Go Tell It on the Mountain: Part 1: The Seventh Day Summary & Analysis

For as long as John can remember, it has always been assumed that he will become a preacher like his father, Gabriel. John himself accepts this as a given and has never thought much about it—until the day of his fourteenth birthday—but it is “already too late.”

John’s first memories, which are his “only memories,” are of going to church on Sunday mornings with his family. His father, Gabriel, would lead them in prayer, and his mother, Elizabeth, “looked almost young” in her best dresses and “straightened hair.” John’s younger brother, Roy, was always on his best behavior, and Sarah, John’s sister, would put a ribbon in her hair and be “fondled by her father.” Ruth, the baby, was dressed in her best as well.

John’s family’s church, the Temple of the Fire Baptized, is just a few blocks from their Harlem home, near the local hospital. Elizabeth has given birth to most of her children at the hospital, and each time she goes there, John thinks, his mother comes “back with a stranger.” She will “soon be going away again,” and even though John cannot yet appreciate any “swelling” in his mother, he knows this to be true.

Each Sunday when John and his family walk to church, they pass “sinners” along the way. Men, “wrinkled and dusty,” still dressed in Saturday’s clothes, and women with “tight, bright dresses” and cigarettes between their lips. The sinners “laugh” and “fight,” and “the women fight like the men.” John always feels ashamed as they pass, but Roy is always “amused.” Roy will likely grow up to be one of these men “if the Lord does not change his heart.”

Once, Roy and John watched a couple of “sinners” in a nearby basement, and “they did it standing up.” John refused to watch again, but Roy, who told John “he had done it with some girls down the block,” liked to watch. John’s parents, Gabriel and Elizabeth, who go to church, do “it too,” and sometimes John listens to them, “over the sound of rats’ feet” and “rat screams” and the “music and cursing” coming from the “harlot’s house downstairs.”

The Temple of the Fire Baptized is “not the biggest church in Harlem,” but it is “the holiest and best.” Gabriel is “head deacon,” but the pastor, Father James, preaches on Sundays and leads revivals. John’s family is constantly late to church on Sundays, which is “always [Elizabeth’s] fault.” According to John’s father, she can never get “the children ready on time.” Upon arriving at church, they first go to Sunday school. John didn’t use to pay attention, and this “earned him the wrath of his father,” but near his fourteenth birthday, with the “pressures of church and home uniting to drive him to the alter,” he wanted “to appear more serious.”

Appearing “more serious,” however, is hard for John because of Elisha, his Sunday school teacher and Father James’s nephew. Elisha is from Georgia, and at seventeen, he is “already saved” and a preacher. John frequently “stares” at Elisha during lessons, and he “admires” the “leanness, and grace, and strength, and darkness” of him. Roy never pays attention either, presumably for different reasons, but it is “different” for him—no one expects from Roy what they expect from John.

Sunday service always begins with Elisha at the piano. To John, it seems as if “this music has been with [him]” ever since his “first drawn breath.” The song doesn’t much matter; it is the congregation’s singing that makes John “believe in the presence of the Lord.” John doesn’t “feel it himself,” but he never “doubts” that for those at church, it is “the very bread of life.” Everyone insists that “one day,” the “Power will possess” John.

One Sunday after service, Father James had “uncovered sin in the congregation of the righteous.” Elisha and Ella Mae, a young church member, were seen “walking disorderly” and “were in danger of straying from the truth.” Father James told the congregation that Elisha and Ella Mae had not yet sinned by “plucking” the “unripe fig” from the tree “too early,” but their behavior would surely lead to no good. Father James was only “exercising” his “duty” as the leader of their “flock,” which isn’t an easy task. The “way of holiness” and “the Word” is a “hard way,” and celibacy until marriage is what is “demanded” by the “the way of the cross.”

John wakes early in the morning on his fourteenth birthday, which is on a Saturday in March of 1935. The house is still and quiet, and he can feel a “menace in the air around him.” Something “irrevocable” has happened deep inside John, and as he stares at a stain on the ceiling that transforms into “a woman’s nakedness,” he is sure that he has “sinned.” In the quiet darkness, John feels as if all the world has been “saved,” and he is left behind, “with his sinful body, to be bound in hell a thousand years.”

John had “sinned with his hands” that which is “hard to forgive. In the school lavatory, alone, thinking of the boys.” John has frequently been warned against this sin, but he has “made his decision.” He won’t “be like [Gabriel].” He will “have another life.” Besides, John is smart and does well in school, and many have told him that he has “a Great Future” as “a Great Leader of His People.” Leading people doesn’t exactly interest John, but the encouragement has opened in his mind “a great brass gate,” beyond which “people did not live in the darkness of his father’s house.” Beyond the gate, John is not forced to pray in his father’s church, and he can “wear fine clothes,” eat “good food,” and visit the theater whenever he wants.

