of the black music, and the biblical language which all come from the roots of the Black Church. The destiny of the once God’s child is to preach, only in a different form. This thesis aims to investigate the Black Church and black community in GTIM from historical and cultural perspectives. It explains the African American’s concept of God, the formation of the Black Church, and how the practice and prophetic and/or messianic language of the Black Church have affected and influenced their life and culture. Particularly, I probe on how and why the religion, namely Christianity, casts a loaded shadow for African Americans and whether the shadow is a force of negativity that drags African Americans as a people down or an urgent power that pulls and gathers them together. Further, I discuss how the racialized landscape, Harlem, is formed as a ghetto to humiliate a race through institutionalized racism and injustice. Baldwin successfully uses Harlem as a setting, as well as a phenomenon, to make clear the racial problem in the U.S.—a ghettoized geography is segregated, encircled, and excluded by one of the richest cities in the world, thereby nullifying flânerie for a black boy. Last, one of the main motives in this thesis is to explore the beauty of language in GTIM, particularly its intimate and inseparable relationship with the peculiarity and specialness of the Black Church music and language.. Thesis Structure The issues discussed in the following chapters either trigger one to another or have impacts and/or interlocking and intertwined relationships among them. Chapter One discusses Baldwin’s wrestle with God. In this chapter, I use GTIM as the primary text to explore the concept of God therein to see how the characters’ relentless denial of and, rather ironically, their irresistible fascination with and fear of the Black Church. Then, in the second half of this chapter, I propose to read GTIM in conjunction with his autobiographical essay, Fire, to flesh out not only his continuous dialogue with God but also his increasingly.

(20) Lee 13. cynical depiction of the Black Church as immobilizing, bureaucratic, and alienating from the needs of African Americans. It is my contention that, whether religion is still important nowadays, to Baldwin, it is a sacred issue that he has to deal with before he can deal with other secular ones. Next, I take a detour in Chapter Two to trace the genealogy of the Black Church, which covers a period of time before, during, and after slavery. Chapter Two traces the origin, emergence, and development of the Black Church and examines its influence on African American community, culture, and literature. Since the emergence of the Black Church was resulted from racism, I use the term “the crippled God” to illuminate and ridicule the white men’s stupidity and atrocity. Though God becomes crippled, the Black Church has played a prominently leading role for the black slaves. It not only serves as an asylum and escapade site for the slaves, but also functions as a mechanism to preserve and maintain their rootless culture. Yet, it gradually loses its positive power or acts negatively in the black community. Instead of providing power to heal wounds as it used to do, it now excises the power to suppress and constrain the black community. This chapter concludes that though the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, a crippled God kidnapped by both white and black communities has not been released and His people are yet to be emancipated. Chapter Three looks into the (in)significance and peculiarity of Harlem—the epitome of black community—in terms of its geographical location, position and structure within the capitalist and consumerist metropolis, New York. I would argue that being situated in the richest city in the U.S.A., and being the poorest black ghetto, Harlem means humiliation and insult to African Americans, especially to the Southerners who have just immigrated from the North. The first half of this chapter focuses on the route of John’s half-day escapade journey. Through John’s walk route and mind map, I compare his city stroll with Benjaminian’s flâneur and argue the “black flâneur” is preoccupied with and overwhelmed by racial difference rather than class. Through the gaze of the “black flâneur,” Benjamin’s.

