Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

On today's episode, Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin's debut novel, believe it or not. This is a debut novel. If you want to find a copy for yourself, thriftbooks.com has lots of choices. You can get a standard paperback that's just the text, and that's going to be great. But if you're looking for something with a little context, something a little special, I've got two picks for you here. First is the edition from the Everyman's Library. It came out in 2016. The special about this one is the introduction by the great Edwige Dandycat. The other one you might look at here is a Library of America version, 1998. It's Giovanni's Room, Go Tell it on the Mountain, and some other early stories from Baldwin, and a whole host of critical and biographical and bibliographical information there. Thanks to ThriftBooks.com for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read. Welcome to Zero to Well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. Today we are discussing a legendary writer's debut novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. Before we jump in, if you're looking for show notes, information about what we talk about today, you can check them out anywhere in your podcatcher of choice. And one of the things in those show notes will be a link where you can sign up for our free newsletter, or you can become a paid member to get early access and add free episodes along with bonus content. That's patreon.com slash zero to well read. You can also find us on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube at zero to well read podcast. If you remember to rate and review wherever you're listening, that really helps the show keeps us going, helps more people find it. And that's just more fun for everyone. if there's more people in the party. We were going to be sticking around for a little bit after the main recording that you're hearing right now to do our, we call it office hours, and you can sign up to listen to that bonus content at patreon.com slash zero to well read, as Rebecca said. Also enjoy your emails, zero to well read at bookriot.com. Today, James Baldwin's 1953 debut novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Rebecca. It's a heavy one. It's a short one. It's a, I don't know. It's a really remarkable novel. We're going to get to it in a minute here. But like top of the dome, what was your, what would you tell people about why they might want to check out Go Tell It on the Mountain? Gosh, I found it to be riveting. It had been a long time since I read this. We'll talk about our first experiences with it later in the show. I was on a trip last weekend. I picked it up thinking I'll just like dip in to the first little bit of Go Tell It on the Mountain. But I sat out on the, I was at the beach. I sat out on the back porch at the beach in the sun and I just it got me. I just read for three hours straight and kind of then came up for air like, oh, this is it is really, really powerful. And as you get into it, it's kind of immediately apparent how and why this is such an important novel and an important component of American literary history. Yeah, we'll talk more about the reading experience here in a minute. But I think there's something to it is immersive and you kind of just want to stay in it. Like it's hard to dip in and out of. Like it has its own logic and its own internal worldview that I think lends itself to staying in for as long as you can. Stay in the bath for as long as you can. Not necessarily a one sitting read because it is so, it can be so heavy. But it could be a one sitting read if you have the time and the, I guess, constitution to be that immersed inside it. Because the world is fully realized. It's just very sensory in a way that you don't get on the page all that often where Baldwin really gives us just a fully realized description of the world and moments that the characters are inhabiting. And it almost feels to me like going to the movies, like we're just fully dropped into this world. You know, I hadn't made that connection because there's a there's a pivotal movie going scene and Baldwin's character. Well, we'll talk about here. I think we might think in terms of the cinematic elements that that influence this. So let's go to what it's about here. It takes place over 24 hours. The life one day. The main character is John. It's the morning of his 14th birthday. This is important. It will lace through our whole conversation here is this is pretty auto fiction core. I don't know that we had the word for auto fiction in 1953. That's actually a nice that would be a nice rabbit hole for some to go down to. When did we start using the term auto fiction? James Baldwin's life mirrors very closely John's main characters and really all the important ways. And we'll talk more about that. But crucially, the scene sitting here is it's his birthday. He's 14 and it's his birthday and he's hoping that someone's going to notice, but he also kind of knows they won't. And they don't for a little while until he gets a little pocket change to go through the movies. And the story such as it is, is him experiencing the day of his birthday and something that happens there and then going to the church at the end of the day. But it's interleaved with stories from the people in his life, especially the generation above him, his biological mother, his adoptive father, his brother, his adoptive aunt, and their own relationship to each other, to the church, to America, and really to their own memory and history as well. And Laced Through All of This is John, the main character's own coming of age. Like, it's a coming of age novel. It's a different kind, but it's laced through with his own hatred of his father, who's very tough on him, his own confusion about his sexuality, or maybe not confusion, Rebecca, like he's gay and he realizes it. But it's also Harlem in the 1930s. What kind of language and identity acceptance is available to him is pretty limited. Right. Yeah. And the idea of sin is all over this book. Shame and guilt. Shame and glory and being saved. And the way people aspire to do better in the ways that they don't and the way they can't, the limitations thereof. When he comes back from the day after sort of walking through Central Park and going to the movies, he discovers his brother Roy has been stabbed in some sort of incident. We don't get many details about that. And sort of the furor around this moment, like how it came to this that Roy got stabbed, because it's like the single thing his father especially is trying to prevent is his children being killed or jailed, right? And he's very tough on them. And we have some quotes to hear about later about his own logic, but it's still come to this. So in a lot of ways, the complete structure around religion and the household and the parental structure and the rules of the house have sort of failed here in the scene of Roy. And I think that really catalyzes these sort of reveries of memory that people are sort of recounting to themselves. how they got there and implicitly how they came to this moment where a child of the house is in mortal peril. And this lays go to a church service that comes a little bit later. John has a sort of older idol slash maybe romantic interest, we're not really sure, named Elisha, who kind of represents an idealized version of maybe they want this, what the community wants John to do. They want him to be an intellectual, a race leader, and a person of the church. But then he starts to get visions, and he starts to have different kinds of experiences. And he comes to some sort of revelation at the end, which we'll talk about as well. And I found that part to be quite powerful and quite elusive and elusive at the same time. We can talk about that a little bit more. It's a really unique reading experience. experience. Yeah. And then, you know, Florence, his aunt, his father, Gabriel, and then Gabriel's first wife, Deborah, they all get their own backstories. How much do we want to go into each of those backstories here, Rebecca? It's a good question. I mean, like John's going to the movies and walking around the city on his birthday and then coming home to find that his brother has been stabbed. That's really only like the first 50 or 60 pages of the book, which is 225-ish. The large midsection is called the Prayers of the Saints. And the saints is sort of the collective term for older members of a church body. In this case, it is the older generation of John's family, his father, his adoptive mother, and his aunt. And there's a long section for each of the three of those adults in the story that their prayer is our window into what they're reflecting on and remembering while they're at this. It's called a tarrying service. It's the prayer service on Saturday night before everybody comes to church on Sunday mornings. The things that the adults reveal to themselves and to then us in the course of those prayers and reflections are just really important pieces of the backstory. Like that is the details don't really matter. It is that Baldwin is laying out the generational example of how John's family came to be in this way. The begats, right? For all the old test kids that tried to do the begats at some point. And it's a psychosexual emotional begatting of John. Yeah. And like it's important that we find out that Gabriel, John's adoptive father, first of all, his name is Gabriel. Like there's biblical stuff happening here. But his first wife was a woman named Deborah who was gang raped and abused as a teenager and the subject of horrible ostracism. The specifics of that are less important than the fact that these are things that happen to Black people in the American South that John's ancestors come from. Like the book is taking place in the 30s. These folks were growing up in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were part of the Great Migration coming to the North. And we find out that Gabriel marries her partially out of a sense that this is a mission from God that he's on. We later find out that his marriage to John's mother is a version of the same thing. And this is insight into Gabriel. Like, this is not a father's and son's man kind of book, but it is very much there's a version of reading this that Gabriel is the main character, like the spinning core that John's character exists around is his father. And then we get Elizabeth, John's mother's perspective on it. We get Florence, Gabriel's sister, her perspective on this man. Like so much of this is about black masculinity and manhood and the sort of gender and power dynamics that exist there. hey folks i'm here with a podcast recommendation for you if you're enjoying what we're doing at zero to well read the deep dives the context what's really going on here energy we want to share some friends of our show who have a great podcast of their own it's called the secret life of books it's a really smart and deeply engaging weekly podcast hosted by princeton english professor sophie g and former bbc arts director johnny claypool each episode they take on an iconic book to ask what's the story behind the story? Who shaped it? What were the stakes? And what meanings might we have missed? Right now they're in the middle of a special Toni Morrison miniseries. Y'all know we love Toni Morrison here at Zero to Well Read. 