Plot Summary
The opening chapter tells the story of John, a young African-American boy in Harlem in the 1930s. John has been raised by his mother Elizabeth and her preacher husband Gabriel, who nominally is John's father and is a strict disciplinarian, abusive to both his children and his wife. Gabriel's religious philosophy is tough and one of salvation through faith in Jesus, without which one is damned to hell. John hates his father and dreams of wounding or killing him and running away. The characters are members of the Temple of the Fire Baptized Church in Harlem, a Pentecostal Protestant denomination.
Florence's Prayer tells her life story. She was born to 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 yearning need to escape from her life. Disgusted by the sexual harassment of her boss, Florence buys a one-way train ticket to New York and leaves her mother on her deathbed with Gabriel. In New York, Florence marries a dissolute man named Frank, resulting in a power struggle within their marriage which ends after ten years when Frank leaves one night and never returns. He later dies in France in World War I, but Florence only finds out from Frank's girlfriend.
Gabriel's Prayer starts with a description of his drunken, womanizing ways as a teenager, before his rebirth in Christ and the start of his career as a preacher. After his conversion he forms a relationship with a childhood friend of Florence, a slightly older woman from his town named Deborah who was gang-raped as a teenager by a band of white men. Deborah is devout in her faith, and Gabriel uses her strength to become a successful Reverend himself. However, despite his religious convictions, Gabriel is unable to resist his physical attraction for a woman named Esther. Esther and Gabriel work for the same white family. Gabriel has a brief affair with her that but then ends it out of guilt. When Esther finds herself pregnant, Gabriel steals his wife's savings and gives them to Esther to hush up the matter and allow Esther to go away to have her baby; she goes to Chicago but dies giving birth to their son, Royal. Royal knows his father but doesn't know of their relationship, and is eventually killed in a barroom fight in Chicago. Gabriel is powerless and unable to stop his son's murder. Deborah, who knew or suspected that Royal was her husband's son from the beginning, admonishes Gabriel before her death for abandoning Esther and his son.
Elizabeth's Prayer, the shortest of the three, tells her story. As a young girl, Elizabeth was very close to her father, but when her mother dies, she is forced by a court order to live with an imperious and cold aunt, and then goes to live in New York with a friend of the aunt's who is a Spiritualist medium. It is revealed that Gabriel is not John's biological father, for Elizabeth had gone to New York with her boyfriend, Richard, a self-educated "sinner" who did not believe in the Church and who never carried out his promise to marry Elizabeth. Richard is arrested for a robbery he didn't commit, and while he is acquitted at trial, the experience – including the abuse he takes at the hands of white police officers – leads him to commit suicide on his first night home. Elizabeth, then just a few months pregnant with John, takes a job, where she meets Florence. Florence introduces her to Gabriel, whom she marries.
The final chapter returns to the church, where John sees his friend Elisha fall to the floor in a religious ecstasy and is himself then caught up in a Pentecostal spiritual experience and falls to the floor. He has a series of dreamlike visions in which he sees hell and heaven, life and death, and also Gabriel standing over him. When he regains his senses, he says that he is saved and that he has accepted Jesus as his savior.
Yet even as the group leaves the church, old sins are revisited as Florence threatens to tell Elizabeth of Gabriel's sordid past. Although she does not tell Elizabeth, she hopes that she finds out eventually.
Read more about this topic: Go Tell It On The Mountain (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or summary:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)