(21) Lee 14. theory is challenged and questioned. Baldwin turns over Benjamin’s discourse and makes it clear that a de-classed and racialized prefixed adjective “black” invalidates the acting out of flânerie. Further, in the second half of the chapter, I discuss whether Harlem is a shelter for the weary Christian southerners or a fire burning dungeon that the sinners find it impossible to be free from the torment. A desire for redemption and salvation and a yearning to get out of poverty (John’s American Dream, according to my scrutiny, is quite white, if not whitenized) is an everlasting battle for the fourteen-year-old John. Apart from John’s ache, the other characters in GTIM either lose their energy to imagine that possibility (as John imagines) of walking out of the community, or are defeated and hurt badly by the outside world (that is, “white world”) and choose, or are chosen, to cluster. This chapter comes to a conclusion that the Harlem depicted by Baldwin in GTIM is not only an epitome of black communities but also a product resulted from racism, which in a way creates a racialized landscape. Chapter Four surveys the steadfast impact of the Black Church Baldwin strives to shake off and is pathetically possessed. The Black Church elements—sermons, spirituals, souls, gospel songs, chanting, blues, preaches and rituals—influence Baldwin’s writing and style. These beautiful and eloquent performing arts not only appear in GTIM but also in his several well-known autobiographical (and/or social and political) essays and subsequent non-religious novels. Though Baldwin’s incessant battle of shifts between two worlds—the Christian kingdom and the mundane world—is known and evident in his works, one can not deny that the Black Church powers have great impact on his writing. This chapter sorts out two main chunks: black songs and the Bible verses. Baldwin himself more than once declares that he would not have written GTIM if there were no Bessie Smith’s music (especially her “Downhearted Blues” or “Backwater Blues”), whose “tone” and “cadence” helped him to “dig back to the way” he was “a pickaninny” and to remember the things he had buried very deep (Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name 5). The reader in contrast hears.

(22) Lee 15. more gospel songs and hymns than secular and blasphemous jazz or blues in GTIM. This is further evidence of Baldwin’s musical language: though he quits church music and turns to secular music, the Black Church music is still the rock of his life while jazz and blues are his muse of creation. Furthermore, the biblical verses and images Baldwin uses in the novel serve mostly as parodies and ironies rather than for sacred inspiration or spiritual purposes. Baldwin demonstrates his talent and genius in using the language and music of the Black Church as his effective and powerful writing tool. My conclusion is that writing GTIM is an act of Baldwin’s redemption and another form of “protest novel”—only through a sheer honest writing can he alleviate the weight (even only some scraps) on his shoulders and travels further and farther. Baldwin has never stopped questioning the meaning or meaninglessness of the Black Church in the racially bigoted America through his autobiographical essays and subsequent novels. Yet, he is also helplessly and obsessively drawn to its beauty, excitement and sensation. When asked the “formative influences” throughout his life or things “that are still much with [him]” in some interviews in 1970 and 1980 respectively, Baldwin named his father, the Church, the music, and his family. They were, and still are, crucial, essential, in his life and writing.12 All in all, though being a noted denouncer of Christianity, Baldwin still writes to preach love and justice that Christianity preaches but hardly practices. Through Baldwin's depiction of the Black Church and community in GTIM, we are given a chance to feel some peculiar and particular aspects of African American culture. Through John’s conversion, we are, like John, to tremble, to inquire, to be touched by the spirit though we may not fully penetrate the mystical purpose. To supplement Traylor’s view that GTIM is a gospel, I would add that it is a blues-like gospel rather than a blissful and heart-lighted one. I attest that it is a remixed kind its the tone to glorify God has been. 12. The two interviews are “James Baldwin Interviewed: John Hall/1970” (98-107) and “James Baldwin, an Interview: Wolfgang Binder/1980” (190-209). See Standley and Pratt, eds..

(23) Lee 16. modulated to a mocking and ironic tune and the biblical verses are not to teach morality or enlighten our knowledge but to complicate the meanings from their origin and authority. Like an eloquent black preacher and a sassy blues singer, Baldwin seduces us spiritually and intellectually. Ultimately, he has sung a beautiful blues to the world via delivering his sermon—a political, social, and cultural parable..

