The CEA Critic 77.1 (March 2015): 120–142. © 2015 College English Association.

Andrew Connolly

Shame, Rage, and Endless Battle: Systemic Pressure and Individual Violence in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain

Florence, the aunt of James Baldwin’s protagonist in Go Tell It on the Mountain, has little faith in the transformative effects of religious con-version. Near the middle of the novel, she says, “These niggers running around, talking about the Lord done changed their hearts—ain’t nothing happened to them niggers. They got the same old black hearts they was born with” (182). She uses her brother Gabriel as her prime example of this failure to change. Florence repeatedly challenges Gabriel’s assertion that he has changed, saying that he “was born a fool, and always done been a fool” (38–39), that he is “born wild, and [he is] going to die wild” (44), and that “he ain’t thought a minute about nobody in this world but himself” (84). It is not only Gabriel’s abuse of his family that leads Florence to believe that he does not and cannot change, but also the secret he keeps from his fam-ily and from members of the Temple of the Fire Baptized. While Gabriel claims to be sanctified and living a holy life, he has committed adultery, fathered an illegitimate son, and then abandoned the woman and his child. To Florence, he is the same man he was before his conversion experience: selfish, lustful, and oppressive, “no better than a murderer” (84).

Critics tend to share Florence’s negative perception of her brother. Depending on their perspective on Christianity, Gabriel is either a per-sonification of a vengeful, misogynist, and even racist God (see Macebuh; Warren; Ikard; Csapó), or an example of a “bad” Christian who uses reli-gion as a front to bolster his own power while secretly engaging in “sin-ful” activities that he preaches against in public (for example see Lundén; Hardy; Porter). Both Trudier Harris and Vivan May take the latter line of critique a step further, suggesting that Gabriel fakes his conversion in order to gain tyrannical authority over those around him. Even more sym-pathetic readings of Gabriel end up condemning him. Peter Powers sees Gabriel’s struggle against his sexual desire as sincere but interprets his conversion as a “gimmick” that enables him to maintain a position of social power in the face of a racist society, ultimately emphasizing Gabriel’s fail-ure (800). I want to suggest that these scholars misread the novel’s critique of the African-American Christianity in general and the Black Holiness Christianity in particular.1 I argue that Go Tell It on the Mountain does not portray Gabriel simply as a villainous character who commits emotional

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and physical violence against his family but as a committed participant in a religious system that fails him. As a result, the novel explores the ten-sion, and interconnection, between individual and systemic failures. In this way, Baldwin avoids that trap of focusing on “concrete individuals and their ‘evil’ intentions” to the exclusion of systemic “evils” that Slavoj Zizek warns against (Violence 11, 13).

It is not uncommon for Baldwin to explore the tension between the individual and systems, especially in his early writing. In “The American Dream and the American Negro,” Baldwin takes aim at the racist “Western system of reality” while humanizing Jim Clark, an Alabama sheriff who repeatedly committed acts of racially motivated violence (714). In Amen Corner, the focus becomes more personal. Sister Margaret, whom Baldwin explicitly links to his mother in his introduction (xv–xvi), is a “tyrannical matriarch” with a “merciless piety” (xvi). Yet, Baldwin argues the racist society in which she lives dictates “her sense of reality” (xvi). Her tyranny is a form of “love” for her husband and son, whom she wants to “protect . . . from the bloody consequences of being a man in this society” (xvi). Perhaps the most relevant example, however, is “Notes of a Native Son.” In this essay, Baldwin wrestles with the actions of his step-father, whose life closely resembles that of Gabriel. Baldwin tries to understand the systemic pressures that drove his step-father toward such hatred. In each instance, Baldwin is interested in the way the individual’s objectionable acts are a reaction to pressure that various systems place on that individual; he looks for a way to balance the systemic and individual responsibility for the vio-lence he sees around him.

This is precisely the approach Baldwin takes in representing Gabriel in Go Tell it on the Mountain. Through Gabriel, Baldwin explores the sys-temic pressures that Black Holiness men experience and the way those men react to those systemic pressures. Fear and guilt over his sexuality plague Gabriel, thanks to a combination of Evangelical theology regard-ing sexual desire, persistent racial stereotypes surrounding black male sexuality, and the threat of violence that accompanies those stereotypes. Throughout the novel, these systemic pressures manifest themselves in the silent, judgmental gaze that Gabriel perceives coming from others. Gabriel feels constrained by theses gazes, limited in his options and the way he is able to self-identify. The Black Holiness religious system offers him deliverance from the guilt and safety from the threat of violence through conversion and sanctification. Though Gabriel experiences a brief period of elation after his conversion, the religious system ultimately fails to deliver on its promises. It is the lingering sense of guilt and fear, combined with a growing sense of disappointment, that motivate Gabriel to commit acts of physical and emotional violence. While the novel does not excuse Gabriel as simply a product of systemic pressures, it reserves its more potent cri-tique for a religious system that it portrays as failing black men in the first

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half of the twentieth century. In John, Baldwin offers an important counter-balance to Gabriel, presenting the unrealized potential that black men can resist systemic pressures and embrace their sexuality without confirming racist stereotypes. At a time when some African-American leaders were calling on African-Americans to present an image of restrained heterosexu-ality in order to make the burgeoning civil rights movement appear more respectable, Baldwin explores how the mixture of religious guilt and racial stereotypes surrounding black sexuality can have a disastrous impact on black males.

Systemic Pressures on Gabriel

Understanding religion as a “system” builds on a specifically anthropo-logical way of looking at religion. Religious studies scholars E. Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley suggest that a religious system is “a symbol-ic-cultural system of ritual acts accompanied by an extensive and largely shared conceptual scheme that includes culturally postulated superhu-man agents” (5). This definition is the culmination of twenty-five years of responses to Clifford Geertz’s calls for scholars to examine religion as a “cultural system” (Geertz 90). The aim of this social-scientific approach remains the same: “explaining many of the behaviors of participants that [a religious system] inspires” (Lawson and McCauley 5; also see Geertz 90). Even critics of this approach, such as Talal Asad, who warn against “a universal definition of religion,” still advocate approaching religion as a set of “constituent elements and relationships [that] are historically specific” (29). In other words, scholars who approach religion as a system connect individual behavior to various historically specific elements and relationships, including beliefs (i.e. conceptual scheme), practices (includ-ing ritual acts), and group dynamics. These elements can compete with each other, working toward contradictory outcomes, or work together to influence individuals in ways that are not necessarily consistent with the explicit, institutional theological tenets or intentions of any one individual. Together, these elements and relationships form a system that influences its participants. The Black Holiness system in Go Tell It on the Mountain, therefore, is a combination of theological principles, religious practices, and social relationships that work together to influence members of the Temple of the Fire Baptized.

