This is an account of a black boy, John Grimes, living in a family where his stepfather is a minister in a Pentecostal church in Harlem.

It was expected that John become a preacher too, and the book is all about church and singing hymns. I call them hymns but in the book they’re called songs. Songs like “”Down at the cross where my Saviour died!” and “Jesus, I’ll never forget how you set me free!”

There is much emphasis on whether or not people are saved. There are those called “saints” which term, as far as I can see, is never explained; they are living people who are part of John’s community.

Members of the congregation dance until they drop, moaning. “And then a great moaning filled the church.”

This differs from my own experience of a church service.

A pastor called Father James “uncovered sin” in the congregation. One couple, Elisha and Ella Mae, had been “walking disorderly”.

John’s father’s face was “always awful” but when his daily anger was transformed into prophetic wrath, it became even more awful.

John is preoccupied with his sins, whatever these are.

Already from the age of five John was perceived to be very bright and have a great future. He possessed a power that others lacked that he could use to raise himself and perhaps win the love he longed for.

John’s father beat him and ”he lived for the day when his father would be dying and he, John, would curse him on his deathbed”.

John has a brother called Roy and a baby sister, Ruth.

Their mother says “Your Daddy beats you because he loves you”.

John asks his mother if his Daddy is a good man. She answers “That ain’t no kind of question. You don’t know any better man, do you?”

Roy complains that their father doesn’t want them to go to the movies, play in the streets, have any friends, or do anything. He just wants them to go to church and read the Bible and “holler like a fool in front of the altar”.

The dialogue is written in the ungrammatical style which the black Harlem community apparently used, or use, and this makes the book more authentic.

The book is very readable and wonderfully expressed as are all Baldwin’s books; I would have read it to the end had I not had to return it to the library pronto.

It provides insight into the lives of members of the Pentecostal black community and I highly recommend it.

Two hundred and fifteen monotonous pages of sermons, hymns, and Praise-Jesusing, and forty-seven compelling pages called "Elizabeth's Prayer". Deeply unsatisfactory balance, that. ( )

He held as the first novel about Blacks in America to be written from a non-racial point of view, it represents a significant milestone in the development of American literature. The story is of a day in the life of several members of a Harlem fundamentalist church. Through flashbacks, we witness a saga of three generations of people.

Summary: An account of John Grimes fourteenth birthday, centering on his brother Roy’s stabbing, his estrangement from his father, and the Saturday night “tarrying service” at a pentecostal church, revelatory of the lives of those around John and his own “salvation.”

It is John Grime’s fourteenth birthday. He’s the well-behaved older son who can never please his father Gabriel, who struggles with his awakening sexuality, a deep sense of both sin, and resentment of his father’s religion. After doing his chores, his mother gives him some money to spend on his own birthday gift. He goes to the movies. When he returns, he finds his younger brother Roy has been cut up in a knife fight. His father is so angry he takes it out on his wife Elizabeth and John before he finally whips Roy, until Gabriel’s sister Florence restrains him. John slips out to clean the church with his older friend Elisha for the evening “tarrying service,” a pentecostal prayer service on Saturday night before the Sunday service.

The second part centers around the prayer service, and the three prayers of Florence, Gabriel, and Elizabeth, with flashbacks to their earlier lives. Florence, to get away from the town where three white men raped a girl, Deborah, but even more, from her brother Gabriel, always favored, moves to New York, marries Frank who never settles down, leaves her for another woman, and dies in the war. She’s the worldly wise Aunt who sees through her brother’s spiritual facades. Gabriel starts out living a wanton life, then is “saved” and becomes a great preacher. Deborah, the raped woman prayed for him and supported him at his lowest. He marries her in an act of both gratitude and condescension, as no one else will have her. It is a childless marriage and grows cold. Gabriel’s affair with Esther leads to a child. She goes away to have the child with money stolen from Deborah, dies in childbirth, as does the child in his youth–the first Roy (for Royal), named by Esther remembering what Gabriel said he wanted to name his son. Gabriel lives with deep guilt for what he has done and the deaths that resulted, and his deception of now-deceased Deborah. Elizabeth’s prayer recalls the loveless aunt who rescued her from growing up in a brothel, parting her from her father, her flight and affair with Richard who gets her with child, then commits suicide after being arrested for being Black at the wrong place and time. Through Florence she meets and marries Gabriel, who sees the marriage as a kind of atonement for his sin. But he never loves Elizabeth’s child, John like their own son, also named Roy.

The third part begins with John on the floor experiencing a vision that recalls the hostility of his father toward him, his hatred of his father’s religion and struggle with the weight of his sins, and finally, “going through” to blessed salvation, bringing rejoicing from all the saints, and brotherly comfort from Elisha. But Gabriel is yet harsh and disbelieving. One cannot help if he resents the grace he sees in John’s experience that he has never certainly known for himself, for he could never live with Elizabeth joyfully, but only oppressively. There is a lot of guilt here, that centers around Gabriel, but also may reflect the version of Christianity Baldwin experienced. Much of that guilt is experienced around sexuality, even the awakening desires both Elisha and John experience. The alternatives seem to be ecstatic release in prayer at the altar, rebellion via a flight to the secular city, or a stern and censorious form of religion.

One wonders where all this will end up for John, who seems a younger version of the author, caught between the angry step-father and the caring older “brother” (is he more than that, reflecting Baldwin’s homosexual orientation?). Baldwin never takes us beyond that single day in John Grimes life, yet it appears that the day is the first step into a greater freedom that Gabriel can only resent but never know. ( )

This is the first Baldwin book I have ever read and, although it was short, it was packed with intense, important issues. Since he is known for big critiques on racism, I just assumed that would be the central theme of the book but, from the title, I should have figured out that it was actually religion. He exposes the hypocrisy and abuse of religion and how it effects the Black community as both a way to overcome oppression and a continued cause of it. I know it is semi-autobiographical which makes it much more profound to me. There are also themes of sexism, racism and sexuality and this book is as relevant today as it was when it was written. ( )