onist reconciles the state of internal exile he is in by remembering that in Jesus' eyes he is a man. In a church whose style of worship is resonant of Africa, where he is able to experience "both baptism and the [RI ing [S] hout and [where the] biblical word is both juxtaposed and given expression in the incarnation of the African spirit" (Murphy 151), he sees himself powerfully, beautifully, as a person able to initiate change in his own being and thus the world. "Lord, I ain't / No stranger now!" the congregants sing as John lifts himself from the floor, his ecstatic vision intact (205). Go Tell It on the Mountain is not simply a story of the "great migration" of African Americans from the agrarian South to the industrial North. (6) Byincluding John's step-grandmother's story, the narrative spans two centuries of African American history. Often the transposition to northern soil severed the anchoring connection to the black church. Many who forfeited this bond fell into an often destructive vacuum fomented by the pathology of an unmitigated racism and the treacherous social and economic conditions thatwere its most obvious symptoms. They could succumb more easily to a kind of nihilism, leading lives of debauchery and self-destruction. As John's mother Elizabeth says, contemplating the nearly unendurable bombardment that blacks and particularly black men experienced, "Only the love of God could establish order in this chaos; to Him the soul must turn to be delivered" (175).Sometimes this severance occurred even in the rural South, as in the case of Gabriel Grimes, John's stepfather. After years of excessive drinking and sexual promiscuity, Gabriel "faced the lone tree, beneath the naked eye of Heaven," and begged Jesus to forgive and save him (96). Born again in the church, Gabriel raises John and his other children in strict accordance withits doctrine. It is ironic that Gabriel, who is vehemently and even violently anti-white, has ...
