Particularly in the revival scenes, Baldwin places his reader in the bowels of the church, vibrating with the players to the pulse of the action. Throughout the work, he uses a narrative technique of repeating a key word three times, in a manner in which one can envision the Preacher trying to evoke a participation and response from his congregation. Music is a part of his life and finds its references everywhere in his works. The music is not always soothing but often it is unrestful, such as in the paragraph describing Gabriel's torment The music that filled any town or city he entered was not the music of the saints, but another music, infernal, which glorified lust and held righteousness up to scorn.16 In the chapter of Elizabeth's prayer he vividly recalls his musical roots by referring to the response of baby John to the faint sound of music in an apartment down the hall "filling the air with the slow, high measured ring in the ears as John is struggling on the "Threshing Floor." In Gabriel's prayer, he speaks of his mother singing "low and sweet," perhaps a play on words of the spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot!" Even in his final line one feels in the subconscious the strains of the spiritual, "Ole Black Joe." James Baldwin has been called "the poet of the Negro revolt." However, one feels that he also reaches out at all humanity with his "blues" prose affirming not only Negro life in the United States, in all its complexities and confusions, but also humanity itself in the very process of confronting failures and existentialistic absurbdities.17 Albert Murray feels that Baldwin rates the theories and abstract formulation of French existentialism over the infinitely richer wisdom of the blues.18 He seems to prefer Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" as the literary extension of the blues. He calls it a blues odyssey the Negroes' obvious predicament symbolizing every body's essential predicament. And like the blues, and echoing the irrepressibility of America itself, it ended on a note of promise, ironic and ambiguous perhaps, but a note of promise still. The blues with no aid from existentialism, have always known that here were no clear-cut solutions for the human situation.19 Perhaps he does not have Wright's or Ellison's capacity to take all modern problems as his province, but he does not stoop to the often blatant provincialism of many Negro novelists.20 It is difficult to examine his short stories such as, "Sonny's Blues" and "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" and not take cause against his critics in this light. Like the spirituals and the blues, Baldwin's works have a remarkable honesty and integrity. His characters experience painful progressive self-revelation and his writing is so powerful that it forces readers to identify with these characters and recognize hidden and sometimes taboo emotions as their own.21 His first novel is both realistic and brutal yet it conveys an extraordinary sensitivity and poetry.22 Perhaps sensitivity would be a better description of the overall aspect of his characters. "They possess a set of values that are often tossed aside and trampled, but despite this capacity for sin, they exhibit an even greater capacity for suffering and repentence." They sense their failings and develop an ability to work through their misery to some kind of peaceful salvation.23 Faithful to the spirit of the blues, Baldwin left much of the book's anguish unresolved.24 Steven Marcus cites a "force above the characters and their relations which creates an impression of terrible uniformity and strangeness.25 Is it not interesting that all of these statements by the various critics quoted, although pertaining to a criticism of literature, sound peculiarly like the aforementioned description of "Black Music" and its developments through the ages! It is indeed unfortunate that some critics have apparently failed to see the poetic and musical tone in this prose and have claimed it to be without vitality and its perfections "wooden!"26 Although many critics prefer Baldwin's essays to his fiction, one cannot agree with their judgment that the surface excellence and poetry of Go Tell It On The Mountain did not seem to suit the earthiness of the subject.27 On the contrary, it is just this precise ability to give this story the lyrical background it demands that renders it a remarkable accomplishment. No discussion of Baldwin's novel is complete without an examination into the richness of his style, which has caused him to be called by many "the most important Negro writer to emerge during the last decade."28 Got Tell It On The Mountain is Baldwin's theme of self-acceptance. Rich in