Critiques of systems in other disciplines share this de-emphasis of the individual. In Violence, Zizek argues that “one should resist the fascination of subjective violence, of violence enacted by social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatical crowds” because these excep-tional cases normalize and obscure “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (11, 2). Systemic violence, for Zizek, is “not only direct physical violence, but also

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the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence” that is “no longer attribut-able to concrete individuals . . . but is purely ‘objective,’ systemic, anony-mous” (Violence 9, 13). Zizek’s focus tends to be the capitalist economic system, and he examines the quantifiable exploitation committed by that system using a psychoanalytic lens. Other systemic critics of capitalism, such as Imre Szeman, take an even stronger materialist approach, examin-ing institutional documents and statistics, supplementing that quantifi-able data with anecdotes. Recent critics of systemic racism also take this materialist approach, uncovering the way institutional practices, outlined in institutional documents and statistics, reveal a privileging of whiteness (for example see Feagin; Litpsitz). The approach is so firmly centered on institutions that systemic racism and institutional racism have almost become synonyms in this line of critique. One major difference between the materialist approach to systems and the anthropological approach mentioned earlier is that these materialist approaches to systems tend to rely on institutional documents and statistics while the anthropological approach to systems, including religious systems, considers less quantifi-able elements of the system that cannot be identified or studied using a materialist approach; the anthropological approach studies lived religion, which includes but goes beyond institutional theology and prescribed practices. Furthermore, the anthropological approach is not always critical of the system it studies. In some cases, the elements of a system may work toward an influence that seems positive. Baldwin is not, of course, positive about the influence that the systems of racism and religion have on black men. In fact, “influence” or “motivation” (Geertz 90) does not adequately convey the relationship between individuals and systems that Baldwin explores. I have chosen the word “pressure” because it reflects the coercive, and what Zizek might call violent, way that systems of racism and Black Holiness Christianity affect Gabriel in the novel.

Despite Baldwin’s emphasis on systemic pressure, his depiction of systems in the novel is more like that of religious anthropologists than the materialist critics of capitalism and racism. For example, he is less inter-ested in the way institutional policies and documents reveal a privileging of whiteness and more interested in how historically specific elements and relationships work together to make black men self-conscious about their sexuality. This system of racism that Baldwin explores in the novel is built on the racist identification of black men as hyper-sexual, violent, and inferior. The white gaze transmits and reinforces this “conceptual scheme.” Since W. E. B. DuBois, scholars have examined the way that the white gaze causes black men to see themselves “through the eyes of others . . . measur-ing [their] soul[s] by the tape of a world that looks on [them] with amused contempt and pity,” creating a “double-consciousness” (8). Baldwin has noted the way stereotypes regarding black male sexuality in particular

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forces black men to contend with the notion that “to be an American Negro male is also to be a walking phallic symbol” (“The Black Boy” 270). Franz Fanon notes something very similar (170). The black men in Baldwin’s novel try to combat this in various ways. For example, Richard, Elizabeth’s first partner, wants “to know everything them white bastards knew . . . so could no white son-of-a-bitch nowhere never talk [him] down, and never make [him] feel like [he] was dirt” (168). Meanwhile, Frank, Florence’s husband, tries to accumulate material wealth. Though both characters do not accept the identity that has been imposed on them by the white gaze, they have internalized the view of themselves projected by the white gaze so that the battle is not merely an external one against “them white bas-tards” but also an internal one, even if it does not seem so to the characters themselves.

This gaze, however, goes beyond a psychoanalytic fixing of iden-tity and incorporates the threat of violence. Building on Michel Foucault, Robyn Wiegman describes the way the white gaze combines the aspects of surveillance and spectacle violence “because the terror of the white lynch mob arises from both its function as a panoptic mode of surveillance and its materialization of violence” (13). This relationship takes a very clear form in Go Tell It on the Mountain: when black men feel white men gazing at them in the novel, they do not merely feel that an identity has been thrust on them; they fear violence. For example, when Richard sees three “colored boys” running away from two white men, he comes “full awake, in panic” because he knows the white men “would make no distinction between him and the three boys they were after” (172). The gaze of the white men fixes them all as criminals. Yet, Richard cannot rely on his intellect to distinguish himself, nor can he go home and wrestle with the “double-consciousness” that the gaze invokes. Instead, the white men take him to jail, where police-men beat and torture him. The experience ultimately breaks him, and he commits suicide. Being seen by white men is the first step toward racial violence. This is why Richard’s first reaction to the white gaze is “panic.” Likewise, when Gabriel passes groups of white men as he walks through town, “silence [falls], and they [watch] him insolently, itching to kill” (141). Gabriel then remembers, in gory detail, the lynching of an African-American soldier the night before. In this instance, not only is Gabriel conscious of how the white men identify him as an inferior, sexual threat, but he is also conscious of the threat the “insolent” gaze of the white men contains because they are “itching to kill.” In this way, lynching becomes the tangible power of the gaze. Lynching helps solidify the characterization of black men as sexual predators because protecting white women from the sexual threat of black men was the primary justification for lynching (for example, see Goldsby 24; Jones 19; Hill Collins 207), while acting as a physical punishment that reinforces the dominant position of the white men. The text clearly outlines the effect on Gabriel. Enraged, he fantasizes

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about “the feel of a white man’s forehead against his shoe; again and again, until the head wobbled on the broken neck and his foot encountered noth-ing but the rushing blood,” yet Gabriel says “nothing, bowing his head . . . he [walks], held by his caution more rigid than an arrow” (141). Racial ste-reotypes and the rituals of racial violence, especially lynching, make up a system of racism that is crystalized in the white gaze and applies pressure on the black men in the novel. While each of the black men reacts to this pressure differently, they all experience it.