It is not only black people who “praise John” (according to John, “colored people” cannot “really know”) but white people too. Since he was a young child, John has been aware, be it with a “wild uneasiness,” of his “individual existence.” Even the school principal, a stern woman with “white hair,” has told John he is “a very bright boy,” and he considers his intellect to be like “a shield,” or even “a weapon.” Inside John is “a power that other people lack,” and he will use it “to save himself, to raise himself,” and perhaps win the “love which he so longed for.”

John’s intellect is part of his “identity,” which means it is not “subject to death or alteration” or “destruction.” But it is also part of the “wickedness for which [Gabriel] beats him” and what John clings to “in order to withstand his father.” Despite Gabriel’s cruelty, he never really wins. There is a part of John that his father can’t “reach”—John’s “hatred” and “intelligence”—and he can’t wait for the day when he can “curse” his father “on his deathbed.” Even though John has been raised “surrounded” by “saints” and “prayer,” his “heart is hardened against the Lord.” Gabriel is “the ambassador of the King of Heaven,” and John can’t “bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father,” which John refuses to do.

At some point in the early morning, John falls asleep and wakes again to the sound of Roy arguing with Elizabeth. John enters the kitchen where his brother and mother are fighting. The room is “narrow and dirty,” and no amount of scrubbing can “ever make it clean.” Dirt covers every surface and stands in contrast to the scrubbed dishes and pots. The windows “gleam” against the perpetual dust that falls, and John thinks: “He who is filthy, let him be filthy still.” Is he not the one “who is filthy” after all?

John looks at Elizabeth’s “perpetual scowl.” His mother looks differently in his dreams. There, she is “young and proud,” with a “beautiful” face that “no evil can undo.” The differences between these “two faces” has created a “darkness” and “mystery” that scares John, and sometimes it makes him “hate” his mother. As John sits at the kitchen table, he feels uneasy. He is worried his family has forgotten his birthday again.

Elizabeth and Roy continue their argument, which is about Gabriel. “One thing you can’t say,” Elizabeth says to Roy, “you can’t say he ain’t always done his best to be a father to you and to see to it that you ain’t never gone hungry.” Roy is irritated. “He got a belly, too, I know it’s a shame the way that man eats.” Roy claims he just doesn’t want his father to beat him all the time. “I ain’t no dog,” Roy says. “Your Daddy beats you,” Elizabeth answers, “because he loves you.”

“Is Daddy a good man?” John asks Elizabeth without thinking. “Looks to me like he’s a mighty good man,” Sarah says. “He sure is praying all the time.” Elizabeth tells her children they are simply too young to appreciate how “lucky” they are to have a father like Gabriel. Roy laughs. They aren’t allowed to go to the theater or play with friends in the streets. Gabriel only wants them to pray and go to church. “Don’t know what I done to be so lucky,” Roy says.

“You listen to your father,” Elizabeth says to Roy, “I guarantee you, you won’t end up in no jail.” Roy becomes angry. “You think that’s all that’s in the world is jails and churches?” Roy asks her. “You ought to know better than that, Ma.” Elizabeth quickly dismisses him and says, “There ain’t no safety except you walk humble before the Lord.” Elizabeth tells Roy to polish the woodworking in the dining room and tasks John with sweeping the front room. John agrees, as always. Indeed, it seems she does not remember his birthday.

Cleaning the rug in the front room is an impossible task. John can “sweep forever,” but the rug is never clean. For every discarded pan of dirt, little “demons” bring in “twenty more.” He thinks of the rug as an “impossible, lifelong task,” like a man he read about who was “cursed” to “push a boulder” up a mountain, only to have it pushed back down again.

After sweeping the rug, John must “excavate” his family’s “goods and gear” from the dust on the fireplace mantel. He begins with the mirror, and as he polishes it, he looks at his face. He looks the same as always. The “hand of Satan” is not “yet visible.” Gabriel always tells John he is “ugly” and that he has “the face of Satan,” but John doesn’t see Satan when he looks in the mirror. As he studies his face, John can’t answer the question he “most passionately desires to know: whether his face is ugly or not.”

John begins to dust the objects on the mantel without “seeing” them, including cards and pictures, “flowered mottoes,” and a metal snake “poised to strike.” Engraved in one of the mottoes is a spiritual saying welcoming all worshippers to God, and the other is a biblical quote from the Gospel of John. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever should believe in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Between the mottoes was the snake, "biding the time to strike.”

On the mantel are pictures of John and his siblings, but John is the only one who is naked. He is just an infant in the picture, but John feels “shame and anger” at his nakedness. There is a photo of Gabriel’s sister, John’s Aunt Florence, and one of Elizabeth taken after her marriage to John’s father. There is even a photo of Gabriel, taken long ago in the South when he was married to a woman named Deborah, who is “now in Heaven.” John finds it strange thinking about Deborah. Had she lived, John would never have been born. She knew Gabriel before John ever did, and John wonders if she would know “how to make his father love him.”