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And the stories of emancipation, plus the stories of the church, plus the stories of the, you know, Pharaoh enslaving the Jews and then being liberated, and that's something was long hoped for in the Black community during times of slavery. And then the actual thing happens. There was actually the emancipation and how that kind of reverberates through multiple generations of like this thing that was hoped for happened, but now what? Does this religion still help us? Does it hurt us? What are we looking for at this point from the church and from each other? So that part is really interesting. I think on the autofiction front, we'll get to Baldwin's a little bit of biography in his minute, one important emendation is Baldwin's mother never told him who his father was. In this book, we get a version of who John's father could be. And I couldn't really find much criticism about what people make of this. Is this sort of wish casting? Did he import someone else's story? But essentially in the book, the main character's father's name, Richard, and he is intellectual. He's read everything. And he gives a little bit of a soliloquy about wanting to arm himself with knowledge and education and books to show white people that he can do it too, and black people can do it too. He then kills himself after a horrible incident of racial prejudice, kind of showing like the insufficiency of a kind of respectability politics, right? Like no matter how good you are or how noble or how well-intentioned you are, If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is sort of always everywhere already in America now to some degree and especially then and especially before, it didn't matter if you'd read every book in the Harlem Library like James Baldwin said he did as a kid. So I don't know. I always found that I find that little, I don't know, dream figure as being really important to recognize as well. And that Baldwin himself was very involved in the church and was a preacher for a while as a young man before ultimately becoming a writer. And that's the pressure for that is on for John. Like the family has sort of accepted that Roy is the bad son, that he is the one who goes out and misbehaves. And they blame Roy for the fact that he gets stabbed in some ways. Like, how could you allow this to happen to yourself? And John knows his family is counting on him to probably become a preacher. to be the successful one. He's been resistant to the church. He's been resistant to the idea of getting saved. He knows this is the thing that everybody wants of him. And he is hoping that, like, his secret belief is that it's not the church, but that it's knowledge and freedom. It's knowledge that will free him. The fact that he gets saved in the end that he has, or maybe gets saved, he has this, like, religious experience. It reads like a hallucination or something kind of psychedelic happens to him in this church service, and that he's going to, at least for a time, go down the path that his family and his community have laid out for him. While we have seen the internal struggle that's happening with resistance to the idea of believing in something, even resistance to the notion of God at all, but also not knowing what to do with his sexuality, where to put it. And we're not really sure how aware the character is of that. Like, we know that he thinks of himself as having sinned. There are references to masturbation. There are references to having looked at men. There's certainly tension on the page between him and Elisha. But how much of that he has grasped or accepted as a... Or even has language to understand what he might want. Or an unchangeable part of himself. We don't really know. So really a depiction there, too, of a person at war with themselves. As a lot of novels, especially from this time period, that deal with both race and sexuality reflect that society was not open and available to Black people. Society was not open and available to queer people. And James Baldwin and this character, John, are both doubly oppressed in those ways. I think it's important here. It frames the conversation where we end. I have this in the quotes, but I'll say it here. John's last spoken utterance is to Elisha at the service after having had this vision, some sort of ecstatic experience that I have, frankly, have a hard time picturing what's happening and what's real and what's not. But he comes out of it and he says, Elisha, no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says you remember, please remember, I was saved. I was there. And I have never really bought the whole, this was, you know, the saved as using the language and experience of the church. There's some other kind of saving being happened here. It's a liberation. It's a reckoning. And his exhortation to Elijah specifically, you remember where I go, what people say about me, sort of a, he's casting himself into the future. And, of course, Baldwin looking back, I left this place. I lived a different life in many different ways. But I was a part of this community. I was there and I was saved. That has a lot of different valences on it. Right. And you can imagine this being important for him to say to someone that he respects that's a little bit outside of his own family system to bear witness to his own life, to bear witness to his own experience. and that it has value even if it eventually he knows, Baldwin knows, that John's life is not going to be something that this community is going to really have an easy time accepting and certainly celebrating, but even accepting. And what happens right after that is really important that the family, like they leave the tarrying service. John has had what appears to be a conversion experience. And his father, who supposedly this is all his dad has ever wanted, is for him to get saved. He takes it well, right? Rebecca, he's so happy and he's like, great job, John. All that Gabriel has ever wanted is for John to follow in his footsteps. Gabriel thought of himself as a prophet of sorts and he wants John to take that same path. And Gabriel is skeptical about whether this is an authentic thing that John is professing. So it ends on this ambiguous note. Now John knows that even if he does the thing his family wants for him, he's not going to get his father's approval. And Baldwin knows, and then we know of Baldwin, that he gets out, that the only way forward is actually to get out. There is no success inside that world, that system for John. All right, let's move on to why it's important, why we're talking about it, what sort of its legacy is. I mean, regularly listed among the greatest American novels. I think there was a time list that was headed like number 39. Like the actual placement doesn't matter as much as it's just thought in those circles at the same time. It's also hard to remember now, if you're the kind of person listening to the show, you've probably read a lot of the books in the American canon and the Black American canon, especially that followed in Baldwin's footsteps. Perhaps, you know, one thing he said was, and we'll get to some attention he had with Richard Wright in his own participation in Black American literary discourse and American literary discourse on a larger scale. But he was trying to capture Black culture as he understood it, this combination of racism, church, music, community, poverty, and shared history, and a representation in art, in a book of a working class. This is not a Harlem Renaissance community. It's Harlem, but it's a little bit later. it's doing something different. It has a certain psychological realism mixed in with some of this blended stuff that Baldwin was doing, but we just didn't see representations like this. And if you read, you know, Rebecca has all the recommendations for follow-ons that you might do, the Morrisons of the world or the Ellisons of the world, you can see the DNA here. It's so clearly here in so many ways. The protest novels of Richard Wright and then sort of coming out of Harriet Beecher Stroh tradition as well, of like using a novel to be overtly political for political change is something he was trying to he was rebelling against not so much that he thought they were wrong but they thought they were limiting They thought they were you know kind of leave stuff out There was a bigness to a Black experience that didn Yeah I always thought that he was trying to write what he thought the ultimate protest novel would be Yes. A good one that doesn't sacrifice in quality of language or quality of story in service of making its point. And this does read differently than many of the things that came before it and a lot of the things that came after. The rage is tangible. So much of this book is about rage and the characters are angry. And Baldwin names the rage that they feel and illustrates all of the ways that they are victimized, what the oppression of being a Black person in the American South and then even in the North where it's supposed to be better, what that looks like, that police violence is prevalent, that poverty is a fact of daily life, and that they are angry. And that rage and shame and not knowing where to turn is one of the driving forces and one of the primary appeals of the church. But that protest novel