Though the pressures of the system of racism hover constantly in the background, the real focus of Go Tell It on the Mountain is the Black Holiness system and the pressure it places on black men regarding their sexuality. The Black Holiness movement is not a unified denomination of churches with a common theology and religious practice. Instead, it is an umbrella term used for several different denominations and independent churches that have a similar focus in their theology and practices.2 With few exceptions, these churches adopt a conservative approach to sexual-ity that condemns any sexual activity outside of marriage. As John Giggie explains, Black Holiness believers at the beginning of the twentieth century tended to follow “a strict disciplinary code characterized by an unswerv-ing devotion to keeping the body pure and the soul sinless” (169). Various rituals, including the rituals that Baldwin describes in the novel, reinforce this concept of sexual morality inside the church. For example, Father James publicly admonishes Elisha and Ella Mae, two teenaged members of the church, for walking together alone because “they were in danger of straying from the truth” by having sex (9). This public ritual reinforces the morality surrounding sex for all those in attendance. Sister McCandless and Sister Price demonstrate the added social pressure that works with the rituals in their explicit approval of the ritual itself and the restrictive sexual morality it promotes (54). The conservative theology surround-ing sex, public rituals, and the social pressure outside of the rituals are important elements that make up the Black Holiness system in the novel. This system begins to apply pressure on Gabriel long before he converts. Though he is promiscuous in his youth, he refers to sex as “sin”: he “hated his sins—even as he ran toward sin, even as he sinned. He hated the evil that lived in his body, and he feared it, as he feared and hated the lions of lust and longing that prowled] the defenseless city of his mind” (89). Even while Gabriel continues to behave contrary to the clear moral guidelines of the Black Holiness system, the pressure the system puts on him causes him to experience guilt regarding his sexuality. Nowhere is this pressure more evident than in his relationship with his mother.

Gabriel explicitly states that his sense of guilt is “a gift bequeathed him by his mother” (89). Gabriel’s mother prays that he will convert and forsake his life of “sin,” and when Gabriel thinks about the pain he causes his mother by failing to convert, he is filled with “confusion, and pain, and

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guilt” (70). Despite this, his mother never scolds him for his behavior. In fact, as Gabriel walks home one morning after his exploits, he knows that when he gets home, his mother “would not ask him where he had been; she would not reproach him; and her eyes, even when she closed her lids to sleep, would follow him everywhere” (89). Even when Gabriel leaves home to go to a tavern and meet women, he feels “his mother’s eyes on him” (90). Like the white gaze, the gaze of his mother fixes his identity: he is a sinner, who causes his mother pain. Also like the white gaze, his mother’s gaze carries with it a threat of eternal damnation: it causes “him to feel, at the thought of death, another colder terror. To go down to the grave, unwashed, unforgiven, was to go down into the pit forever, where terrors awaited him” (90). His mother’s silent gaze affects Gabriel so much that he projects her behavior on God. On the morning of his conversion as he walks home, the relative silence becomes an indication of God’s judgment of him and a sign of his guilt: “There [is] silence, only silence, everywhere—the very birds [cease] to sing, and no dogs bark, and no rooster crow[s] for the day. And he [feels] this silence [is] God’s judgment; that all creation ha[s] been stilled before the just and awful wrath of God, and wait[s] now to see the sinner—he [is] the sinner—cut down and ban-ished from the presence of the Lord” (92). Gabriel feels caught between the unsatisfying life of sexual promiscuity and the “holy” life of a Black Holiness believer: “He [can]not say yes to his mother, and to the Lord; and he [can]not say no” (72). This matches the dichotomous options that several critics suggest black men gravitate toward: either “fulfill the myth of unquenchable black lust” or “rigidly discipline . . . sexual urges to erase stereotypes of excessive black sexuality” (Dyson 313; also see Hill Collins 106–07; West 88; hooks xii). This is the pressure Gabriel experiences as a result of the Black Holiness system, comprised of Evangelical theology, religious rituals, and social interactions. Gabriel links this pressure to the gaze of others, especially his mother, and to the silence that accompanies the gaze. It haunts him, constantly impacting his moods and behaviors; rather than embrace a sexually open lifestyle, he feels guilty because he causes his mother pain and because he fears the consequences of his “sin.” Unable to see the way the Black Holiness system prompts these feelings, Gabriel wallows in his own fear and guilt.

Conversion, Sanctification, and the Promise of Relief from Systemic Pressure

As Powers points out, “Gabriel is a man driven by terror, a terror produced by his own desire and the desire of others . . . despite his aura of author-ity” (798). Michael Lynch agrees and goes on to argue that “Gabriel’s theology, although partially an inheritance from his mother, is primar-ily a product of his own fear, egoism, and need to justify his own mean

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spirit” (40). Quite the opposite is true: the theology is not a product of his fear; rather, his fear is a product of the theology when it interacts with the practice and social dynamics within the Black Holiness System. In his discussion of the Catholic Church’s condemnation of cloning, Zizek describes something similar. He argues that the Church positions itself as a defender of “the culture of life” against the asexual, “undead” reproduc-tion of science (“Nature” 52–53). He goes on to say that the church “evokes and formulates the fear [of death, the undead, etc.] against which it then offers a solution of hope and faith” (“Nature” 52). The Catholic Church’s actions are symptomatic, Zizek argues, of a larger trend in which a system offers a solution to a problem that the system itself is responsible for creat-ing—or at least fostering. Likewise, the Black Holiness system that Baldwin describes offers Gabriel relief from fear and guilt through conversion and sanctification even though it is responsible for creating and fostering the same guilt and fear. In the Black Holiness tradition, sanctification can occur in an instant, simultaneously with conversion. The term “sanctified” comes from the theology John Wesley introduced almost a hundred years before the Black Holiness movement began. As Arthur Paris explains, sanctifica-tion “purified the believer of inward sin, giving him ‘perfect love’ toward God and man” (16). This is what Elisha explains to John at the beginning of the novel: “When the Lord saves you He burns out all that old Adam, He gives you a new mind and a heart, and then you don’t find no pleasure in the world, you get all your joy in walking and talking with Jesus every day” (49). In other words, while conversion forgives the believer of past “sins,” sanctification erases the desire to sin and empowers the believer. The solution the Black Holiness system offers Gabriel, therefore, is to erase his sexual desire, alleviating what he, and the system itself, identifies as the source of his guilt and fear while continuing to affirm a theology that condemns sex outside of marriage.

Sanctification does much more than erase the desire to sin. It also imbues the believer with spiritual power. Many critics mistake this spiri-tual power that Gabriel wants for a “social power” (Powers 800) or “power and authority over others” (Lynch 41; also see May 120; Harris 27). Instead, it is that “quickening power” that supplicants wait for in the Saturday eve-ning prayer meeting at the Temple of the Fire Baptized (88), the power that emboldens Gabriel when he preaches his first sermon despite the fact that he is “terrified by the eyes on him” (99). This does not mean that Gabriel does not also want the social power that critics refer to but rather that when the text explicitly states “yes, he wanted power” (89), it refers to this spiritual power described one page earlier in relation to the prayer meeting (88). In the Black Holiness tradition, this power can also provide protection from racial violence. The protection comes as believers withdraw from the world, including the white world, into God’s power. Jon Michael Spencer suggests that early Black Holiness hymns and theology “teach Christian

