"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

This explanation at least seems to account for Carlton Molette's nigh-euphoric experience during the several productions he has attended and for the marked difference between his and Carolyn Sylvander's interpretations of the play's meaning. He is convinced that

The Amen Corner is about

love--about the enduring

strength that love gives--about

the love [among]

... four people who comprise

a particular black family.

In addition to family

love, there is an extended-family

love that surrounds

the congregation on the

stage (the actors) and the

congregation in the auditorium

(the audience). There is a

love that transcends all the

petty bickering, the jealousies,

the family fights.

(184)

While Sylvander, who apparently has not seen the play produced, does recognize its concern with love, she nonetheless insists that it is a "weighted attack" on a loveless church. Molette's production experience suggests that the play's criticism of that loveless church is undermined by the communal feeling the play's ritual elements create between the characters and audience.

The reactions of critics to the pentecostal rites in Go Tell It on the Mountain also betray an ambiguity. According to Lunden's survey, some critics have called John's conversion a disheartening defeat in which he only recapitulates his forebearers' experience, repressing his fears, running to the safety of the church and away from the dangers of the outside, white-dominated world. Others find John's conversion suggestive of a new beginning, a genuine release from such vexing problems as sexual guilt, father-hatred, and racial-inferiority fears. On the one hand, Howard Harper insists, "The imprisoned Negroes [in the novel] sublimate their anger and their sense of injustice in the hysterical rites of the Temple of the Fire Baptized" (144). And Nathan Scott sees John's experience as coercive: the "unsubduable propensity for religious hysteria implanted in him by his nurture ... finally hurled ... onto the Threshing-Floor and swept into a high fever of spiritual convulsion in the Temple of the Fire Baptized." For Harper and Scott, despite every effort not to "`become like all the other niggers,'" John has become just that. The church has reduced him (160). On the other hand, a critic of equal stature, Albert Gerard, sees the rites of the church as nurturing, providing "integrations" that Western culture would do well to admire and even emulate: (1) "the inner integration of personality" in which "transports of religious faith are not separated from physical expressions of enthusiasm" (152), and (2) "the integration of the community" in which John's new birth is a communal effort. Gerard celebrates this aspect of John's conversion, observing that "in this terrible crisis, in which a man's soul is born, John is not alone, as are Mauriac's adolescents. The church is not a collection of abstractions. The community is a living whole..." (155).

Although the endings of Baldwin's novel and play do, when viewed side by side, unmistakably signal Baldwin's deepening insistence that the church be left behind, each ending in itself is vexed with ambiguity. While it is true that young John Grimes enters the church, it is also true that his conversion to Christianity and his incorporation into the church community are suspect. Do we have here a spiritual reality or a psychological illusion? Do we have a subjugation to the group or an integration into it? Similarly, while it is true that David Alexander leaves the church, his rejection of Christianity may not be so unequivocal as it seems. Do we have here an irrevocable denunciation or a prophetic challenge? Does David abandon the church or take it with him into the world?