element here, like, I don't know if Baldwin thought of it really as a protest novel. No, I mean, he wrote clearly against the idea of a protest novel in Richard Wright and others. Like, he wanted to capture what he understood to be the fullness and complexity of Black experience and have that be not enough, but that be on the record, so to speak. Like, that gets captured and taken seriously by readers of all kind. And he lets his characters be messy. Like, these are very complex and often unflattering depictions of characters that a protest novel can tend to, like, deify some of its characters or beatify them. That, like, how dare anyone subject these people who are so saintly to this kind of experience? And underneath the truth of Baldwin's writing is instead, no one deserves to be treated this way regardless of how they behave. And also, humans are complex and messy, and the circumstances that these characters are subjected to shape a lot of their behaviors and choices that they make in ways that are limiting, that could be expansive, but that ultimately really constrict the amount of agency that they have. And then as his debut novel, it was well-received. I don't think it sold great. It didn't sell like gangbusters, but it sold well enough and was considered highly enough by the critical establishment that Baldwin has a writing career now. He'd had a writing career before, but he's a writer of the author of books. And then he goes on to write Giovanni's Room. He's 29 when this comes out. It's incredible. Yeah. And he's been working on it for a long time, which we'll talk a little more about when we get into the biography stuff. But then he goes on to write Giovanni's Room and Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time. What are the great titlers of books, Baldwin? I think we don't talk about that. But The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son, and Go Tell It on the Mountain are three as a troika of the best titled books you're going to see by a single author. And if you are not familiar, Go Tell It on the Mountain is an old hymn. Oh, I know. I didn't even say, yes, of course. That is what the title comes from. Yeah. And then Baldwin, of course, becomes the leading public black intellectual of like the 50s into the 60s into later in his life. And you can see him on Instagram quotes all over the place. One of the most misquoted or out of context quoted authors we've got. Yeah, I do encourage people, if you Google James Baldwin interview video and you're going to find something interesting. And a lot of what he says still seems sharp and honest and unfiltered in a way that feels fresh and new, which is both a testament to him and an indictment of American culture. But such as we are, Baldwin himself was born in Harlem in 1924. and like I said, the biographical details roughly line up to Go Tell It on the Mountain. His father was unknown to him. His mother married a much older preacher. I think I get the Gabriel age a little bit wrong, but I think his real life, his adoptive father is much, much older, like maybe 30 years or something like that. And they did not have a great relationship. Baldwin did gain admission to one of these elite public New York high schools, and that was his entree into the wider world. I mean, the easiest thing is like he was like working right next to like Richard Avedon and people that become important in the New York intellectual scene for the ensuing decades. He made a connection early to Richard Wright. Richard Wright, who had in 1940 Native Son, was chosen by the Book of the Month Club and sold like 400,000 copies. A little hard to understand. That is incredible when you think about 1940s America. It's hard to – we don't have an equivalent kind of a moment like this. And then Richard Wright had a lot of juice. And Baldwin would sort of have his own little literary rebellion against Wright. They did stay friendly. He no longer considered Wright his mentor. He used to kind of feel like he was moving beyond him. I always thought it was cool that they stayed friendly because Wright could be a tough customer. He had a long-going feud with Jordan. With Zora. And he seemed to have a little bit of lassitude when it came to holding Baldwin to account for what he said. So I think that's a sign of his own recognition and respect for what Baldwin is doing. Baldwin said he began this book or something that would become this book when he was 17. And it was long in germination. And there was a couple of deals Tavit published that fell through. But eventually he moved to France and he got some distance from the racial bubble slash panopticon of the U.S., finished a manuscript. and he got an advance of $10,000 in today's dollars, which, Rebecca, the more things change, the more things stay the same. It's not a lot of money for a debut novel, and the first chunk was on, he got $3,000, I think I read this, he got $3,000 initially, and then the subsequent $7,000. Again, this is in 2024 dollars, so the 1952, $53 would have been different on the completion of the manuscript. And it was well-received enough that he had a career. And that's the story of Go Tell Him Not. And I said, he becomes the most visible black intellectual. Really, I mean, I was thinking about this too. Is he still the most famous public black intellectual? I mean, Martin Luther King Jr., Tony Morris. I mean, King is a political leader. I'm not sure they thought in the same stripe. Yeah, I think Morrison eclipsed him in invisibility, especially with a Nobel win. But also we don't get a Toni Morrison without a James Baldwin first. There is a clear lineage of thinking, writing, both in the direct subject matter that they take on, but also really the philosophy, the vibe of their writing that allows their characters to be so complex. And there are nuggets in Go Tell It in the Mountain of characters wrestling with being perceived as ugly, with wanting to be loved, with wanting to be accepted, with feeling the long term impacts of hatred as internalized shame and guilt that then Toni Morrison took as subjects for herself. We talked a lot about that in our episode in The Bluest Eye last season that you can go back and find in the feed. But there are certainly seeds of Morrison's thinking in Baldwin. I thought about Bluest Eye a lot while reading this book. I mean, not just because we'd read it recently, but he's also just a striking figure, like wearing those like really tailored black suits. Smoking a heater. Smoking a dart on a black and white. Like he just looks cool. He looks like a serious intellectual. And I think that kind of branding matters as culture moves on. Rebecca, what was your first experience of reading? Go tell it all. I read this in a liberation theology class in college. Oh, God, you got to love the Jesuits, man. You do. You got to love the Jesuits. It was like an 80-year-old Jesuit priest talking to us about James Baldwin. Turned out to be a pretty formative literary and educational experience. This was the first time that I had picked up Go Tell It on the Mountain since then. So as these experiences tend to be really eye-opening and astonishing to come to this as an adult with a more complete appreciation of American history and also of American literature and to see things that I didn't understand or appreciate about Baldwin since. What about you? Yes, similarly. Undergraduate in a survey African-American literature course. I remember being pretty astounded by it then. I think I didn't have the tools to process it. It still is outside of my ken to fully grasp, I think. But I do remember it being very transporting and having an ecstatic-like reading experience. I think Baldwin does something unusual. I guess it's a good way of transitioning to the reading experience discussion of at moments He is trying to capture a feeling of religious ecstatic experience that he would have seen in the church. And then kind of using it to his own ends, to using it as a moment to do something outside of the scope of everyday life, to sort of say the unsayable and explore the unexplorable, which I think is really interesting. I don't know. I read the Nicholas Boggs book, but I forget. It was a huge book and I really liked it, but I don't remember the details and how much it got into. Like, what was Baldwin reading that let him write this book? I mean, I'm sure there was the stream of consciousness modernist classics. Like, I know he was reading Joyce as an example. And you could do worse as shorthand, and maybe I should have put this into the cocktail party takeaways, is Joyce But For Black People is not the worst shorthand you could do. But it's also much more approachable than Ulysses. It just is. It's just much more approachable. I think it's a combination of a lot of extensive reading in that kind of zone with a lifetime at the time that he was writing this of exposure to the black church. And not just to any black church, but to Pentecostal churches, which if that's unfamiliar to you, that is speaking in tongues, dancing in the aisles. The spirit of God comes upon you and you do have an ecstatic, expressed. A full body contact sport, the Pentecostal experience. And that rhythm, like nothing is more riveting than a preacher in the zone. And the rhythm of a good sermon and the buildup of a good sermon is really present in the writing, especially in the section of Gabriel's Prayer, which is the longest standalone section of the book. I found myself like, oh, this, it rises and falls. It pulls you into different components of the sentence. I really wanted to hear a full cast audio version, which doesn't exist. There's not a full audio performance with a bunch of different voices, but I wanted to hear especially the church scenes and Gabriel's memories. You tell someone if they wanted to could do an unbelievable audiobook version, if they really wanted to put their back and resources and production into it. It would be really incredible that that experience of Baldwin's so clearly shapes not just the content of the book, but the way that the language comes across, that it does feel like hearing a preacher pulling you further and further into something. And that there's momentum picking up in the story and momentum picking up in John's reflection. And then ultimately in this experience that John has that like is ecstatic is the right