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believers simply to endure until the end. Their vocation in life is not to make the world a better place, but to erect the barricade of faith to protect them from evil embodied in the world” (118). This is the barricade that Baldwin describes, and ultimately critiques, in The Fire Next Time. When Baldwin converts to Pentecostalism (which shares a great deal of theology and practices with the Holiness tradition), he believes the church will be a refuge from the world that frightens him, because he “suppose[s] that God and safety were synonymous. The word ‘safety’ brings us to the real meaning of the word ‘religious’ as we use it” (16). The safety offered by the church is a safety against the world that is dangerous and full of rejec-tion from a dominating white society. Elizabeth describes that safety in the novel when she warns her children that “there ain’t no safety except you walk humble before the Lord” (18). The evidence of this humble, sanctified life is a lack of desire to sin. In other words, Gabriel can be confident in his protection from racial violence if he is sanctified, and he can be confi-dent he is sanctified if he no longer has any desire to commit the “sin” of extra-marital sex. This understanding of safety through sanctification is markedly different from what West calls the “Faustian” pact of the “pro-gressive” Baptists and Methodists (86; also see Russell 104, 116, 119; Hill Collins 107–08; Douglas 68). While Civil Rights leaders who came from “progressive” churches promoted sexual restraint and heteronormativity to appear more respectable to the white majority as part of the larger proj-ect of obtaining equal rights for African-Americans in the United States, the Black Holiness system (including exilic theology and practices reinforced by social interactions among believers) offered safety to believers if they withdrew from the world and embraced sanctification.

Gabriel’s conversion initially seems to confirm these promises in a predictable pattern. Just as Gabriel internalizes Black Holiness notions of “sin” before he converts, he internalizes conceptions of what it means to be converted and sanctified. Gabriel wants “all the glories that his mother prayed he should find . . . to know himself to be the Lord’s anointed” (89). At the same time, he feels he cannot convert because “he [fears] to make a vow before heaven until he [has] strength to keep it. And yet he [knows] that until he [makes] the vow he would never find the strength” (89). Gabriel’s stalemate is consistent with the condition of the “sick soul” who “cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil, but [is] congenitally fated to suffer from its presence” that William James describes in The Varieties of Religious Experience (135). In that book, James creates a model of religious experience based largely on Protestant conver-sion stories from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The conversion stories heard frequently at Black Holiness churches such as the Temple of the Fire Baptized and told by believers such as Gabriel’s mother, Sister McCandless (54, 203), visiting evangelists (45), and the recently con-verted follow this model: “in an instant [light] filled the soul, causing . .

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. the new-born in Christ to testify: Once I was blind and now I see” (75). It is not simply the theology but also the rituals of testimonies and the social acceptance afforded new converts within the community that work together in the Black Holiness system to mold the conversion experiences of future converts. It should come as no surprise, then, that what breaks Gabriel’s stalemate follows this model.

Faced with the oppressive silence of both nature and God on the morn-ing of conversion, Gabriel miraculously hears his mother, who is still at home, “a-singing low and sweet, right there beside [him]” (93). Though Gabriel knows Black Holiness theology, it is this perceived miracle that enables him finally to convert. This matches what James describes in rela-tion to the “sick soul.” Though the notions of a new religious system build in the mind of the sick soul for some time, they appear to come to him/her in a moment, accompanied by supernatural manifestations: “voices are often heard, lights seen, or visions witnessed” (228). What comes next again follows James’s model, where the sick soul perceives an “objective change which the world often appears to undergo” providing the sick soul with a “sense of clean beautiful newness within and without” (248). Gabriel, who only hears silence before his mother’s singing, now hears “singing everywhere; the birds and the crickets and the frogs rejoiced, the distant dogs leaping and sobbing, circled in their narrow yards, and roost-ers cried from every high fence that here was a new beginning, a blood-washed day!” (93). The chorus of animals signals, for Gabriel, the end of his guilt and the accompanying judgmental, silent gaze; it is the beginning of a life where he can achieve the spiritual power he has longed to acquire. The Black Holiness system has conditioned Gabriel to expect conversion to follow a model, accompany particular affective experiences, and lead to rewards associated with sanctification.

Gabriel believes that God makes specific promises to him in two dreams—promises that supplement the rewards all sanctified believers enjoy. In the Black Holiness tradition, it is not unusual to interpret dreams as messages from God in the way that Father James illustrates earlier in the novel (54). Gabriel’s first dream consists of demons and seductive women who tempt him “to bring him down” (107). He resists them and wakes up thinking about “the dog who returned to his vomit, of the man who had been cleansed, and who fell, and who was possessed by seven devils, the last state of that man being worse than his first” (108). Though he is suc-cessful in resisting the women in his dream, the dream illustrates the con-tinuing pressure he feels to perform his sanctification by remaining “pure.” The alternative, engaging in promiscuity again, would result in a despair that is worse than his youth. When Gabriel returns to sleep, he dreams that God calls him to climb a difficult mountain. When he finally reaches the top, God rewards him with a glimpse of what awaits him in heaven. In addition to this, he meets “the elect” who cannot be touched because God’s

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“seal is upon them” (109). God then tells Gabriel “so shall thy seed be” (109).3 The elect in this dream represent the rewards for the sanctified. Not only do they remain pure, but God’s seal protects them from harm, includ-ing racial violence. The promise that his son will inherit both the power and protection that Gabriel believes he enjoys as a sanctified believer moti-vates Gabriel and ultimately becomes part of the systemic pressure he feels when he fails. The dreams make even more explicit that relief from guilt and fear for Gabriel and his children is contingent on Gabriel’s sanctifica-tion, evidenced by an absence of sexual desire. Though the Black Holiness system promises relief, it instead refocuses the pressures Gabriel feels and further obscures their systemic sources; Gabriel now feels pressure to sup-press his sexual desire in order to prove to himself (and others) that he is sanctified (thus performing his sanctification).

The Failure of the Black Holiness System

Gabriel’s anxiety regarding his sanctification is evident not long after his conversion through his relationship with Deborah, who eventually becomes his first wife. Gabriel sees Deborah as the epitome of sexual purity despite the jokes others make about the gang rape she endures in her youth. He emphasizes the difference between her and the women he sleeps with during his youth: “She [is] not to be seen prancing lewdly through the streets, eyes sleepy and mouth half open with lust, or to be found mewing under midnight fences, uncovered, uncovering some black boy’s hang-ing curse! No, their married bed would be holy, and their children would continue the line of the faithful, a royal line” (105). Deborah becomes the antithesis to the women who evoke his lust. Powers suggests that by “mar-rying Deborah, a woman whom he does not find desirable,” Gabriel tries to remove all objects of sexual desire from his life and thus eliminate his own desire (198). Similarly, Csaba Csapó suggests that Gabriel marries Deborah “with the hope of controlling the sexual desires of the flesh” (323; also see Fabre 123). Neither critic explores the stakes of Gabriel’s not controlling his desire. If Gabriel gives into his desires, he loses his confidence in his sanctification, which he believes will expose him and his offspring to racial violence and eternity in Hell.