With his work finished, John stares out the window at the neighborhood boys playing stickball. He wants to play with them but knows he can’t. He longs to be with the “boys in the street, heedless and thoughtless, wearing out his treacherous and bewildering body.” Suddenly, Elizabeth calls to him from the kitchen. He goes to her, and she holds out her hand to him. “I didn’t never ask you,” she says giving him a small pile of coins, “what you wanted for your birthday. But you take this, son, and go out and get yourself something you think you want.”

John smiles and takes the money. “I know,” Elizabeth says, “there’s a whole lot of things you don’t understand.” Her words are kind as she smiles. “You put your faith in the Lord, Johnny, and He’ll surely bring you out.” She tells him that “everything works together good” for those who “love the Lord.” She seems to “know he is in trouble.” John’s “trouble” is “also her own,” but John knows that they aren’t talking about the same thing. If she truly knew of John’s “trouble,” she would most certainly be “angry and no longer proud of him.”

John leaves the house and heads in the direction of Central Park with his coins. At the “center of the park,” outside the path where white women and men walk their dogs, is a small mountain. John knows the path to the hill as if “by instinct,” and at the top is the “brilliant sky” and the New York City skyline. The view gives him “a sense of power,” and he runs to the top, ready to “throw himself headlong into the city that glows before him.” At the “summit,” John stops for a moment. The city below has “no love for him.” The people there don’t “see him,” and if they do, they “smirk.” Gabriel claims that John’s soul will “find perdition” in the city.

John has seen the “marks of Satan” on people’s faces as they wait in lines outside of theaters. The movie posters hanging on the buildings “invite people to sin,” and the “roar of the damned” fills Broadway. The road leading to “death” is “broad,” but the road that leads to “life eternal” is “narrow.” This “narrow way, the way of the cross,” leads to “humiliation forever” and life and job like Gabriel’s. Looking to the bottom of the mountain, John begins to run. “If it’s wrong, I can always climb back up,” he thinks to himself.

On Fifth Avenue, John sees “graceful women in fur coats” shopping for “silk dresses, and watches, and rings.” John wonders what church they all go to. Some of these people have been nice to him, and it is “hard to think of them burning in Hell forever.” But Gabriel says that “all white people are wicked,” and that they are not “to be trusted.” According to John’s father, “not one of them has ever loved a [n_____],” and since “John is a [n_____],” he will soon learn “how evil white people can be.” John has heard stories from the South of slavery and death and “worse.”

Black people are “forbidden” to live in this part of the city, but no one bothers John as he walks down the street. Still, he doesn’t “dare” enter any of the shops, as “this world is not for him.” Off Fifth Avenue are the movie houses, and this is John’s favorite part of the city—not because of the theaters but because of the library. John has a library card issued from the Harlem branch, which gives him the right to borrow books from any library in the city, but he never goes into the sprawling building full of white people. Once he has read all the books in Harlem, John will go in. Then, he will have “the poise to enter any building in the world.”

John stops outside a movie house and decides to go in. He buys a ticket quickly and rushes in the door “for fear that one of the saints might” see him. Sitting in the darkness, John tries to make himself “invisible” to “deny his presence there.” The movie begins and features a “most evil” woman. She is promiscuous and drinks, and she “never thinks of prayer.”

The woman dies, and John thinks about “her dreadful end.” If it weren’t “blasphemous,” John would think that the Lord brought him to the movies to “show him an example of the wages of sin.” He thinks of “his soul’s redemption” and “struggles to find a compromise between” the road that leads to “life everlasting” and the road that leads to “the pit.” It is a “narrow way” for sure, John thinks, and he grows uncomfortable. To him, it seems like “God’s injustice” that he is forced to “make so cruel a choice.”

Later, as John returns home, he feels “weary.” From down the street, he sees Sarah run out the front door of their house and head in the opposite direction, toward the drug store. By the time John reaches the house, Sarah is coming back with supplies from the store, and he notices that there is blood on the steps leading up to the house. “Roy got stabbed with a knife,” she yells and runs into the house. Aunt Florence is there too, and she meets John at the door. “This bad brother of yours done gone out and got hisself hurt,” she says softly. John can tell by the tone of her voice there is no real danger. Roy is not “going to die.”

“I’m sure going to be having some questions to ask you in a minute, old lady,” Gabriel yells to Elizabeth. “I’m going to be wanting to know just how come you let this boy go out and get half killed.” Florence steps in suddenly. “Oh, no, you ain’t,” she says sternly. No one let Roy do anything, she says, Roy does what he wants. Elizabeth “can’t put no ball and chain on him,” she says. “She got her hands full right here in this house, and it ain’t her fault if Roy got a head just hard as his father’s.”