word for it. And if you've never been in a church like this or like seen footage of people in a church like this, it feels a lot like being at a concert where the best possible version of a concert where everybody knows the words and you kind of feel like all one body. And in fact, there's like really interesting neurological research that the same things are happening when people have collective effervescent experiences at concerts that are happening in church services where people say that they're experiencing the presence of God. It is something about how our pulses sync up with each other. Our respiration syncs up. It just makes our neurons fire in a way that is wild. And Baldwin has felt that. His characters have felt that. And he uses it to bring us into this story that's largely about the social and emotional functions of religion. Like, what is the appeal of surrendering to God when a lot of your everyday existence is out of your control? Yeah. And the appeal of the idea of a future in heaven, in paradise, when you are living in the daily hell of being a black person in the United States in the 1930s in this story. And how that all comes across, that it's beautiful and terrifying, that it serves a purpose. And also, is it really serving us? Like, none of this is straightforward. Yeah. And since Gabriel himself is the fulcrum of the book, his own strengths and weaknesses very much become heightened and feel extensible to larger social structural figures. figures, right? Like we don't get a representation of the church in this book with a bunch of like really good examples of look how it helped this person and they did it, right? Not only they're not a lot of great male figures, but you don't get the sense that the women themselves are super happy in this particular dynamic because some of us being subject to race and some of us being subject to these men who in their lives who are not doing great all the time. But we don't, outside of Elisha, who we don't know that much about, we don't have, you could grow up to be X, Right. Look at that person over there who did it the right way and they're thriving and everything's great. It's always coming. Right. It's always coming to salvation. It's always coming to rapture. And you have to be wait and be patient and stay on the narrow. But we are humans, Rebecca. And it's hard for us not to be human. And there's sort of an asking us to be human. That's one of the things that I always found most difficult about my understanding of my own church upbringing. I mean, even it was the more watered down version of sin in the Methodist church. It's like, we're just human people and you got to do the best you can. And how do you figure out your own agency and your own fallibility and manage those things together? And I think that's one thing the book is, I think, implicitly trying to figure out is there's a bunch of reasons that the people in this book have been subject to the world. And that is real and that is powerful. And at the same time, at what point do they have some agency not to be mean to their kids, not to think of them as just staying out of jail or not dying as the highest end of their child rearing functions or their relationship to each other? And I think Baldwin himself is conflicted. And frankly, that's one of the great human conflicts. Right. How much do you have agency over your own life versus life is also subjecting you to itself? That's what he's trying to work out. Like, no person and no institution gets off the hook and no person and no institution is one dimensional here. That Baldwin and John recognize the benefits of the church. They also recognize the ways that the church is harmful. They recognize the benefits of like sort of this call to respectability, but also that that's really incomplete and insufficient for protecting anyone out in the world. And that I think he also is recognizing people are trying. Most people are trying their best and still falling short. But there are people that don't seem to be trying as hard as Baldwin or John believe that they should. And it's especially the men here. Like, the novel is just deeply concerned with manhood, with masculinity. The women in the novel universally have a low opinion of the men in their lives. And John is looking around him for an example of manhood that he can aspire to, and he doesn't see one. Like, Baldwin never says it directly, which, thank goodness, like, we don't need authors to say it directly. But he invites us to consider how much of the men in the book, especially Gabriel, how much of their bad behavior is really their fault? How much agency do they have? How much can we hold them responsible for it? And how much of it is the product of existing in a system where your only real options are jails and churches? Like, early in the story, Roy says to their mom, you think that's all that's in the world? jails and churches. And we understand how she's arrived at that way of viewing things and also why Baldwin wants to push against it. Yeah. There's a moment where I kind of like the cloud, it's not clouds, but like the book parted for me a little bit. And usually for me, it's a specific moment. And for me, Florence's aunt has harbored this letter that a woman wrote to her. I'm sorry, I know that Gabriel's first wife, Gabriel's first wife wrote to her expressing her knowledge last suspicion that Gabriel had a child with another woman. And that was a thing. So that kind of proof of his sin, proof of his imperfectibility, that he's not the saint, the prophet that he purports to be. And Florence, who wants nothing more than to tear Gabriel down for complicated reasons, has been harboring this and sort of waiting for the right moment. And she confronts him with the letter. And it doesn't really matter. Right. Like it doesn't change the reality of the situation. It doesn't it's not cathartic, nor is it. Proof of something. You don't get a huge confession. You don't get a huge rending of garments and a tearing down. They already know that Gabriel. Everyone already knows that everyone is broken. And so one specific instance isn't enough. And that feels a little bit emblematic of what Baldwin was trying to think about. It's like, even if you know these things, there's no gotcha here. There's no, you know what, the walls came tumbling down because it's not set up like everyone says it is. And what do you have to do in the meantime? Figure out something else for your life. Yeah, it does. That story, I think, more than anything, just illustrates the dynamics of the world that they're existing in, that rage and power and sex are all tangled together and no one can sort them out in a way that feels really good. Like nobody has threaded that needle among these characters in a way that has resulted in a life that they feel fully satisfied with, choices that they feel fully good about. But they're all, of course, because we're human, looking for escape and looking for ecstasy. And the avenues for that are so limited that it really is sex and church are the only places that they can go to try to have some moment of release and of freedom. And the descriptions of the religious experiences sound a lot like sexual ecstasy here. And Baldwin, it's just masterful how we understand why these characters make some bad decisions about who they sleep with and when and how, and also why the church is so appealing and that it's the same desires at the core of all of those behaviors. There's this one scene early on in the book where he's kind of narrating the neighborhood, like walking through the neighborhood and saying, narrating what's going on and representing what's going on. And there's like someone who is maybe a prostitute that's getting raped. And he and Roy's watching them. And that flows right into his mother and father, Kama, who went to church on Sundays. They did it too. Like there's a real moving in and out of their religious life and their lived life. It's much more fluid and connected where one of the things I picked up on this time and it struck me is the binary choice this particular religious tradition offers in terms of being saved or not being saved. I think he said at one point, you're either saved or it's a binary condition. And what Baldwin is representing here is that that is not true of life. There is nothing in life that's a binary condition. They're all sort of Hegelian dialectics. They're on a spectrum from one to another and they flow back and forth. And in this mode where you're either saved or not, you're going to hell or heaven, walking that precipice for your whole life is frankly kind of impossible. You can't really do that. It's crazy making. And one thing he's doing is showing how the worlds of the human, the body, the natural man, the sin, and the elevated world of the holy and the divine are actually just sort of holding hands. They are not different spheres. They are connected and always bleeding in and out of each other. And that sort of goes against the grain of how he understands his church is asking him to be either always in the light or in the dark. And the truth is, it's some of both and it depends on the day and you do the best you can. But if you're only presented a binary choice and you can't stay on the good side all the time, it doesn't offer more. It doesn't offer like a B plus, I guess, or an A minus or a C plus on a day. It's very difficult to live that way. It really gives lie to the promise that the church makes that if you get saved in the spiritual sense, you will be saved in all of the senses. Forever and forever. That this is the thing that you need That will make life feel better Because all of these saints John father and his mother and his aunt we call them saints on the page And they all been saved and they all want John to get saved. And yet they also continue to struggle. Of course they do. They continue to be human. They continue to make decisions that are ultimately harmful to them. And they all, everybody here, continues to experience this church that is supposed to be the source of community and warmth and salvation. And it is those things, but it is also the source of a lot of shame and humiliation and guilt. And it in itself is not a fully liberating space. Yeah. And that last scene of his own salvation or conversion or whatever you want to say it, it did strike me too. It felt