metaphor and a prose of unusal power, his "story within a story" narrative allows him to maintain an ironic distance from his material, even as he portrays the spiritual force and emotional appeal of store-front Christianity. It is by extended metaphor that Baldwin devles into the essence of Negro experience, rejection and shame. The image of Gabriel, the guilty, and John, the rejected son, is an emblem of the race relations in this country. Only God does not reject the Negro completely. He may cast down, but it is only to raise again in glory. The symbolism of even the family name of Grimes recalls to mind dirt and blackness; the robes of the saved, the saints, are white. "There is in short, the path of self-hatred and the path of self-acceptance."29 It is in the final conversion of John that Baldwin so eloquently brings his rhythmical prose to its culmination and evokes from the reader the troubled "feeling of having looked on beauty bare."30 The closing scenes are so intense that God seems to come alive on the page.31 In the depth of John's depression, it is a sound that comes from the darkness. a sound of rage and weeping of Melancholy of chains of death.32 "It is the sound of all Negro art and all Negro religion, for it flows from the cracked open heart."33 The final pages of Got Tell It On The Mountain reverberate with the music and rhythm of the spirituals, driving home the message of Baldwin that it is through these emotional cultural forms that his people can rationalize their sufferings and survive the ordeals of white oppression in which they must abide. 12 1Barbara McKenzie, ed, The Process of Fiction (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1969) p. 39 2Lola M. Irelan, ed., Low Income Life Styles (U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1967) pp. 2-3 3Irelan, op. cit, p. 7 4"James Baldwin," The McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of World Biography (McGraw Hill Inc., 1973) I, p. 359. 5James Baldwin, "The Discovery of What It Means To Be An American," in Black American Literature; Essays, Darwin T. Turner, ed. (Charles E. Merrill, Ohio, 1969) p. 119 "Arthur P. Davis, From The Dark Tower, Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960 (Washington, D.C., Howard University, 1974) p. 226 7Edward Margolies, ed., A Native Son Reader (Lippincott, 1970) p. 281 8Beatrice Landeck, Echoes of Africa in Folk Songs of the Americas (McKay, New York, 1961) p. 3 9lbid., pp. 7-13 10lbid., p. 130 "Ibid., pp. 135-136 12Le Roi Jones, Black Music (William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York) p. 11 13Ibid., p. 185 14E. Franklin Fracier, The Negro Church in America (Shocken, 1963), p. 73 15Jones, op. cit, p. 207 16James Baldwin, Go Tell It On The Mountain (Dial Press, New York, 1963) p. 33 "Albert Murray, "Someting Different, Something More" in Ander, and Beyond The Negro Writer in the United States, ed. Herbert Hill (Harper, New York, 1966) pp. 44 and 117 18lbid., p. 117 19Murray, op. cit, p. 136 20 H. C. Webster, "Community of Pride," Saturday Review, May 16, 1953, p. 14 21Barbara Dodds Stanford and Karima Amin, Black Literature for High School Students (National Council of Teachers of English, 1978) p. 55 22Roi Ottley, Chicago Sunday Tribune Book Reviews, July 12, 1953, p. 7 24Joseph Featherstone, "Blues for Mr. Baldwin." New Republic. Nove. 27, 1965, p. 3 25Steven Marcus, Commentary, Book Review Digest, November 1953, p. 459-461 26Anthony West, "Sorry Lives," New Yorker, June 20, 1953, p. 93 27Langston Hughes, New York Times Book Reviewsm February 26, 1956, p. 26 28Robert Bone, The NEgro Novel in America (Yale University, New Haven, Conn., 1966) p. 218 30Bone, op. cit, p. 220 30Time Book Reviews, May 18, 1953 32Baldwin, op. cit, pp. 200-201 33Bone, op. cit. p. 225 UNTITLED by David Torres so lightly I touched her feeling only Her warmth, the smooth line of a snail down her back and round. Hardening, stiff with her very essence and limp together Moving so very slowly not missing the smallest sensation, the bursting hearts met and like a giant red rose, unfold exposing, exploding, touching and then returning to the virgin buds of life to reopen again and again and again JIVEMAN by Julie LaVine jitterbug jiveman doncha know we ain't here just to give your cosmic cloud a push and we ain't here just to add a little class to the inside of your Rolls nuthin' like that nowheres about we is here top cat to show that where you are is not where we is at NOTE FROM A FRIGID PERSON by Frank Cook If some vision you have thought about destroys the prison and lets you out then tell him with your eyes. If some touch inside of you can do as much for someone new then free him from disguise. I can't wait to know you 13