Gabriel does, in fact, give into those desires with Esther. At first, Gabriel tries to interpret his lust for Esther as religious compassion, though, as Powers points out, Gabriel’s underlying motivations are trans-parent in his language (799). Gabriel’s denial of his desire crumbles, and he has sex with Esther in the kitchen of their white employers, “locked away from all others, all heavenly or human help” (124). Though the affair lasts only nine days, it leaves Gabriel “bruised and frightened . . . what frighten[s] him [is] the knowledge that, once having fallen, nothing would be easier to fall again” (125). Gabriel’s belief in his own sanctification is

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compromised because he can no longer deny his persistent sexual desire. Because his sanctification is also the source of his sense of protection from racial violence, it is also compromised. Powers argues that immediately after the first time Gabriel has sex with Esther that Gabriel is filled with “racial terror” at the thought of being discovered by his employers (800). This racial terror is also present when Esther breaks into tears and tells him while they are in their employers’ yard that she is pregnant. Gabriel’s first reaction is to “[look] in panic around the yard and toward the house” (126). Later, he moves “toward the house, which now—high, gleaming roof, and spun-gold window—seemed to watch him and to listen” (127). The house functions much as the tower functions in Foucault’s panopticon, where the “architectural apparatus [becomes] a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it” (201). Just as inmates are uncertain whether the guard is actually in the tower watching them, so Gabriel is uncertain whether his white employers are in the house watching him. As a result, the house itself becomes the subject of the white gaze that Gabriel feels, carrying it with it the constraints on his identity and the threat of violence. Likewise, Gabriel feels “his mother, beneath the star-tled earth on which he move[s], [lift] up, endlessly, her eyes” (127). Even though his mother is long dead, Gabriel identifies the religious guilt he experiences over his sexual activity with her gaze, feels fixed in an identity of sinner, and ultimately fears he will lose the rewards of sanctification he believes he has enjoyed; even if it is not physically present, the pressure he feels from the Black Holiness system still manifests itself in Gabriel’s imagi-nation as his mother’s gaze. Though Gabriel has internalized the systemic pressures, he projects them outward so that inanimate objects and absent figures become subjects of the imagined gaze he associates with those pres-sures. When Gabriel finally confronts Esther, he is “enveloped by an awful, falling silence” (130) and there is “only silence in him, like the grave” (131), “continuing like a corridor, carr[ying] Gabriel back to the silence that had preceded his birth in Christ” (88). While the text continues to remind read-ers of the systemic pressures that Gabriel faces, and the effect they have on him, it does not excuse Gabriel for his actions. Richard, Frank, Gabriel, and later John all react differently to the pressures of systemic racism, showing that while the systemic pressure dictates the conditions of the characters’ choices, the pressure do not dictate the choices themselves. Although they do not acknowledge the pressure that Gabriel is under, critics like Csapó are right to suggest that Gabriel is “selfish” and “sacrifices everybody’s life around himself” (324). Gabriel harshly rejects Esther, giving her money to leave town, ultimately sacrificing her and his son with her in order to preserve his own sense of sanctification. It is the first of a long series of objectionable and ultimately violent acts that Gabriel commits.

The systemic pressure Gabriel feels does not end or subside with Esther’s departure. Instead, the gaze that manifests this pressure begins to

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migrate between subjects. It is no surprise that Gabriel begins to experience the pressure of the Black Holiness system in Deborah’s gaze. In Gabriel’s mind, she has long been associated with his mother’s gaze because before Gabriel converts, “Deborah [sits] with his mother, watching him with eyes that were no less patient and reproachful” (89–90). After his affair with Esther ends, Gabriel tries “to wear out his visions in the marriage bed, [struggling] to awaken Deborah, for whom his daily hatred grew” (125). Rather than admire Deborah for her sexual purity as he did before, he begins to hate her both because she cannot satisfy him and because she is able to maintain her purity when he cannot. This only worsens once Gabriel learns Esther is pregnant. He perceives Deborah become “more silent than ever” (133) and feels “oppressed by the silence” (139). Again, this silence is a reminder of Gabriel’s pre-conversion despair and vulner-ability and stands as a challenge to his sanctification. As a result, Gabriel spends as much time as possible on the road, away from Deborah, even as she contracts an illness that eventually kills her. Gabriel flees the subject of the gaze that manifests the pressure he feels from the Black Holiness system in hopes of escaping his own sense of guilt and lack of confidence in his own sanctification.

Despite his travels, Gabriel is unable to escape the judgmental gaze he perceives. While the imagined gazes have stable subjects when Gabriel talks with Esther in the yard (i.e., the house and his mother), they become dislodged from those subjects afterward: “people he had known all his life . . . seem suddenly to mock him, to stand in judgment on him; he [sees] guilt in everybody’s eyes. When he [stands] in the pulpit to preach they [look] at him, he felt, as though he had no right to be there, as though they condemned him” (134). The systemic pressure that Gabriel feels remains, and while it is still manifested in a gaze that Gabriel perceives, the source of that gaze is no longer stable. This gaze is also connected to the threat of racial violence and intertwined with the threat of hell, though it manifests itself differently for Gabriel. Feeling exposed to racial violence, he sees its effects everywhere:

blood, in all the cities through which he passe[s], [runs] down. There seem[s] no door, anywhere, behind which blood [does] not call out, unceasingly, for blood; no woman, whether singing before defiant trumpets or rejoicing before the Lord, who ha[s] not seen her father, her brother, her lover, or her son cut down without mercy; who ha[s] not seen her sister become part of the white man’s great whore house . . . no man, preaching, or cursing . . . whose manhood ha[s] not been, at the root, sickened, whose loins ha[ve] not been dishonored, whose seed ha[s] not been scat-tered into oblivion and worse than oblivion, into living shame and rage, and into endless battle. Yes, their parts [are] all cut off, they [are] dishonored, their very names nothing more than dust blown disdainfully across the fields of time. . . . Behind them [is]

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darkness . . . and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire—a bastard people far from God. (135)

No matter where he looks, Gabriel cannot escape the evidence of the racial violence to which he feels himself vulnerable, and it is conflated with “the fire” of Hell that awaits him; the threat of Hell and the threat of racial vio-lence are part of the same linear path, combining the threat of the white gaze and the threat of his mother’s gaze. Initially, Gabriel sees no way out of this because racial violence makes no distinction between those who rejoice before the Lord and preach and those who curse and sing jazz in bars. Gabriel seems temporarily to lose his belief that the sanctification will offer him protection. This belief is restored at the end of the passage when Gabriel identifies what makes people vulnerable to racial violence: the victims are “a bastard people far from God.” This passage concludes with Gabriel recognizing a light at the end of the tunnel for himself: “[O]ne day, God would raise him, Who has suffered him to fall so low” (136). Though Gabriel has lost his sense of sanctification, he comforts himself in the thought that God will one day allow him to regain it, along with the protection from racial violence and relief from his guilt.