more to me like being in community with the people in that room in that building more than sort of about something that's going on in the Bible. It was very much about being in communion with his community and black people. Yeah, it becomes a more visceral and felt thing than a, you know, I'm thinking about John chapter 3, 16 at this particular moment. Yeah, it's not a spiritual, it's not like a spiritually driven decision. Like he knows all the arguments for believing in God. It's an emotional, physical, like almost chemical thing that happens to him there. Straight thoughts, Rebecca? Where would you like to go? Well, you have this note that I had the same thought as well, that like if Baldwin, if we could, you know, back to the future him into today, what would he think about especially a work of art like Sinners? And I mean, I was thinking about this in the context of the threshing floor scene, which the threshing floor is both a reference to like the place where the wheat is separated from the chaff in a farm. But also that's a Bible reference. But it's what the church members call the floor in front of the altar. where they're dancing and falling down to pray and where John is having this convulsion, vision, whatever it is that's happening to him. Like that to me feels like the big scene in Sinners in the bar or in the juke, you know, of I Lied to You with all the ancestors coming. Unbelievable sequence. Full body experience that as I was reading, it was like, where is Ryan Coogler? Like, what could Ryan Coogler and James Baldwin have done together was something that I thought just a whole lot about. And related to the threshing floor thing, this is one of those books in American literature where it really helps to know some Bible, both for the general points of conversation among the characters. They talk about the upper room, which is a biblical thing. They talk about he had run well, and that's a pull from a Bible verse about running the race before you and what God wants you to do. And really for the names here, like in the New Testament, we get John the Baptist, who's one of Jesus' primary apostles. But we also have John the Revelator, who sees the visions of the apocalypse. And there are direct verse pulls from Revelation in part of John's, in the book, in Go Tell It on the Mountain, in John's religious vision. Gabriel, of course, a biblical name. Esther, who is the woman that Gabriel had an affair and an illegitimate child with, also a biblical name, a woman who sacrificed herself for the nation, who was called for and created, you're told she was created for such a time as this. There's a lot going on here that Baldwin was definitely aware of with names. And you can have a full, I think, reading experience of this book without that, but it really enriches it if you either know or take the time to do some Bible research. Yeah, I mean, it's it's ironical, right? Gabriel in the Bible means hero of God. And that's a loaded thing and hard to live up to. And boy, does Gabriel, let's say, struggle with with living up to in its own way. I was thinking of a center similarly, but also differently. Just this historical 16 Academy Award nominations, thinking about Baldwin wanting to kind of enter his own experience of black culture into the record of American life. this is a sign of how integrated black art and black experience has made it into american life i wonder would he would he be shocked to see how much black culture is still part of the church but also so divorced from it like part of the thing about sinners is historical period piece frankly probably happening around the same time that go tell it on the mountain is happening during prohibition in the late 1930s, but also that it's still dealing with some of the issues that he was wrestling with, you know, the relationship of whiteness and the sort of vampiric sucking of life of white America from Black experience. You know, I think he would be shocked about how prominent, or maybe he wouldn't be. I think he would notice, certainly, but I don't know what he would say. Again, he died in the late 80s, so he would have seen some of the emergence, especially in popular music through the 50s and 60s. But to see it on film and to see this kind of racial storytelling be recognized at a historical level, would he think it's still late or still early? I don't know. So that's why I don't know what he would say. I wouldn't dare. I wouldn't deign to wonder. There are some just even through lines in the text of Go Tell It on the Mountain and the text of Sinners that kind of post-Great Migration analysis of did we actually get the things that we were promised? There's a quote in the book of, there was not, after all, a great difference between the world of this North and that of the South, which she had fled. There was only this difference, that the North promised more. And this similarity, what it promised, it did not give. And what it gave at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took with the other. And there's a moment early in Sinners where Smoke and Stack are saying they came back from Chicago, like not just because they've been stealing from everybody and they have to get out of town, but like Jim Crow is everywhere. And at least it's a real the devil, you know, situation. You know, of course, the deal that they're offered is maybe you want to become a vampire because life as a black person in the South is worse than living as a vampire. And the deal that the characters in Go Tell It on the Mountain are presented with first is come north and it will be better. Make this great migration and it will be better. And then also join the church. Be part of the church. This is the way to a better life. And of course, this is not exclusive to James Baldwin and Ryan Coogler. A lot of black art has explored this. Well, it just so happened that we were like prepping for this the day the Oscar nominations were coming out. So it was like put on our lap to consider together at the same time. Really interesting. What else were stray thoughts from you? Yeah, I mentioned the Joyce before. The most famous line in Portrait of the Artist is a Young Man. So I was mentioning Ulysses and the formal things that Joyce is doing Ulysses that seem there are some shared morphology there. But Joyce explicitly says in that work of autofiction core that his goal as an artist is to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated consciousness of my race. and that seems very appropriate that seems like a useful way of thinking through what Baldwin was trying to do and go tell him out and especially um and it's difficult to understand how much of this stuff was new to see represented in a text uh at this time um I thought is this the best book ever with a 14 year old narrator protagonist it has to be up there and that led me to I would love a list of the best books by the age of narrator starting to like, I don't know, is there an infant narration? I'm sure there's some experimental fiction that's like an uncreated consciousness seeing the world for the first time. But what's the best book with a nine-year-old narrator, a 13-year-old narrator, a 17-year-old narrator going all the way through it? You would have to, I don't, it doesn't come to mind. Maybe there's some book I'm not thinking about, but this is the leader in the clubhouse for the best book ever with a 14-year-old narrator. Totally. Also, just incredible shit for a debut novel. I thought about this all the way through. Like, not just as it's someone's debut, but he started writing it when he was 17 and it comes out when he's 29. Like, we used to be smarter. And James Baldwin. Oh, there's a nice Freudian slip, yeah. Baldwin is smarter and wiser, and there's just the weight of so much life experience, too. But debut novels often have this kitchen sink feeling to them that the authors threw in everything they've been wanting to say for 30 years, and they put it all into the book. And Baldwin has – there's a lot of that, but he's clearly been distilling his perspective. This feels crafted and concentrated that he had some very defined things to say. It doesn't feel overstuffed in the way that a lot of debut novels can. It's tight. 225 pages. Like, you'll love to see that, especially for a book that has so many points to make. And even though, like, the memories and the dreams and the hallucination sequences can be a little hard to track, It felt more to me that they were hard to track because Baldwin trusted the reader than that they were hard to track because he lost control of it. Or whatever you were feeling in those moments was intended. Yes. I felt like I was in good hands the whole time. And that's an unusual feeling to have from any debut novel. So just really incredible. I think part of that, too, is he is putting his fictional avatar in the broader context and structure of his family, community, and history. And that's something that also Joyce does in Portrait of the Artist. He draws this circle where it's a universe, and then Europe, and then Ireland, and then Dublin, then my neighborhood, and then my house, and then me. So he's thinking expansively about his place in the world and what that means. But in order to do that, you have to have some sense of being able to understand the people around you and the structures around you and how I'll put together and your relationship to those things and understanding your place in your community in the world as being part of like an ecosystem. Like there may be apex predators in any ecosystem, but that doesn't mean they're the hero. They're all part of the same thing. And sometimes what you see in a daily novel is the narration, the specific narration of a specific experience, but it feels isolated and contained where this feels connected and expansive. And that is extraordinarily hard to do, especially in 220 pages. Yeah. Quotes. Quotes. Okay. So many. Yes. There were so many things I loved and just so many things that are notable. There's a scene of someone remembering watching, I think it's Gabriel, remembering watching people dancing in a juke joint. And he describes them twisting their bodies into lewd hallelujahs, which. Good line. That's a sentence. Like that could be the apex line of a writer's career. And not a bad encapsulation of the whole book. You know, it's a lewd