Go Tell It on the Mountain

JACQUELINE GOLDSBY: Go Tell It on the Mountain tells the story of John Grimes, and the novel is set on his birthday, his 14th birthday. And he has to make a tremendous decision: Will he enter into the world of his father’s church? Or will John pursue his own passions, which he has yet to really name for himself, but he knows that he longs for something more?

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: Dr. Jacqueline Goldsby is a professor at Yale University, where she has taught many classes on James Baldwin and his novels. She’s currently writing a book that examines Baldwin’s life and his creative practice as a novelist.

GOLDSBY: What we have here are two editions of Go Tell It on the Mountain: the first edition, a hardcover book in a dust jacket, and the first paperback edition. They’re really strikingly different covers. When we look to the hardcover copy, there’s a very dignified-looking family, well-groomed in their Sunday best. 

The cover of the paperback edition tells a different story in part because Signet, the publisher, specialized in designing cover art to pronounce sexy, racy themes in a book. But this isn’t tarted up just to draw our attention as readers.

GATES: The paperback’s cover artist, in effect, is bending time. The seduction John witnesses here is not something he actually sees in the book—it happens in one of the novel’s flashbacks, set long before John was born. 

GOLDSBY: A great deal of the novel is spent narrating how John’s father, his mother, his aunt—how every one of John’s elders left the South and came north in search of a kind of erotic liberation. This is a scene that actually captures John Grimes’s father Gabriel’s “sin” that drove him to New York.

GATES: Though the two book covers have many differences, they do have one somewhat puzzling thing in common. 

GOLDSBY: Each one gets the name of the church wrong. In Baldwin’s book, it’s the “Temple of the Fire Baptized.” 

GATES: You can see for yourself how each cover gets the name of the church wrong, but in a different way. Could it be that the two artists simply made mistakes? Or was there something more going on?

GOLDSBY: It’s hard to know why the artists would name the church differently than Baldwin does in the book. I would like to think it’s the artists’ way of trying to come to their own understanding of the world of holiness and spirituality that Baldwin himself was grappling with.