Though Gabriel’s second marriage seems to provide him with a sec-ond chance, ultimately through his second son Roy, things only get worse. Gabriel is convinced that the death of his first son, Royal, is a punishment from God for Gabriel’s affair with Esther, Royal’s mother. This conviction keeps Gabriel “bowed low, on his knees” at the altar when he feels “that he should rise and pray over Elisha” (111). Gabriel feels unable to go to Elisha and pray with him because “each cry that [comes] from the fallen Elisha [tears] through him. He hear[s] the cry of his dead son and his living son” (111). His living son, Roy, has little interest in church. Instead, at the beginning of the novel, he comes home bloodied from a knife fight with “white folks” (39). This scene is written from John’s perspective, and thus it is more difficult to ascertain Gabriel’s state of mind. There are, however, some clues. There are several moments where the action seems to freeze while people stare at Gabriel. While fighting about Elizabeth’s parenting skills, Gabriel and his second wife “[stare] at each other a moment in an awful pause” (43). Later, after Roy calls Gabriel a “black bastard,” John and Gabriel stare “into each other’s eyes . . . in the absolute silence that followed John’s words, John [sees] that his father was not seeing him, was not seeing anything unless it were a vision” (43). Though he does not fully understand what is happening, John recognizes his father’s problem. Instead of “see-ing him” and his family, he sees something else like a “vision” projected in front of his eyes. Again, Gabriel projects the source of the systemic pressures onto the subjects of the gazes, both real and imagined, that he perceives. The gazes are no longer separate and no longer affixed to an identifiable, responsible subject. The white gaze merges with the gaze of his mother to stand in for the pressures of both systems. The same gaze

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carries the threat of racial violence and Hell, and he worries that he and his offspring are vulnerable to both because he is no longer confident in his own sanctification. In this case, the perceived gaze affixes itself to his fam-ily members. Gabriel’s references to racial violence committed by whites (40) and his own mother (42) further illustrate that these pressures occupy Gabriel’s mind and influence his subsequent behavior. The key word here is influence. Even though Gabriel might experience systemic pressure in the “startled, pleading question in [Elizabeth’s] eyes,” there is no indica-tion that this pressure dictates that he “[reach] out and [slap] her across the face” (43). Likewise, when Roy protests this abuse and does not “drop his eyes,” it does not mean that Gabriel has no choice but to “[raise] his belt[, which falls] with a whistling sound on Roy, who shiver[s], and [falls] back” (44). Instead of facing the sources of the pressure, Gabriel lashes out at the most immediate subjects of a gaze, which he interprets as judgmental; he violently attacks his family in the hopes of quelling his own fear of racial violence and Hell linked to his guilt over his sexuality.

John becomes a particularly strong focal point for Gabriel. Unlike his brothers, John is much more restrained in his behavior and by the end of the novel has a conversion experience. As a result, John seems to pres-ent Gabriel with an heir to the promises he believes God and the Black Holiness system make to him and his offspring. The problem is that John is not Gabriel’s direct offspring; he is the product of an affair Elizabeth had before marrying Gabriel. As a result, Gabriel, who sees and feels remind-ers of his own perceived failures everywhere, sees them potently in John. During an altar call where the two stare at each other,

Gabriel [has] never seen such a look on John’s face before; Satan, at that moment, [stares] out of John’s eyes while the Spirit [speaks]; and yet John’s staring eyes tonight [remind] Gabriel of other eyes: of his mother’s eyes when she [beats] him, of Florence’s eyes when she [mocks] him, of Deborah’s eyes when she [prays] for him, of Esther’s eyes and Royal’s eyes, and Elizabeth’s eyes tonight before Roy [curses] him, and of Roy’s eyes when Roy [says]: “you black bastard.” (150)

For Gabriel, John becomes a focal point for his sense of guilt, encapsulating all the other people who make Gabriel feel guilty. John’s gaze becomes the ultimate condemning gaze for Gabriel, the gaze that most strongly makes him feel the systemic pressures of the Black Holiness system. In order to combat this guilt, Gabriel resorts to both physical and emotional abuse. For example, Gabriel repeatedly tells John that John’s “face is the face of Satan” (20; also see 13). Several other critics have linked this to a longstanding rac-ist theology that situates blackness as evil (for example, see Gerrard; Cobb 12–16; Coleman 52). John internalizes the suggestion that he is inherently evil and that his evil is related to his blackness. Ultimately, John believes “it was his identity, and part, therefore, of that wickedness for which his

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father beat him” (13). Like his mother, Gabriel becomes a conduit for the Black Holiness system, threatening his son with after-life consequences. Furthermore, John connects this internal sense of evil to his emerging sexual desire for the older boys at his school (11, 20–21). Again, critics have discussed this link between the racist theology that Gabriel passes on and John’s shame about his sexuality (for example, see Csapó; Powers; Cobb). Though Gabriel physically and emotionally abuses John, Baldwin is inter-ested in the motivating systemic pressures that lead Gabriel to commit this abuse. In punishing John, Gabriel is trying to control and punish the sys-temic pressures he himself feels, ironically, passing those same pressures on to his son.

John as Baldwin’s Hope for Resistance

There are important differences between the experiences of Gabriel and John, but they both face pressures from the Black Holiness system and the system of racism in the United States. While Gabriel’s desire is mature and heterosexual, John’s desire is still developing and queer. Were John to become part of the Black Holiness church of his family, or most evangelical black churches for that matter, this difference would make John’s struggle even more difficult. As E. Patrick Johnson suggests, “heterosexual church members who ‘yield to the flesh’ are rarely, if ever, asked to leave the church” (402). The same is not true for queer members: “African-American gay men are rarely if ever out of the closet. Such a blatant expression of one’s sexuality would be an affront to the fundamentalist conventions of the church, even though this attitude embodies a double standard in terms of who can and cannot express sexual agency within the black church” (404). This double standard puts more pressure on John to control his desires and keep them hidden, which could, in turn, lead to increased guilt, and ultimately, despair.

