Perkins is an Assistant Professor of English at Prince George's Community College in Maryland and has written numerous critical articles for essay collections, journals, and educational publishers. In the following essay she explores how the variety of narrative voices in Go Tell It on the Mountain illustrate how psychological and social forces can impede the search for self.

In his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin divides his narrative into three distinct parts. The first section, "The Seventh Day," sets the novel's central action, what Shirley S. Allen, in "Religious Symbolism and Psychic Reality in Baldwin's 'Go Tell It on the Mountain,'" calls John's "initiation into manhood." John completes that initiation and discovers a sense of self in the closing section, "The Threshing Floor."

Between these two sections comes "The Prayers of the Saints," which is broken into three narratives that focus...