James Baldwin (1924-1987)

• most of his work deals with racial and sexual issues in mid-20th century United States
• his novels mime the complex social and psychological pressures related to being both black and homosexual

Notes On A Native Son

• castigates Uncle Tom's Cabin for being too sentimental
• also repudiates Richard Wright's Native Son for portraying Bigger Thomas as an angry black man
• also points out how rent is expensive in Harlem and how although there are black politicians, the President is white
• criticizes how the black press emulates the white press
• the black Church seems to him to be a unique forum for spelling out black injustice
• ponders on anti-Semitism among the blacks and comes to the conclusion that it is because Jews are white and more powerful than blacks
• explains how his paranoid father died of tuberculosis when he was 19 and how he was often turned down in segregated places

Go Tell It On the Mountain

Characters:

• John
• Elizabeth
• Gabriel
• Florence
• Deborah
• Royal
• Esther

Summary:

• John has been raised by his mother Elizabeth and her preacher husband Gabriel, who is a strict disciplinarian and abusive to his children and wife
• Florence was born a freed slave who chose to continue to work in the south for a white family Her mother always favored Florence's younger brother Gabriel, causing Florence to feel a need to escape. Florence buys a one-way train ticket to New York and there marries a dissolute man named Frank who later dies in France during WWI.
• Gabriel was a drunk womanizer during his teenage years before his career as a preacher. After his conversion he forms a relationship with a childhood friend of Florence, a woman named Deborah who was gang-raped as a teenager by white men. However, Gabriel is unable to resist his attraction to a woman named Esther and impregnates her. Gabriel steals his wife's savings to give to Esther but she dies giving birth to their son, Royal. Royal knows his father but not of their relationship and is eventually killed in a bar fight. Deborah admonishes Gabriel for abandoning Esther and his son.
• Elizabeth was very close to her father but when her mother dies, she is forced to live with a cold aunt by the law. Elizabeth goes to New York with her boyfriend, Richard, who never carried out his promise to marry Elizabeth. He is arrested for a robbery he didn't commit and commits suicide on his first night home after his acquittal. Elizabeth, then just a few months pregnant with John, takes a job where she meets Florence, and Florence introduces her to Gabriel whom she marries.
• The final chapter returns to the church where John falls to the flor in a spiritual fit and has a series of visions of hell and heaven. When he awakes, he says that he is saved and he accepts Jesus.