hallelujah, right? Yeah. Like up there in pop culture hallelujah references with Leonard Cohen. Then also there are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process. People who are never destined or people who are destined never to arrive. Related. Folks can change their way as much as they want to. But I don't care how many times you change your ways. what is in you is in you and it's got to come out. And like, there's a lot here about how much are we fated? Like, let's go back to Oedipus. What's our fate and what can we control? How much can we actually change? Yeah. That's good. Let's see. I broke out a short one in trying to imagine what he was going to be. But he doesn't have a lot of good models for, or goals or targets or, you know, role models, I guess is the word we would use now. Just simply, he would not be like his father or his father's father. He would have another life. And I do wonder, you know, I used to teach this course that was loosely, not loosely, it was called How to Find a Critical Consciousness. And each of the books was like, there'd be an, I was looking for books where there was a moment where the character's like, this value system, this world, this community, this dynamic, it ain't it. And I want to try to forge something else. And I find this maybe the most interesting and maybe the most human and maybe the greatest and highest best use of art is be able to say, no, and then this, or like go out. But this is, I don't want, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to have another life. And this another life is not just rebelling against the church because people have done that. It's something that he doesn't even, he can't even really quantify. And it's a true act of intellectual and emotional courage to think that's possible. And I don't know where it comes from. I find it one of the most interesting things in life and art. We pulled the same quote here. I just noticed. Oh, interesting. Okay, do that one then. Back to back. They sang with all the strength that was in them and clapped their hands for joy. There had never been a time when John had not sat watching the saints rejoice with terror in his heart and wonder. Their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord. Indeed, it was no longer a question of belief because they made that presence real. He did not feel it himself, the joy they felt, yet he could not doubt that it was for them the very bread of life. Could not doubt it, that is, until it was too late to doubt. a fascinating, um, representation of what the inevitability of your own cultural world can feel like that it's beyond consideration, reproach, or even escape. Um, and he doesn't reject it completely, but he also is not going to stay in it. And that's, that's one of the great ambiguities and pleasures of trying to understand what this book is trying to do. Um, the, the, the other inescapable thing, the other Gordian knot that Baldwin in the book cannot really get outside of is this, what his mother says to him, or this is his mother talking to him. She sighed and turned slightly away, looking out the window. Your daddy beats you, she said, because he loves you. Your father, she said, watching him knows best. You listen to your father, I guarantee you, and you won't end up in no jail. And that is one of the prime directives, one of the spoken logical premise of some of this dynamic is the thing we're trying to do is really, the thing we're doing to you to raise you is very bad, but it's not as bad as the thing that could happen to you if we don't. And that's the Faustian bargain being made. And it doesn't always work, but that's the only they know how to do. That's their biggest fear. Yeah. Wilkerson writes about that in The Warmth of Other Sons, her great book about the Great Migration, and that this was part of Black culture at the time, that parents felt that they had to be strict and had to be scary with their children because that was the only way to protect their children from the even worse things of the outside world. Yeah. We talked about that dynamic in those scenes in Their Wives Were Watching God, too. For those of you who have listened to that one, that might sound familiar, too. My last one here I have, this is Frank, who is in the book positioned as John's biological father, but as far as we know, doesn't have an analog in James Baldwin's Realize. And John's mother has asked Frank why he reads so much. How did this happen? Where did you get all this information? And he says, I just decided one day that I was going to get to know everything them white bastards knew, and I was going to get to know it better than they. So no white son of a bitch nowhere would never talk down to me and never make me feel like I was dirt when I could read him the alphabet back front sideways shit. He weren't going to beat my ass then. And if he tried to kill me, I'd take it with him. I swear to my mother, I would. And Frank, unfortunately, that's insufficient to deal with the structure he is up against. And I think that's Richard. Oh, Richard. Yeah, Frank. There's so many names. Draw yourselves a family tree. Yeah, Frank is Florence's first husband. I'm sorry. Yes, you're actually right. Thank you for that correction. All right. Let's help people decide if they want to give this a try, Rebecca. It's for you if what? What kind of people are reading? This is just really high on my list of just do it. Okay. Which we try not to say on every episode because, I mean, that's also the thesis of the show. That's a little bit of a cheat, yes. You note here, and it's right, that this is a really core component of the lineage of 20th and 21st century Black literature. And so if you're interested in what that evolution looks like, reading some Baldwin is an important part of that. I would say implicitly that also means it's the lineage of 20th and 21st century American literature as well, but especially important in that. Yeah. Yeah. The messy overlap of religion in real life. Some people can't give two wits about religion. If you grew up in a church or know someone who does, I do think it has something to say about the attractions, uses, abuses, and shortcomings of a religious experience. It is not wholly embracing or rejecting. And I always find that kind of wrestling, I guess, to continue with that, the most interesting kind of encounter. Yeah. And if you are comfortable with a narrative structure that's going to move back and forth in time and in perspective, like even when we're in one of the three adults prayer reflective moments, we pop back out to what's happening with John. And there's not like a big notice that that's what is happening. So some comfort with a slightly unconventional, but it's not that difficult to track narrative structure. Not for you if like trigger warnings galore. Racial violence, sexual violence, all of the things that you know that were difficult about life for Black people in America are present on the page here. So careful with that. not graphically really or extendedly, but they're definitely there. They're there. And in a very matter of fact way, like that was a straight thought of mine. In the beginning, and who fondled his daughter. Is that what you're thinking of in the very beginning? There's that. And then just like real direct, they're not graphic descriptions, but the fact that it's just a direct sort of matter of fact, like these things are so commonplace that the characters don't feel the need to go into great detail about what happened to someone who was beaten by the police or lynched or, you know, any number of things, that that in itself, just like the dailiness of it is, of course, true and can be difficult to read. And has a different kind of effect and power when represented. I mean, there's no right way to do anything, but this is a different way of showing how eminent and always around those kinds of dynamics were. I guess the other maybe not if is if you're one of if you're a likable character person, you may have a hard time finding purchase here. Yeah. Or if you want a clear interpretation. Yeah. If you want a clear indictment of the church, if you want a clear indictment of like some mode of expression somewhere. Baldwin shows all of these things in like the warts and all like we see the appeal of the church. We also see how it's harmful. We see the ways that John's parents are trying. We also see the ways that they're doing a lot of harm. It's a real, like, no one is one thing. No one is one dimensional. And I mean, I think that's one of the reasons that it endures. But if you want, like, if you want clear moral judgment about and against characters who do objectively bad things, you're not going to find it here. Yeah, it's very clear what right and wrong is, but how that maps into being a good or bad person is not as neat. And that is fascinating to see. Well said. I think this may take the cake for saying yes to the number of questions Immortal Art asks. We do this with all the books. Which of these questions are primary here? What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? And what's the deal with good and evil? Rebecca, it's all of them. It really is. It really is all of them. Is there a primary? Or maybe what's the one it's least about? I'm not even sure how to handle this. It broke my system. Baldwin broke my system, which I should have expected. Maybe. How do I know what I know, actually? Yeah. Because John, at the beginning, it seems like he's never going to get saved. He's not interested in that. And then I realized at the end of the book, when I went back to look at passages I had marked from the beginning, knowing how it ends, stuff that happens in the beginning makes it seem inevitable. Like, oh, of course he's going to end up getting saved. But how does he know what's true about him? How does he come to this conclusion about religion? And the answers to the rest of these questions, I think, flow from that. Right. Right. But they're all there. I would also like to submit a new immortal question. Okay the jury is open for submissions Something along the lines of can people change or how much of our existence is under our control Okay. Free will stuff. Yeah. Free will stuff. Yeah. Do my, do, do, can I have any say. There you go. In my life. Or how much say do I have in my life? There we go. How about that? Free or just