John and Gabriel also feel the pressure from the system of racism and the Black Holiness system differently. Where the white gaze causes Gabriel to feel afraid and powerless, ultimately leading him to conclude that “all white people were wicked” (30), John experiences envy for the lifestyle he imagines white people have. Were he able to enter that lifestyle, John “could eat good food, and wear fine clothes, and go to the movies as often as he wished. In this world John, who his father said was ugly . . . became immediately beautiful” (12). John soon realizes that “this world was not for him. If he refused to believe, and wanted to break his neck trying, then he could try until the sun refused to shine; they would never let him enter” (31). This realization leads to a different kind of resentment for John. While Gabriel participates in what Cheryl Sanders calls the “exilic conscious-ness” of the Black Holiness system where believers reject the white world that also rejects them, John simply feels rejection from the white world he

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desires to enter (6). The white gaze fixes John as an undesirable, unwelcome other. As a result, John feels caught between two options very similar to those that Gabriel sees for himself: John can either join those on the streets of Harlem who “had spent the night in bars, or in cat houses, or on the streets, or on the rooftops, or under the stairs” (4), or he can join the believ-ers, where “there awaited him only humiliation forever; there awaited him, one day, a house like his father’s house, and a church like his father’s, and a job like his father’s, where he would grow old and black with hunger and toil” (28). Despite the differences between the experiences of Gabriel and John, John feels that his options are either to confirm the stereotypes about hyper-sexualized black men on the streets or take on the hyper-disciplined, unsatisfying work of being part of the church just as Gabriel does.

John’s conversion experience allows him to break the stalemate between the two options. Again, this is very similar to Gabriel. Of course, the results of John’s conversion are much harder to evaluate. Not only does the novel offer little insight into what happens to John after his conversion, whereas it provides details of Gabriel’s life long afterward, the descrip-tions of John’s conversion are somewhat vague. This has lead scholars to have vastly different interpretations of John’s conversion.4 Whether John becomes a more traditional Black Holiness believer, whether he estab-lishes a new kind of gay-friendly Christianity, or whether he simply has a general revelation that empowers him, the progress of his conversion is consistent with the initial steps of conversion that James outlines: an expe-rience that seems supernatural allows John to accept a system of beliefs that had previously been obscured or appeared out of reach. Following his conversion, John is “filled with a joy, a joy unspeakable” (221) while the air is “new and heaven bright” (209), and “the avenue, like any land-scape that has endured a storm, lay changed under Heaven, exhausted and clean, and new” (219–20); as a new convert, John feels internal joy as a result of shedding his despair, and the external world appears to have undergone a change. The ambiguity surrounding John’s conver-sion, combined with the similarity to Gabriel’s conversion, casts Gabriel’s warnings in a new light. As John leads his family down the street in the early morning, Gabriel says, “He going to learn . . . that it ain’t all in the singing and the shouting . . . He got the steep side of the mountain to climb” (214). Gabriel is not simply trying to undermine John’s salvation; he is also providing a legitimate warning based on his own experience: conversion and sanctification are not always enough to erase sexual desire and the accompanying guilt and do not eliminate the systemic pressure both characters experience. Yet, the ambiguity allows for hope that is not fully realized in the text but that critics such as Robinson, Stanley Macebuh, and Melvin Dixon identify. John may be able to make choices that help him resist the systemic pressures that both he and Gabriel face.

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This hope places the novel in an interesting position in relation to other African-American thought on sexuality. During the Harlem Renaissance, writers such as Langston Hughes and Alain Locke celebrated the diversity of African-Americans that the “New Negro” could incorporate. Locke’s 1925 essay “The New Negro” is a particularly articulate appeal for this plu-ralism. In contextualizing Baldwin’s work, Douglas Field makes a strong case that Locke’s essay subtly points toward acceptance of various sexual practices even though it does not explicitly discuss sexuality (118–19). This acceptance was evident in at least some African-American communi-ties. As Thaddeus Russell illustrates, promiscuity and queer sexual prac-tices gained a certain level of acceptance within the popular black media between the 1930s and 1950s, but that acceptance deteriorated as the Civil Rights movement began to gain steam in the early 1950s. Locke’s 1950 essay “Self Criticism” reads like a lament that the Harlem Renaissance was unable to achieve the kind of lasting pluralism he had hoped (Field 119–21). Go Tell It on the Mountain was published just a few years later, yet the novel critiques the Black Holiness movement, excluded from the drive toward race respectability because it continued to engage in ecstatic religious practices and because of its “exilic consciousness,” both of which more “progressive” churches rejected (Taylor 38; Giggie 179). When later scholars on race discuss the systemic pressures of the church, they tend to focus on “progressive” churches that promoted race-respectability, overlooking the differences between those churches and exilic, charismatic churches. Despite these important differences, there is a common theme that unites the novel with the later African-American thinkers. Building on Locke’s call for a more pluralistic understanding of blackness, West, Dyson, hooks, and Collins all urge black men to resist the systemic pres-sures of both a racist white society and a repressive sexual morality in order to seek sexual identities that go beyond the dichotomy of voracious, predatory sexuality and restrained heteronormativity. Though the con-tours of the religious systemic pressure in the novel may be different than those discussed by other writers, the hope at the end of the novel is that John will be able to discover a sexual identity beyond the dichotomy these writers identify, thus avoiding the mistakes that Gabriel makes.

Conclusion

In his essay “Many Thousands Gone,” Baldwin offers a biting critique of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son. Baldwin argues that the novel presents Bigger Thomas, an African-American man, full of hatred, who rapes and kills his girlfriend, as a product of the pressures of American society on black men. The novel offers no alternative, Baldwin says, that does not ade-quately reflect “the ways in which Negroes are controlled in our society and the complex techniques they have evolved for their survival” (27). Baldwin never denies the pressures that black men face in American society or that

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they sometimes experience the same bitter hatred that envelops Bigger. At the same time, Baldwin argues that an “adjustment must be made—rather, it must be attempted, the tension perpetually sustained—for without this he [the African-American man] has surrendered his birthright as a man no less than his birthright as a black man. The entire universe is then peopled only with his enemies, who are not only white men armed with rope and rifle, but his own far-flung and contemptible kinsmen” (29–30). The responsible artist, he continues, must present the Biggers who fail to make the adjustment alongside others who make a multiplicity of adjustments in order to combat the pressures they feel from American society.

