In the following excerpt, Bawer discusses some of the religious aspects of Go Tell It on the Mountain.

Baldwin's own most valiant attempt to capture the "ambiguity and irony of Negro life" was his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which centers on a Harlem family not unlike his own. Like the Trinitarian God, the book is divided into three parts: John" who is the focus of the first and third parts (and who, like Baldwin, is known as "Frog Eyes"), is the stepson of Gabriel, a preacher who believes "that all white people [are] wicked, and that God [is] going to bring them low," and who feels that God has promised him a son to carry on his holy work; the second part, itself divided in three and consisting largely of flashbacks, outlines the earlier lives of Gabriel (who many years ago, we learn...