What I\u2019ve Been Reading This Week:<\/strong><\/p> A book that\u2019s lingered on my shelves for years. Another pickup from my old bookstore job. An author whose Greatness and Legend looms so large it\u2019s sometimes hard to start the books\u2014an attitude I learned is kind of silly with this one. An excellent religious text, a real document of the middle of the 20th century. I\u2019m talking, of course, about Go Tell It On The Mountain<\/em> by James Baldwin. <\/p> Baldwin famously grew up thinking he was going to be a preacher. I wasn\u2019t quite that settled on being a preacher, but the idea occurred to me, multiple times. Wikipedia tells me this novel is semi-autobiographical, and sure, that scans with the listicle version of Baldwin\u2019s biography I have in my head. I don\u2019t know the precise reason why Baldwin became disillusioned with the church, but if this book is clues here are some: the main character, John, does not know how to handle his developing homosexual desire, nor does he see the church as a place he can express this inner conflict. His stepfather, Gabriel, is Deacon\/preacher who is emotionally and physically abusive at home. His mother, Elizabeth, has all the options a Black woman in the 1950s had to deal with an abusive husband (mainly, shutting up and going to church, while occasionally getting wistful about John\u2019s dead father). His younger half-brother, Roy, is rebellious in \u201cgo out and start street fights and one day get non-fatally knifed\u201d kind of way. Don\u2019t worry, John eventually gives his heart to The Lord and gets saved. <\/p> There\u2019s more to the novel than all that, obviously. We get extensive backstory of Gabriel and his sister Florence\u2019s time in Jim Crow South, we get Elizabeth\u2019s love tragedy with the self-educated, museum-loving Richard, who has his will to live destroyed by one racist shopkeeper and an incompetence of cops. The main thing I get, though, is a portrait of people who have completely given their lives over to religion, but religion hardly has the answers to help them. God here is discussed as someone who can fix all your problems if you ask nicely, but will not hesitate to heap mounds more problems on and \u201cbring you low\u201d if you sin. Sinning here means stepping outside a pretty narrow, heteronormative box\u2014one where women are blamed and mocked for being raped, men are household tyrants, living any other way is out of the question, and while it might be such a viciously racist time in the south that Black people were buying one-way tickets north in droves? Your problems are still mostly your own fault. You shouldn\u2019t have been sinning. Go Tell It On The Mountain<\/em> is, like a lot of novels from the 1950s, a beautifully well-wrought portrait of why you don\u2019t want to go back to the 1950s. Don\u2019t worry, though. John\u2019s soul is saved.<\/p> LINKS!<\/strong><\/p> It\u2019s all music recommendations today, so instead of something to listen to, here\u2019s Lake Michigan from Kenosha: <\/p> We Are The Union: <\/strong>I first heard of this band thanks to trombonist Jer\u2019s Twitter and YouTube presence. A highly energetic multi-instrumentalist covering video game songs and emo classics is an attention-getter, whaddyawantfromme<\/em>. Jer\u2019s infectious energy made me check out We Are The Union, and I\u2019m happy to report they\u2019re very good. Check out their album Ordinary Life<\/em>, released around the time singer Reade Wolcott came out as trans, with songs dealing with transition and existing beyond the binary. <\/p>![\"Go](\"https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/b1763041-a25d-45a5-9456-2151a3e86ac7_3024x4032.heic\")
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