(24) Lee 17. Chapter One Baldwin’s Wrestle with God: Go Tell It On the Mountain and The Fire Next Time. “O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!” Habakkuk 1:2. “All that brotherly love was bullshit. All those missionaries were murderers. That old cross was bloodied with my blood.” --James Baldwin Standley and Pratt, eds. 91.. John Grimes, a fourteen-year-old black boy and the protagonist in Go Tell It on the Mountain, doubts what kind of life God will lead him to. More specifically, he suspects the existence of God his Harlem community (especially his father) believes. After a half-day city journey on the afternoon of his birthday, John goes back to Harlem and is saved in the church. The final part of GTIM, “The Threshing-Floor,” illustrates John’s sensational experience of being on the threshing floor. It just happens, abruptly and out of blue. John is like a “rock, a dead man’s boy, a dying bird, fallen from an awful height,” and he is “invaded” and “possessed” (193). Though his body is wounded, it is not the wound he feels but the agony and the fear. Lying on the floor, John yearns for God’s voice in response to his agony and fear, rather, it is “the ironic voice” he hears, which seems to say that if he does not want to become like “all the other niggers” he had better rise from “that filthy floor” (194). Afterwards, he is told by the church saints that he is finally saved. The story seems to end here. But it has not ended. The ironic voice John hears in the conversing process contains multiple and complicate meanings which still remain unanswered. The.

(25) Lee 18. reader hears a tone in John’s whisper and soundless cry, which (I would argue) is similar to Baldwin’s semi-confessional tone in The Fire Next Time (hereafter Fire). Thus, I would suggest that GTIM has to be read together with Baldwin’s autobiographical and social essay Fire, for both yield potent evidence of Baldwin’s life-long wrestle with Christianity. In this chapter, I attempt to explore the concept of God in GTIM to see how the characters’ (and the author’s) relentless denial or bitter rejection of and, rather ironically, their irresistible desire and yearning of God. Then, in the second half of this chapter, I propose to read GTIM in conjunction with his autobiographical essay, Fire, to flesh out not only his continuous dialogue with God but also his increasingly cynical depiction of the Black Church as immobilizing, bureaucratic, and alienating from the needs of African Americans. It is my contention that, whether religion is still important nowadays, to Baldwin, is a sacred issue that he has to deal with before he can deal with other secular ones. He himself claims that he has to complete GTIM before writing something else.13 If one is bold enough to proclaim that Christianity is unimportant to Baldwin, nonetheless, its insignificance or residues still haunt him for the rest of his life and are shown in his later works. GTIM is to be read not only autobiographically but also socially.14 In addition, for a better understanding one should read GTIM with Baldwin’s autobiographical essays together. Moreover, the religious crisis John Grimes faces at the age of fourteen is also a crisis many young blacks face. John’s being self-alienated from his church community and his being passively isolated from the white society is not exclusively a personal issue but a. 13. Additionally, David Leeming suggests that Baldwin has to “confront the relationship with his stepfather more honestly before he could be free to write GTIM” (53). And GTIM “would have to tell the story of a ‘birth’ even as it recorded the ‘killing’ of a father” (85). 14. Baker contends that the recurrent themes in Baldwin’s works are both “autobiographical and traditional” and these two spectrums respectively mean “a quest for identity” and “a drive to be free” (“The Embattled” 64). In other words, throughout his life Baldwin incessantly oscillates between individuality and community. The definitions and boundaries of both are likely capricious and to be shifted with time and situation..

