Go Tell It on the Mountain

James Baldwin 1953

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
race religion Harlem coming of age

Our Take

John Grimes's conversion experience in a Harlem storefront church is Baldwin's account of everything Black America had been forced to contain: the sexuality, the rage, the yearning, the faith that was simultaneously liberation and tool of oppression. The night on the threshing floor is one of the great set pieces in American literature.

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