This is what Baldwin does in Go Tell It on the Mountain. Throughout the novel, he does not shy away from representing the systemic pressures that African-American men face, especially men who belong to the Black Holiness religious system. Both the system of racism within the United States and the conservative Christian morality pressure black men to feel guilty about their own sexuality. This guilt is even more pronounced in the Black Holiness system, where African-American men must maintain a level of “purity” in order to be perceived as sanctified. The novel critiques the Black Holiness system’s inability to fulfill the promises it makes to believ-ers, including a cure for the guilt it, in part, helps create. While Baldwin presents several different characters who find ways to adjust to these pressures, Gabriel, like Bigger, is unable to adjust. His adjustment would require a revision of his theology and religious practice, a revision of what he sees as God’s will and the rewards God offers. Because Gabriel does not make the adjustment, he ironically loses his “birthright as a black man” (Baldwin, “Many” 30) while trying to secure the birthright he believes God has promised him. His family becomes peopled with enemies, and he fights them to maintain this divine birthright.

The novel spends considerable time showing the consequences of Gabriel’s failure to adjust on those around him. He harshly rejects Esther, with whom he has an affair and conceives a child, sending her away with money he steals from Deborah. Esther eventually dies in childbirth. After this experience, Gabriel becomes increasingly distant and even cold toward his first wife, Deborah, keeping the affair and the money he gave to Esther secret. After Deborah dies, he sees his marriage to Elizabeth as a second chance. Despite this, he treats her even worse than Deborah. He emotion-ally and physically abuses Elizabeth whenever she challenges him. He does the same to the children he has with Elizabeth, including his son Roy, under the guise of discipline. Gabriel punishes his step-son, John, as well, but he focuses particularly harmful emotional abuse at John. He frequently says John is both ugly and evil, reinforcing racist theology concerning the sinfulness of dark skin. John internalizes this perception of himself, and it leaves him with a persistent sense of guilt and powerlessness, similar to that of Gabriel. Gabriel sees everyone around him as the source of a judg-

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mental gaze that causes his guilt, and he reacts with bitterness and violence in a futile attempt to control that guilt.

Unlike the way the Native Son presents Bigger’s fate, Baldwin’s novel does not present Gabriel’s fate as inevitable. Even as Gabriel illustrates the danger of not adjusting to the hatred and guilt prompted by systemic pressures, John offers the hope that an adjustment can yet be made, an adjustment that simultaneously diminishes John’s sexual guilt and allows him to embrace his family and friends as allies. The potential remains unfulfilled at the end of the novel and points to the continuing power of the pressure that Baldwin explores in the rest of the novel. Yet, the very existence of that potential points to the possibility that Gabriel could have at least tried to adjust. Without absolving Gabriel of his violence, the novel points to the systemic pressures that push him to become bitter and angry; it strikes a careful balance between systemic and individual responsibility for Gabriel’s actions, providing both a sincere warning and hope for John at the end of the novel. This balance places Baldwin at odds with the grow-ing civil rights movement’s call for restrained sexuality in the 1950s when the novel was published. Instead, he is a precursor to later scholars of race such as West, Dyson, hooks, and Collins who identify the crippling sys-temic pressures that both a racist American society and repressive sexual morality place on black men and then ask black men to resist the restrictive, dualistic roles those pressures help create.

Carleton University

Notes 1 Harris (214), Powers, and Clarence Hardy all identify the Temple of the Fire Baptized in Baldwin’s novel as a Black Holiness church. Hardy points to the simi-larities between the rituals described in the novel and those described by anthro-pologists (19) and the theological language in the novel surrounding the concept of “holiness” as evidence of this affiliation (109). The name of the church also bears a close resemblance to the Black Holiness denomination Fire-Baptized Holiness Church of God of the Americas, established in 1908. Though Black Holiness church-es are distinct from Pentecostal churches such as the one where Baldwin acted as a preacher in his early teens, the difference is often difficult to identify because there is so much diversity within the Black Holiness movement. In her detailed discus-sion of the two movements, Cheryl Sanders says that Pentecostal churches tend to have a very clear doctrine surrounding glossolalia (speaking in tongues) as evidence of the Holy Spirit while “some Holiness believers reject glossolalia altogether [and] others appropriate and/or practice speaking in tongues without insisting on the doctrine of tongues” (5). Sanders goes on to add that Holiness churches tend to emphasize “sanctification, or personal holiness, whereas the Pentecostals . . . emphasize spiritual power” (5). At the same time, Sanders suggests that the two movements are more similar than different and argues that they can be grouped together under the term “Sanctified church” (6). Baldwin, she argues, offers a rather unusual perspective and critique as “a son of the Sanctified church” (111).

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2 This is not to say that individual denominations within the Black Holiness umbrella do not have a clear institutional theology and a well-defined mode of gov-ernance. The Fire-Baptized Holiness Church of God of the Americas, for example, has clear theological positions and a well-organized Episcopal form of governance. Instead, I am suggesting that there is a great deal diversity in the denominations and independent churches that fall under the Black Holiness umbrella; they do not share a common theology or means of governance. For more on the Black Holiness movement see Sanders, Giggie, Taylor, Spencer.3 This passage also illustrates the way a system of patriarchy works with racist and religious systems to pressure Gabriel. Not only does Gabriel see women as either temptresses or “helpmeets” (109), his role as “God’s anointed” is clearly a gendered one, in which he secures a sanctified life for “his seed.” As several critics have noted, most notably Harris, Gabriel positions himself as the leader of his fam-ily and protects that position with violence. David Ikard does a quality analysis of the way the patriarchal system influences Gabriel’s actions. Though I disagree with her assessment of Gabriel’s motives, Harris provides an excellent appraisal of how Gabriel’s actions affect the women in his life and how their opportunities for resis-tance are limited by a patriarchal system. Complicating a simple gender binary in the novel is Sister McCandless, who teaches both men and women (5), preaches on occasion (52), will soon become an evangelist (53), and, above all, has “a matchless, impeachable authority” (203).4 Some scholars have read it has a legitimate conversion into the Black Holiness tradition (for example, see Gibson; Coleman; Lynch; Lundén), though some in this group see this as a negative because of the sacrifices John will have to make, includ-ing suppressing his homoerotic desire (for example, see Powers; Cobb; Scruggs; Hardy). On the other hand, critics have also argued that John does not experience any kind of conversion and, instead, maintains a kind of status quo (for example, see Olson; Fabre; Warren; O’Neale). These are only two extremes in the critical con-troversy. Numerous critics have argued that John is able to find the “compromise” he is looking for at the beginning of the book, combining elements of the Black Holiness tradition with the white world he envies, enabling him to explore his sexuality while simultaneously participating in a “new” religion (for example, see Angelo; Macebuh; Dixon). Still others have suggested that the conversion is simply a metaphor for John’s acceptance of a gay identity (Csapó), his entrance into adult-hood (Allen), or even the birth of a rejuvenated Civil Rights movement (Norman).

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