(26) Lee 19. social one, particularly a communal and racial one. Hence, I would suggest that the main theme in GTIM does not concern God the Almighty from a theological viewpoint; instead, it represents the Almighty as crippled from an existential angle. The disability of God has its intricately complex roots. In GTIM, Baldwin lets the characters interpret (within and without) what God mean to them from varied perspectives and kaleidoscopic lenses. They express their doubts, condemnation, grudges, anxiety, and fear of God. Love, it seems, is a stationary verb and meaningless noun to them, except on Sundays in church. Both Florence and Elizabeth are forced by women of the older generation (the mother and the aunt) to accept the dogma of Christianity. Elizabeth is so successfully “confined” by her aunt that she cannot view herself beyond the role “as wife and mother” and Florence is “an old woman, aged, lonely, drooping, tired” who is manipulated by her community “into feeling guilty” (Harris, Black Women 23, 25, 29). To the black women in GTIM, the church is not only racialized, but also patriarchal and gendered. Even worse, the chain of “women [who] keep other women in place for men” (Harris, Black Women 14) is tightly and strongly built and extended. Harris suggests that the fundamentalist Black Church “effectively kills women […] like Elizabeth” and imposes “racial and gender restriction” on black community; thus, the Black Church has since long encountered “moral dilemmas” and “intrafamilial problems” (Introduction 20, 21). Florence’s mother is the main and first cause that disables Florence to love and believe in God. The belief that one day God will eventually come to bring the house down—namely, “the house of pride where the white folks lived”—has passed down to Florence, for she is the one who contrarily desires the house of Gabriel’s will be destroyed eventually. Her mother believes that the world, the church, and the future should belong to a man rather than a girl like Florence. Florence’s mother— “the oldest woman in the world” to Florence with “the face of a prophetess, or like a mask” (69)—was born into slavery. She has not.

(27) Lee 20. much choice (or has no desire to make choices) but to “endure and trust in God” (70). Thus, when people in the South begin migrating to the North for a better life, she chooses to stay, for she believes the North is the dwelling for devils. Florence, at last, has to abandon the South, where her mother and Gabriel live, and where God prefers an old woman and a low black male, and heads for North. Besides, Gabriel is a stumbling stone to Florence, both in church and in life. The hatred between these two siblings is mutual and strong. Florence never gives up on waiting “this patiently awaited day” that Gabriel is “completely cast down” and she will “prevent him from ever rising again by holding before him the evidence of his blood-guilt” (90). To Florence, people just won’t change even if their mouths are full of God’s stuff. She tells Elizabeth that even though “[t]hese niggers running around, talking about the Lord done changed their hearts—ain’t nothing happened to them niggers” (180). She distrusts God’s power on them and says “I reckon the Lord done give them those hearts—and, honey, the Lord don’t give out no second helpings, I’m here to tell you” (180; emphasis original). Florence cannot end the battle between a total submission to God and an absolute unbelief of God, and it is her “abject disappointment and bitterness toward God” (Hardy 108) which ironically motivates her to pursue a God to set everything right. To Florence, as long as Gabriel unashamedly claims himself as God’s agency and does not stop representing himself as God’s spokesman, she cannot accept the God who loves Gabriel. In other words, I suggest that if Florence were able to completely eradicate God from her life, she would not extend her bitterness and hold grudge on God, which is the root of her bitterness towards Gabriel. Likewise, Elizabeth runs away from God for the sake of her man. She cannot give up the man who really loves her, because his love for her is the love she cannot find from God who her mean aunt loves so much. While Florence has to leave her mother because of her mother’s favoritism on Gabriel, Elizabeth is brought up by her aunt who “uses God in an.