“You got an awful lot to say,” Gabriel says to Florence. “It’s just the mercy of God that this boy didn’t lose his eye. Look here,” he says to John, forcing him to look at Roy’s face. His forehead has been gashed by a knife, slicing his eyebrow in half. Over time Roy’s scar will fade, but the “violently divided eyebrow” will stay forever. “You see?” Gabriel asks. It was a group of white boys who had cut Roy. “This is what white folks does to [n_____s]. I been telling you, now you see.”

Elizabeth reminds Gabriel that Roy had tried to cut the white boys too and wasn’t exactly innocent. “I reckon you know,” says Gabriel sarcastically, “all about a mother’s love.” He asks her “how a woman can sit in the house all day” while her son goes and gets “half butchered.” Gabriel remembers his own mother, Rachel. “God rest her soul,” he says, “she’d have found a way.” Florence laughs. “She didn’t find no way to stop you,” she says. Elizabeth turns to her husband. No, she can’t stop him, she says, but neither can Gabriel. “Ain’t nobody to blame, Gabriel,” she says.

Gabriel looks at Elizabeth and, “with all his might,” reaches out and “slaps her across the face.” Roy sits up instantly. “Don’t you slap my mother,” he says. “That’s my mother. You slap her again, you black bastard, and I swear to God I’ll kill you.” Gabriel stares at his son. “Gabriel,” Elizabeth interrupts. “Let us pray…” Gabriel silently removes his belt and begins to beat Roy. Roy cowers and “shivers” but doesn’t make a noise.

As Gabriel winds up to strike Roy again, Florence approaches and stops his arm midair. “Yes, Lord,” she says to him, “you was born wild, and you’s going to die wild. You can’t change nothing, Gabriel. You ought to know that by now.”

By six o’clock that night, John opens the church for “tarry service.” Service doesn’t begin until eight, and people usually don’t arrive until eight thirty, as the Lord is “sufficiently tolerant to allow the saints time” for “Saturday-night shopping” and house cleaning. As John enters the church, the silence “presses on him, cold as judgement.”

“Praise the Lord,” Elisha says as he enters the church. John welcomes Elisha and the two begin to banter back and forth. Elisha’s presence causes John’s “mood to change,” and their teasing and joking increases. Suddenly, Elisha “rushes” at John, lifting him off the ground in a friendly wresting match. John “struggles and squirms,” and begins to hit Elisha’s shoulders and arms. He “thrusts his knees against Elisha’s belly” and is “determined” not to be “conquered.” As John is “filled with a wild delight,” they stumbled over the chairs, and Elisha’s hold breaks. They sit awhile, recovering and smiling, and then get up to clean the church for tarry service.

“Boy, ain’t it time you was thinking about your soul?” Elisha asks John as they clean. Elisha says John still has “Adam’s mind” and is thinking too much about friends, and girls, and movies. “When the Lord saves you,” John says, “He burns out all that old Adam,” and you then “get all your joy in walking and talking with Jesus.” He warns John that too many people think they can “sneak into Heaven on their deathbed,” but not “everybody lies down to die,” Elisha says.

“Do you want to be saved, Johnny,” Elisha asks. “I don’t know,” John answers. Elisha asks him to try. “Just fall on your knees one day and ask him to help you pray,” Elisha says. Suddenly, the church doors open, and two saints, Sister McCandless and Sister Price enter. “Praise the Lord, son,” they say. Sister McCandless is a big woman, “one of the biggest and blackest God has ever made,” and she has a voice and presence for preaching. She travels all over the North doing the Lord’s work. She is planning to soon go out “into the field” to preach, and she has “buckled on her traveling shoes.”

Sister Price and Sister McCandless visit with Elisha and John a bit, mostly talking about how wonderful Father James is. “Indeed, that is the truth,” Sister Price says. Not every pastor will “set down his own nephew” for “no big fault.” Sister McCandless interrupts. “Ain’t no such thing as a little or a big fault,” she says. “You is in the Word or you ain’t—ain’t no halfway with God.” She suggests they sing a song to begin their service as they wait for the other saints, and Elisha begins to play the piano.

Elisha plays “This May be My Last Time,” and they all begin to sing. “This may be the last time I pray with you, / This may be my last time, I don’t know.” John tries “not to hear the words” as he sings with the others. He doesn’t want to sing, but he knows they will “force” him if he doesn’t. Still, he refuses to clap. John’s “heart” tells him that he has “no right to sing or rejoice.

The church doors again open, and Gabriel walks in with Elizabeth and Florence. John has never actually seen Florence in church before, but now it seems as if she has been “summoned to witness a bloody act.” God appears to have led her to the church for some reason. “The Lord is riding on the wind tonight,” John thinks, “what might that wind” speak?