free will stuff. Yeah. Free will stuff. Casual. Real or no? Question mark. Yeah, lots of different adventures there. Are we sure this is about art and writing? Not at all. Yeah. Like, we're not at all sure. It's overtly about the power of knowledge. And in the beginning, John thinks that the way he's going to save himself is through education. Yes. Clearly, Baldwin had some feelings about that, too. There's less creativity, art writing stuff on the page, but it seems to me that that's something Baldwin was thinking about. Where did you come down on this? I mean, transmogrified slightly into there's a great scene of preaching and many great speeches. And speechifying and felicity with language is clearly of use and clearly seen as a tool, neither good nor evil, but to the use to which it's put. But that is very much at stake. I think it's about the limitations of knowledge and the limitations of education. I think it's interesting that Baldwin is writing this 14-year-old as being interested in, you know, there's a scene where he comes across the New York Public Library and doesn't feel like he can access it. Yeah. And he won't be welcome or comfortable there, which is both true and not true at the same time. And that's just that was sort of true for the rest of Baldwin's life. That education and art and writing was an entree into a different world, but he was not perfect or fixed forever. So there you go. That's the answer, right? Yeah, I read an interview with him. I think it was the Paris Review Art of Fiction interview where they asked him something about like, and how did did leaving the U.S. save you? How did you get out of everything? And he's like, I'm not sure that I did. Yeah, right. I didn't. I mean, I'm not I'm not all the way back on the terror in the tearing service, but I'm not gone. I'm not away from it. Totally either. Could you get the most of the gist from watching a signal adaptation? You know, sure, there really isn't one. There's an 84 made for TV movie that as far as I can tell, you cannot get if you even if you wanted to. I tried to get it. I think you could maybe rent it, but for a lot of money. But Baldwin was happy with it. Like the cast is a murderer's row of people who were in black pop culture in the 80s. So that's really interesting just to see. But Baldwin was happy with that adaptation. He said that it did not betray the book. And, you know, as I said earlier, I feel like this is really rich material, but it would need to be in the hands of somebody like Ryan Coogler, maybe Ramel Ross, who did the adaptation of Nickel Boys. Or Barry Jenkins, like the Underground Railroad adaptation. There's so much that is internal. Those prayer scenes, you would need a director that could move between, here are the people on their knees in the church, and here is the flashback that they're having. And for both of those existences to be fully realized and just enveloping all of your senses. There's only a couple directors that can really do that. And Coogler is the top of my list for it right now. I find myself uninterested in the idea of an adaptation. Yeah, I don't really want to see one. I don't find myself saying, boy, wouldn't it be cool to see this? I think the book is book. The book does book things in the way that books. If I could get anything from this, I would want the full cast audio. Yeah, I think that's right. I agree with you. With real preaching or maybe, you know, our next question here, Should this be a movie, a musical, a TV series, or something with the Muppets? I think it would have to be a musical to be done well on stage. You have the church and the hymns and people falling on the floor and dancing before the Lord, all of that. But I want to hear these sermons given. I want to hear the preaching. I think the performances of the sermons is the thing that would be most additive to the book experience. Most of the other kinds of things would be a compromised version of what this book's to do, but that would be the one piece that would be. And there's present and past day. Like you get the present day preacher that John has his conversion in front of. But also Gabriel is a revival preacher in the South before he comes to New York. And there's like one really great sermon that he gives that's part of getting the girl. And it's also just part of his own origin story that I want to be in that tent at that revival and see that. Yeah. Miscellaneous trivia adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes and more. Rebecca, what did you uncover? As you said, like you can go down a lot of fun YouTube rabbit holes with James Baldwin and you really should. Specific to this book, just a few things. The original title was Crying Holy, which go tell it on the mountain way better. Crushes Crying Holy. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. That note or else. Good job. Gold star for you. Yeah, good job on that change. It did take Baldwin 10 years to finish the book. And at one point, he didn't think he would ever finish it. He told Studs Terkel in a 1961 interview after the fact that he was so ashamed of where he came from that he wasn't sure he could actually tell the story and that it was specifically about the Black church, that driving source of shame for him. I don't know if you went back and read some of the original early reviews. That's rough reading now. A lot of academic white guys bringing a lot of academic language and approaching what it felt to me. Even though I don't think this is how black people actually are, I thought it was a good book. It's like, whoa. Yeah, it's real rough. And the most popular Goodreads quote is the one about there are people in the world for whom coming along is a perpetual process. people who are never destined to arrive. Yeah. Sidebar, Studs Terkel is a pinch and ass name, by the way. Also, if you've ever seen a photo of Studs Terkel. The eminence of Studs Terkel is one of the more confounding and hard things to explain. And I don't know that there's an equivalent now. If you're younger than us, do you even know who Studs Terkel is? I barely know who Studs Terkel is, but a hugely important cultural figure. And I was thinking when I saw you put this in here, I was like, who would I even make, I guess it would be a podcaster of some kind. I have no idea. And no big interview podcaster is worthy of a comparison to Studs Circle. It's just an unbelievable name. I need to go find out, did he get that name somehow? Is it ironical? What's going on here? Yeah. Hot takes. Not a lot of hot takes for us here. It feels sacrilegious to have a bunch of hot takes, frankly, about It does. Yeah. Just like, I don't want the spirit of James Baldwin to come back for me. Yeah. I guess mine is it's just underrated as a teenage coming of age novel. I think the radiation of Baldwin's name is warranted. But I think at a very basic level, this is a coming of age novel of a 14-year-old, a precocious one, an aware one. and of course written in hindsight, but is essentially about a kid coming to terms with themselves and the world in which they live. As a teenager, YA and those sort of genres have their own strictures. It doesn't apply in those strict terms. But as a coming of age novel, it is as good and complicated and fraught and renumerative as anything you're likely to read. Is this the best debut novel in the American canon? That's a really good question. I'm trying to think of, this just occurred to me. But like, I mean, it's up, the bluest eye is up there. Well, do you think it's better than To Kill a Mockingbird? I mean. Yes. I do. Better than The Secret, just the things we've covered, better than The Secret History. Yeah. Just for canonical reasons, it's better than The Secret History. V by Thomas Pynchon, I think was his, I think we're now in interesting company at that level. It's up there. And like V, I mean, Pension is canonized, but is V canonized? Like in what we think of as the American canon. Well, I guess those are maybe different questions. And maybe they have different answers. I think V is so technically precocious and vertiginous that it's hard to put against them. And it's not a I don't enjoy this kind of pitting against each other. I put it alongside of it. Right. It's a real hot take exercise. Like, I don't know if this is the best debut novel in American literature ever, period. But like in the canon, it's really it's really stunning. It's really, it's really something else. I guess for further reading, that's maybe a good transition. It stands alongside the greats of certainly African-American literary history. Like it's very much a continuum. Like you say, Their Eyes Were Watching God into Ellis. You know, Their Eyes Were Watching God into Wright, into this, into Ellis, into Morrison is a through line. And they're different. They're not all the same. You make yourself a little miniature syllabus by do their eyes were watching God, read Native Son, read Invisible Son or Invisible Man, pick up the bluest eye. Also, you mentioned the Nicholas Boggs book that came out last year, a huge biography of Baldwin called Baldwin, A Love Story. And then The Warmth of Other Sons by Isabel Wilkerson, which great work of narrative nonfiction and oral history about the Great Migration. I was thinking, this is not really a read-alike, but I was thinking of, are there equivalent scenes of white Pentecostal experience in art and culture? And the one that jumped to mind, maybe because Tarantino was slagging him recently as Paul Dano and There Will Be Blood. And there will be blood. But I think those scenes and those figures are interesting to think in context and how they're presented as differently and similarly operating. But I think that's another interesting way to tack is this is about American ecstatic religious experience. I just had to Google it, but it's a work of nonfiction from the 90s called Salvation on Sand Mountain that's about Appalachian Pentecostal snake handlers. Yes. And I mean, that's written by a journalist, but the depictions of those worship services and the rituals are pretty stunning. I read that. I will read, as listeners of the Book Riot podcast know, I love a religious sect. I love a cult. I'll read any sort of journalistic exploration of those. And Salvation on Sand Mountain was memorable. Final cocktail party crib sheet, three to five takeaways. You have