(28) Lee 21. attempt to bully people into a prescribed behavior (Harris, Black Women 16). The God issue these two women face is also the problems of “generational differences” that the older generation attempts to impose upon the younger one “a male-dominated vision of the world” (Harris, Black Women 13). When her aunt speaks of love, Elizabeth senses it as “a bribe, a threat, an indecent will to power” (156). She knows that one day she is going to go away from her aunt. The desire to leave is like “a heavy jewel between her breasts” which is “written in fire on the dark sky of her mind” (156). Thus, when she is forced to choose between Richard and God, “even with weeping,” she could only turn “away from God” (157). Douglas Field argues that though Baldwin acknowledges that the church served as a refuge for people like his father, “who, in the face of racism, had nowhere else to turn,” Baldwin also suggests that “the church, as a place of safety, fosters a tendency towards passivity and a submission of individuality” (11). And people like Elizabeth can be represented as “a shell, a religious automaton whose vitality and individuality has been sucked out by an overbearing institution” (11). Thus, even though Elizabeth turns her back from God, she knows that God will not forget or forgive her as a betrayer. The absence of God casts a larger-than-life shadow on her, and the shadow is like a thick blanket of smog that blinds and burdens her. Michael Lynch parallels Elizabeth, who gave birth to an illegitimate son, with the biblical character Hagar (“A Glimpse” 45).15 Hagar is an Egyptian maid of Abraham’s wife,. 15. Hagar is the Egyptian maid of Sarai (later “Sarah”), wife of Abraham. Despite God’s oracle to Abraham that Sarah and Abraham will have descendants, Sarah conceives the evil plan of letting Hagar sleep with her husband and conceives Abraham’s first son. After Hagar has conceived Abraham’s child, Sarah now is despised by Hagar and comes to complain to Abraham, who says “thy maid is in thy hand; do to her as it pleaseth thee” (Genesis 16:6). When Hagar is chased out of Abraham’s house and exiled in the wilderness, the angel of God hears her and comforts her. “I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude,” says the angel to her (16:10). And Hagar’s son shall be called Ishmael because “the LORD has heard thy affliction” (16:11). Nonetheless, Hagar and Ishmael become damned characters in the New Testament. Paul uses them as symbol of bondage and otherness. Paul delivers his speech in front of the Christ’s fellows, saying “for it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondwoman, the other by a freewoman” (Galatians 4:22). He further explains “but he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh, and he of the freewoman by promise” (4:23). Accordingly, Hagar’s descendants are born after flesh while Sarah’s are by promise. Paul concludes that “now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise. […] Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman.

(29) Lee 22. Sarai (later “Sarah”). Like Hagar who bears a child out of wedlock and is exiled by her mistress, Elizabeth bears John without a marriage tie. To Elizabeth, John’s birth is “the beginning of her life and death” (188). It is the beginning because her son becomes her new life, and it is a death because Richard has left her forever. And John is compared to Ishmael, the first bastard in the Bible. The other critic, Horace Porter, compares Elizabeth to Hester in The Scarlet Letter as they are the characters of pride and dignity with an illegitimate child and have to lead a life of “consecration of its own” as though they were to bear “consecrated cross” (Stealing 101). Gabriel, of course, is paralleled with Arthur Dimmesdale in Scarlet who has to live a “guilty” life because of his adultery (Stealing 100). I partially agree with Porter’s viewpoint that Elizabeth, like Hester, bears the consecrated cross, which is an unnecessary but psychic object to her. Nonetheless, I find the comparison of Elizabeth and Hester problematic for Hester physically and spiritually lives an out of church life while Elizabeth is surrounded and unconsciously suffocated by it. Elizabeth cannot disengage herself from the patriarchal church but meekly obeys its doctrine. Her favorite biblical verse is “everything works together for good for them that love the Lord” (Roman 8:28). She pampers her son, John, not to “fret” because God will reveal to him “in His own good time” everything He wants him to know (32) and comforts John that though he may not now understand, God surely has a plan on John. The seemingly powerful statement that “everything works together for good for them that love the Lord” immediately loses its fervor when Elizabeth utters it, for it is more a self-assurance to herself than to her son. Thus, the church, I would argue, is in fact a prison to Elizabeth, and God’s ruling on her (and hers on herself) is a life sentence. Harris points out that the women in GTIM—Florence, Esther, and Elizabeth—hold the shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman. So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman but of the free.” (4:28-31). In fact, what Paul quotes is from Sarah’s mouth, who says to her husband Abraham, “Cast out this bondwoman and her son; for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac” (Genesis 21:10). Apparently, Paul misses the later verses which describe God’s blessing to Hagar and Ishmael. Furthermore, God says unto Abraham that He will “make a great nation” for Ishmael for “he is thy seed” (21:13 and 18)..

