"Come-to-Jesus Stuff" in James Baldwin's 'Go tell It on the Mountain' and 'The Amen Corner.' - a novel and a play

African American Review, Summer, 1997 by Barbara K. Olson

By his own account, James Baldwin wrote The Amen Corner in reaction to the reception of his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. His reaction was a complex one, perhaps more complex than he admitted openly in his preface to the published version of the play in 1968. There he described his encounter with the editor assigned to his novel:

The editor ... asked me, when I entered his office for the first time and

after the book had been accepted, "What about all that come-to-Jesus

stuff? Don't you think you ought to take it out?" Go Tell It on the

Mountain is the study of a Negro evangelist and his family. They do,

indeed, talk in a "come-to-Jesus" idiom, but to "take it out" could only

mean that my editor was suggesting that I burn the book. I gagged, literally,

and began to sweat, ran to the water cooler, tried to pull myself

together, and returned to the office to explain the intention of my novel.

I learned a great deal that afternoon; learned, to put it far too briefly,

what I was up against; took the check and went back to Paris. (Amen

xiv)

The event, Baldwin went on to say, taught him that he "was a writer, a Negro writer, ... expected to write diminishing versions of Go Tell It on the Mountain forever." To avoid such a fate, he said, "I was absolutely determined that I would not attempt, ... at that moment in my life.... another novel." He confessed, "I was really terrified that I would ... try to repeat my first success and begin to imitate myself" (xv). So Baldwin began Amen Corner, a "writing exercise," as he called it, in the form of a play.

But even though the play The Amen Corner (1954) is obviously different in genre from the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), it is not very different in idiom or message. Both play and novel are laden with black spirituals and biblical allusions. Both works attempt to recreate the compelling dynamics of black fundamentalist, pentecostal congregational worship. Both play and novel feature black fundamentalist preachers whose zeal for God's house has all but consumed any possibility of natural and healthy relationships in their own homes. The preachers, Margaret and Gabriel respectively, are both deeply concerned that an "anointed" offspring will follow in their steps, inherit their perceived responsibilities in God's kingdom on earth, and further their dynastic rule. Their teenage sons are depicted as young men in the throes of deciding whether or not they will adopt their family's religion as their own. Their status as the "anointed" is then put into question. There are also already decided unbelieving characters in these works who, along with the ironically incriminating quotations from biblical texts throughout, serve to challenge the version of orthodoxy and control the preacher has imposed. Indeed, the most memorable scriptural text in both works is the injunction that Margaret and Gabriel, like King Hezekiah, must hear from the prophet Isaiah: "Set thine house in order."

Although Baldwin did not tell us in his preface to Amen Corner just what he said to his editor regarding his intention with Go Tell It on the Mountain, the patent similarities between the two works may give us a clue. Indeed, it could be argued that Baldwin turned to a new form after Mountain because he knew the content in his next work would have to be much the same. He knew that he had not finished with his "come-to-Jesus stuff," that what he had said in the black church idiom of his novel had not come through with the clarity he had intended, that he would have to try again. Of course, his return to that idiom in Amen Corner did on one level mount an eloquent defense of the validity and cultural integrity of black language and religion in the face of the snobbish, racist insult Baldwin had heard in his upper-class white editor's remark. But it also seems to signal a second attempt on Baldwin's part to come to terms with the profound influence the black fundamentalist/pentecostal church had wielded in his life. As he had done earlier on the Mountain, so in The Amen Corner he now tried to free himself and his people from what he calls in The Fire Next Time the suffocating "safety" of religion (30): "safety" from social constraints such as racism, and "safety" from our passions and pains, from our frailties and fears. Ironically, Baldwin's goal is one his obtuse editor seems to have shared, a goal to which he may have been suggesting a different route.

And a different route just may have been in order if Baldwin's intent was, in fact, to indict the church he had left in anger and disgust at age 17. His editor's otherwise absurd reaction to the "come-to-Jesus stuff" in Go Tell It on the Mountain may have been strangely warranted. It may bespeak a not surprising secular discomfort with a work so saturated with evangelical fervor and biblical language. And it may bespeak a legitimate uncertainty as to whether this novel makes an ironic commentary on the faith or, instead, gives a straight apologetic for it. For Mountain's attitude toward Christianity is ambiguous at best: It requires the reader to be familiar with Baldwin's views penned elsewhere if he or she is to be confident that the novel denounces rather than defends essential Christianity. Believers and unbelievers alike could very well conclude that Christianity has been celebrated, not mocked, on the pages before them. Baldwin's intended denunciation was undermined by the black church idiom he chose to use.