one here and I've got one here. One of the great literary interrogations of the uses and the abuses of religion and of the dangers of getting high on your own supply, that Gabriel is an all-time tragic figure. And his belief that he is destined for something great and that his bad behavior is justified because it's in service of this mission from God that he believes he's on is just kind of an all-time. One of the great scenes of rationalizations you're ever going to see in a book. Yeah. And just up there in like, we didn't have the language of intersectionality when Baldwin was writing, but this story and these characters exist at intersections of race, gender, sexuality, religion, class, obviously. But one of the great works that does that. I saw in an interview that Baldwin said this was the book he would write if he could never write anything else. Wow. Which I thought was pretty interesting. It reminds me of that scene in Walk the Line, the movie, where Johnny Cash is sort of performing for Sam Phillips and Sam Phillips is bored. He's like, is that really what you would say if you're lying dead on the side of the road and you had one chance to say to God? I don't remember the line exactly. And then he does something different. But if you've got one, if you had one of the books that, and he could do nothing else, this is the one he would do. We haven't really talked about this in kind of the relationship to the rest of the Baldwin stuff. I think Giovanni's Room is more read now. It's a love story, and I think it's a little more approachable. He's better known maybe as a purveyor of nonfiction essayistic intellectual takes. I think probably this book is now under-read significantly. Yes. It only has 80,000 Goodreads readings. Like, hasn't even cracked 100K. I didn't think to go back and look at that. I was astonished. Like, I was going to just look and see, you know, looking for popular quotes, doing my general Goodreads, poking around. But that a book that is part of so many people's educational experiences. But I think you're right that the nonfiction gets assigned more often and Giovanni's Room gets assigned more often. But I was really stunned to see that it was under 100,000 Goodreads ratings. That's very low for a book that is this old and this important and well-known. Yeah, I think the pleasures of it are hard to call pleasures. And I think that just makes for harder to people for pickup on their own if they, you know, most of the books that get read more or even meaningfully outside of the classroom have one or more pleasures that attend to the sort of artistic concerns. And whatever the edification here, it's hard to say that there's many parts of it that are pleasurable in a simple sense on a character or story or, you know, whatever else that might be. Out of curiosity, I just looked. The Bluest Eye has 301,000. Like it's more current. Also, Oprah talked about it. But that's an equally when you say the pleasures of it are not like overt pleasures. It's the same class of fiction. Right. Right. What is, while you're looking at it, what does Giovanni's Room have for good reads reviews? Oh, good question. Or ratings. I would assume an order, not an order, but like twice as many? Yeah, 253,000. So more on the order. Quarter of a million. Yeah, it's just, I was in Powell's last night and I looked at the Baldwin shelf and it's not a perfect representation of relative weighting of sales, but it's not that. And there were like two copies of Gotella the Mountain and like 15 of Giovanni's Room right there. Giovanni's Room, The Fire Next Time is 121, so Giovanni's Room is about twice. That gets assigned all the time. Yeah, and then If Beale Street Could Talk, Go Tell It on the Mountain, write like neck and neck within a couple hundred of each other. I have never read If Beale Street Could Talk. I haven't either. That's my one big blank on Baldwin. I know there's a well-regarded adaptation that came out recently, and I meant to get to it and just didn't. All right, final beat, a zero to well-read score. Each score gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. The five categories we have instituted thus far are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, and oh, damn factor. Historical importance, Rebecca, I think is pretty damn high. Nine, 10. I think it's a nine. Nine, eight and a half or nine. It's less than 100 years old. So, you know, I tend to wait. Older things are more historically important. That's why the historical part is in there. Yeah. I mean, I think for the time in American history and culture that it represents, like in the long arc of the literary universe, it's going to be harder to find a book about this moment that does more things better than. Yeah. Readability is kind of a mixed bag here. There's no individual sentence that's hard to understand, but the plot is not linear, nor is the plot really the point. There are scenes that are quite difficult to feel like you are confident that you know what's trying to be accomplished in that scene because of the sort of embodied metaphysical nature of it. On the other hand, it's quite easy to get it. I don't find myself resisting keeping the pages turning, Rebecca. So I'm not really sure what to do with the reading experience. I think I would go with like a seven. OK. Say more. Seven or eight. the parts that are smooth are really smooth. Like the opening section where we're just with John walking around the city. His family is talking to him. Like that's really direct. The stuff that's challenging is having your grip on what's going on when he's having these hallucinatory moments and when we're in the prayers with people. But I think that's intentional. No, I think it's intentional. Sure. The consciousness is slippery. They're praying. They're in one room and they're also thinking about something else. And we move back and forth through those spaces as they move back and forth through them and intellectually and emotionally. But the backstories are also quite I mean, they're kind of like they're kind of gripping. Like what's going to happen there in this situation? It is gripping. And like the reveal, we don't find out that Gabriel is not John's biological father until like midway through the book and how and when that's revealed and that that's the source of the tension between them. That's why Gabriel hates John and is so hard on him. Like that's masterful that it's saved for later in the book. The ways that some of the stuff spins out. I think it's pretty readable on a sentence level if you can if you're willing to just like kind of let it wash over you and be OK with not having a full handle on everything all the time. It's kind of it's sort of an Ouroboros where it's snakes is your own tail. But if you kind of know going into it that these visions ecstatic sections are going to be more difficult to parse, that actually makes them easier to deal with. So like even having this conversation means that it's going to be more readable to you right now if you haven't read this than if you go into it cold. And we tend to sort of – we're trying to sort it if you go into a cold. So, yeah, I think I would agree with you in that six or seven range. Okay. In there. The current relevance of central questions, I have eight, nine, ten. It doesn't get higher than this. Yeah, yeah. Ten. It's not obviously about specific things right now, but they're versions and echoes and ancestors of them. book nerd read cred. I think, given what we just said about the Goodreads stuff, and again, it's high. If you've gone and read this, not many people have, and combined with its under-readness and that historical importance number we get, that manufactures a pretty high number. Where would you peg it? I'm going to go eight and a half, nine. Yeah, I agree. We'll give them a nine. We'll round up. Oh, damn factor, Rebecca. Also high. This is our kind of a catch-up, je ne sais quoi. I didn't know books could do this. I can't get this anywhere else. The singular of the artistic experience and artistry here, also quite high. Also very, yeah. And this points back to what we were saying about like not really being interested in an adaptation or an end this story in any other format. It really does things that only books can do. And it does them at a high level. I mean, again, that it's a debut novel is just incredible. If you grade on a little bit of The curve for debut, it only enhances its reputation. Yeah, and considered his biggest literary achievement in many circles, which is also saying something given the career that James Baldwin goes on to have here. The O.J.M. factor is high. Eight and a half, nine? Yeah, I was thinking eight and a half, too. I think one thing that maybe is a demerit on it, and this comes down to personal opinion. And I didn't find myself looking at an individual sentence sort of on its own as being striking. Now, the lewd hallelujah maybe is the one that's one. But he's also not trying to do that. Like he's trying to do something else here because he's thinking of a 14-year-old, but he's going inside and out. But I'm perfectly happy with an O-DAM factor. A hell of a book, Rebecca. That brings us to the end of our formal syllabus here, Office Hours, which we're going to take a quick break. This will be the end of the recording, the main feed. But for those of you subscribed over on Patreon.com slash zero to well read, you can get detailed show notes. You can sign up for the free newsletter. Vanessa Diaz or managing editor book riot is helping us put together a companion piece, but it can kind of stand on its own as well to learn more about Baldwin. And I'm sure she'll find an interview and other things that we have yet discovered ourselves here. And there's a couple of different membership options. One include ad free early access to episodes. And then another one includes that and the additional discussion. we're going to do here in a few minutes of office hours, go false on the socials at Zero to Well Read podcast. Email us at Zero to Well Read at podcast.com. At bookriot.com. What did I say? Who knows? I can't even tell. Zero to Well Read at bookriot.com. Thank you so much to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read. Go check out thriftbooks.com. And Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, thank you so much. this was a really good one