(30) Lee 23. strong belief of “the laws of retribution.” The unbelieving Florence, the church outsider Esther, and the passive and quiet church goer Elizabeth believe in the tenet of “laws of retribution” and blame themselves for misfortunate events and are willing to bear the responsibilities for things that have gone wrong (Black Women 32, 48, 54). For example, even as a non-believer, Florence is still unable to shake off the idea of God’s judgment and punishment and holds the apocalyptic vision rooted from the Bible. She constantly possesses “a terrible longing to surrender” and from time to time has “a desire to call God into account” (90). No matter how hard she tries, she cannot unshackle the chain her mother has put on her: she is “forever tied to the mother whose influence she has tried to remove from her life” (Harris, Black Women 15). Elizabeth also blames herself for the death of Richard because she has turned her back from God. She knows that it is the very reason God has taken Richard from her (157). To Elizabeth, she still holds the strong belief that God’s power is ubiquitous and overwhelming and His punishment will eventually come. An extreme case falls upon Esther, a church outsider. Esther is also pathetically sucked into believing in the laws of retribution that Gabriel has to “pay and one day be brought low”, a concept that belongs to “those church strictures (Harris, Black Women 48) that she refuses to accept earlier. Harris also suggests that most of the women in Baldwin’s works “believe themselves to be guilty of some crime or condition of existence that demands their doing penance” (Black Women 5). In other words, since they are willing to suffer, they are “doomed to exist in psychological discomfort, self-accusation and repression” (Harris, Black Women 5). The female characters in GTIM are “all limited in the emotional relationships they form with the men in their lives” and the root of their predicament is from the teaching of the church, which teaches them “to accept their places as wives, mothers, and sisters, and to feel guilty if they do not” (Harris, Black Women 12). Yet, on the one hand, these women become willing scapegoats for the male ego; on the other hand, suggests Jacqueline E. Orsagh, they.

(31) Lee 24. are “extraordinarily strong, dynamic, and even more importantly, interesting” (57). Since society “offers no protection” to them, they are “realistically thrust into a world hostile to their very existence and the key is survival” (Orsagh 57). Moreover, Orsagh indicates that it is necessary for women to act in the matriarchal black community as “life’s suddenness requires instant action” for “they cannot afford to ‘wait’, they cannot be passive” ( 60) but to act. We may not be able to embrace their imposition of self-torture and self-punishment, we can certainly admire their strength and ability to act. Unlike Elizabeth whose belief is an unconsciously socialized acceptance (neither strong nor weak), Gabriel is persistently in struggle with God for self-justification of his (mis)conducts. Obviously and ironically, Gabriel always gains the upper hand: he is able to convince himself by using God’s grace and forgiveness, or, His indifference and unresponsiveness. At the very beginning, and first of all, Gabriel has to fight the evil inside his body and deal with his hatred of his lustful body. Before his conversion, he “ran toward sin, even as he sinned” (94). He “hated the evil that lived in his body, and he feared it, as he feared and hated the lions of lust and longing that prowled the defenseless city of his mind” (94). How he wished “nearly, for death, which was all that could release him from the cruelty of his chains” (94). The chains do not get loose until he is conversed, yet the chains-off is only brief. Before conversion, Gabriel was a drunkard and slept with women he met. The day when Gabriel’s dungeon shook and chains fell off was the day after he had slept with a woman he barely knew. The woman was a widow from the North, in town for only a few days to visit her people. When he looked at her she looked at him and:. as though it were part of the joking conversation she was having with her friends, she laughed aloud. She had the lie-gap between her teeth, and a big mouth; when she laughed, she belatedly caught her lower lip in her teeth, as though she were ashamed of so large a mouth, and her breasts.

(32) Lee 25. shook. It was not like the riot that occurred when big, fat women laughed—her breasts rose and fell against the tight cloth of her dress. . . . Yet the distance between them was abruptly charged with her, and her smell was in his nostrils. Almost, he felt those moving breasts beneath his hand. And he drank again, allowing, unconsciously, or nearly, his face to fall into the lines of innocence and power which his experience with women had told him made their love come down. (95). And they did it. He remembers “how they rocked in their “bed of sin,” and how she cried and shivered; “Lord, how her love came down!” (95) and the smell and heat of the body were still with him:. in vanity and the pride of her conquest, he thought of her, of her smell, the heat of her body beneath his hands, of her voice, and her tongue, like the tongue of a cat, and her teeth, and her swelling breasts, and how she moved for him, and held him, and labored with him, and how they fell, trembling and groaning, and locked together, into the world again. (96; emphasis added). Right after the luscious and lascivious sex, oddly without a clue, Gabriel realizes that he is a sinner and cries out “Oh, Lord, have mercy! Oh, Lord, have mercy on me!” (96). Baldwin may suggest that sex is one way to salvation, or contrarily, people are saved when they are at most satisfied with their body while at the same time disillusioned by the momentary ecstasy, thereby breeding a guilty sense of bodily pleasure.16 Gabriel is afraid 16. It is well known that Baldwin has never stopped requesting and criticizing the anti-sex theory of Christianity. The rationale of citing the passages is to stress Baldwin’s concern and/or doubt of the relationship between body and Christianity. Cornel West in Race Matters states that “Americans are obsessed with sex and.

(33) Lee 26. of judgment from God; thus, he surrenders and repents, though the submission may be reluctant and repentance out of fear. After a “blood-washed day,” Gabriel walks out of the valley and begins “his life as man” (97). We might hope that Baldwin would ordain Gabriel a true awakening, a victory of Christianity, but what we see is a saved man trips, and trips again. Gabriel continues to fall from heaven to hell because of his own pride and lust. Failing to lead in the church and in the world, Gabriel rules his family—the house of his own—with violence, hatred, and bitterness. Lynch reads Gabriel as a “negative spirit of St. Paul” who thus “poison[s] the spirit of Christianity” (“A Glimpse” 49-50). Gabriel is in “spiritual darkness” and his theology is full of dishonesty. His real reason to preach in church is for “power and authority” and “not holiness or service” (Lynch, “A Glimpse” 42). David Foster also contends that Gabriel’s faith is “impotent” for the belief has not changed him “but merely disguises the self-loathing which rankles beneath” (54). “Consistent with his inconsistencies,” Gabriel owns both “the smallest and largest conscience, the longest and shortest memory, the highest and lowest sense of righteousness” (Rosenblatt 78). Though a “pettiest figure” in the novel, he tyrannizes everyone around him (Rosenblatt 78). Unlike the Archangel sitting next to God in the Book of Revelation, Gabriel is a vicious spirit that suffocates people around him. It is hard for John to truly believe in God, for “bowing to. fearful of black sexuality” (119), consequently, black sexuality becomes “a taboo subject to white and black American” (120). West further proposes that to demythologize of black sexuality is crucial for black American “because much of black self-hatred and self-contempt has to do with the refusal of many black Americans to love their own black bodies” (122). Furthermore, Kelly Brown Douglas in Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective traces the roots of the taboo and myth of black sexuality. Douglas introduces Michel Foucault’s theory to elaborate the relationship of white power and black sexuality during slavery. The sexual stereotypes (generally smeared, magnified, and dehumanized) invented by whites “have impacted Black lives in such a way as to render sexuality a virtually taboo topic for the Black church and community” (31). Detailed discussions on the mystified black female and male bodies and sexual discourse please see pages 31-59; impacts of white sexual assault upon black sexuality please refer to pages 63-86. West in Prophesy Deliverance suggests the racial difference in modern discourse has shifted from cultural grounds to nature, “that is, ontology and later biology” (64). As a result, “the everyday life of black people is shaped not simply by the exploitative (oligopolistic) capitalist system of production but also by cultural attitudes and sensibilities, including alienating ideals of beauty” (65). A case in point, please see Sander Gilman’s “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.”.

(34) Lee 27. God would entail capitulation to Gabriel” (Lynch, “A Glimpse” 47). It is Gabriel’s conduct and misconduct that fail John and his family to embrace God, who has anointed Gabriel. I would suggest that Baldwin’s indictment of Gabriel is best uttered through Esther, an outsider of the Black Church community. When Gabriel has known of Esther’s pregnancy, he accuses Satan and blames Esther, saying “Satan tempted me and I fell. I ain’t the first man been made to fall on account of a wicked woman” (132). At once, Esther becomes a wicked woman, a “harlot.” Esther cautions him that she is also not the first girl being “ruined by a holy man” (132). Later she indicts him, saying “I guess it takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore” (133) and then resentfully swears in her letter that she will bring up her baby to be a man and a better man than his Daddy, and she will let him read no Bibles (135). Through Esther’s mouth, Baldwin condemns the hypocritical “holy men” in church who ungracefully justify their misconducts by using God as their weapon. Different from Gabriel’s self-reasoning and justification, John pathetically pleads for the Holy Spirit to release him from his sinned and cursed body and set him free from “a carnal mind” and “Adam’s mind” (54). Similar to but unlike his father, John is surrounded by fleshly sinners and too preoccupied by everyday events that are too horrifying for him to understand God’s plan upon him. For example, he is afraid that every time her mother’s belly begins to swell, “knowing that each time the swelling began it would not end until she was taken from him, to come back with a stranger” (11-12). If children are sent by God as the most precious and blissful gifts, John surely feels more petrified than blessed with the too many God’s gifts. As a teenager who is curious and anxious about sex and body, John realizes that, like the “sinners along the avenue” who embarrass John (nevertheless, his younger brother Roy is “amused”), his mother and father “who went to church on Sundays […] did it too” (12). He can hear them “in the bedroom behind him, over the sound of rats’ feet, and rat screams, and the music and cursing from the harlot’s house downstairs” (12). Acting as a voyeur, John sees all the sinful and horrible scenes not only through his eye but.

(35) Lee 28. his ear as well. Even during the church service, John is very clear that even if sin is “not in their minds” it is “in the flesh” (17) and a yellow stain on the ceiling can slowly transform “itself into a woman’s nakedness” (18). Being a voyeur—an observer, not participant—John cannot feel what the congregation feels in church, which vexes and troubles him, though he reminds himself that it is too late for him to doubt. In church, he discovers that his father’s “daily anger” is transformed into “prophetic wrath,” and his mother raises “her eyes to heaven,” hands before her, “moving, made real for John that patience, that endurance, that long suffering, which he had read of in the Bible and found so hard to imagine” (15). While people are shouting and stamping their feet in church when the “temple was rocked with the Power of God,” John watches their faces and bodies, hoping one day “this Power would possess him” (15). Yet, John is so occupied by the down-to-earth stuff that there seems no room for the Holy Spirit. What he needs to confront with, rather, is a hard reality. The first thing John has to confront is to fight God over the flesh. While Ella Mae Washington, a seventeenth-year-old young girl, is dancing and Elisha, a seventeen-year-old young preacher from Georgia who has been saved “in the improbable fields down south”, is singing at his piano, John watches their bodies and ponders whether they have sinned when they are “not surrounded by the saints” (17). John imagines “the nakedness of breasts and insistent thighs” of Ella Mae and admires “the timbre of Elisha’s voice, much deeper and manlier than his own” and admires his “leanness, and grace, and strength” (13). Particularly, John’s gaze on Elisha’s is full of carnal connotation. When John looks at Elisha, Elisha is like “a great, black cat in trouble in the jungle, he stiffened and trembled, and cried out” (15) in front of the piano on the church stage. When he is on his feet, his face is “congested, contorted . . . and the muscles leaping and swelling in his long, dark neck” (15-16). He seems breathless, “that his body could not contain this passion, that he would be, before their eyes, dispersed with the waiting air.” Suppressed and depressed, John watches the.