AP English Literature
from Go Tell It On the Mountain
by James Baldwin
Read the following passage carefully before you choose your answers.
In this passage from a semiautobiographical novel first published in 1953, J
...
AP English Literature
from Go Tell It On the Mountain
by James Baldwin
Read the following passage carefully before you choose your answers.
In this passage from a semiautobiographical novel first published in 1953, John Grimes, an African
American teenager in the 1930s, awakens on the morning of his fourteenth birthday.
In the midst of all his wonderings he fell asleep again, and when he woke up this time and got out of his
bed his father had gone to the factory, where he would work for half a day. Roy was sitting in the
kitchen, quarreling with their mother. The baby, Ruth, sat in her high chair banging on the tray with an
oatmeal-covered spoon. This meant that she was in a good mood; she would not spend the day howling,
for reasons known only to herself, allowing no one but her mother to touch her. Sarah was quiet, not
chattering today, or at any rate not yet, and stood near the stove, arms folded, staring at Roy with the flat
black eyes, her father’s eyes, that made her look so old.
Their mother, her head tied up in an old rag, sipped black coffee and watched Roy. The pale end-ofwinter sunlight filled the room and yellowed all their faces; and John, drugged and morbid and
wondering how it was that he had slept again and had been allowed to sleep so long, saw them for a
moment like figures on a screen, an effect that the yellow light intensified. The room was narrow and
dirty; nothing could alter its dimensions, no labor could ever make it clean. Dirt was in the walls and the
floorboards, and triumphed beneath the sink where roaches spawned; was in the fine ridges of the pots
and pans, scoured daily, burnt black on the bottom, hanging above the stove; was in the wall against
which they hung, and revealed itself where the paint had cracked and leaned outward in stiff squares and
fragments, the paper-thin underside webbed with black. Dirt was in every corner, angle, crevice of the
monstrous stove, and lived behind it in delirious communion with the corrupted wall. Dirt was in the
baseboard that John scrubbed every Saturday, and roughened the cupboard shelves that held the cracked
and gleaming dishes. Under this dark weight the walls leaned, under it the ceiling, with a great crack like
lightning in its center, sagged. The windows gleamed like beaten gold or silver, but now John saw, in the
yellow light, how fine dust veiled their doubtful glory. Dirt crawled in the gray mop hung out of the
windows to dry. John thought with shame and horror, yet in angry hardness of heart: He who is filthy, let
him be filthy still.* Then he looked at his mother, seeing, as though she were someone else, the dark,
hard lines running downward from her eyes, and the deep, perpetual scowl in her forehead, and the
downturned, tightened mouth, and the strong, thin, brown, and bony hands; and the phrase turned
against him like a two-edged sword, for was it not he, in his false pride and his evil imagination, who
was filthy? Through a storm of tears that did not reach his eyes, he stared at the yellow room; and the
room shifted, the light of the sun darkened, and his mother’s face changed. Her face became the face that
he gave her in his dreams, the face that had been hers in a photograph he had seen once, long ago, a
photograph taken before he was born. This face was young and proud, uplifted, with a smile that made
the wide mouth beautiful and glowed in the enormous eyes. It was the face of a girl who knew that no
evil could undo her, and who could laugh, surely, as his mother did not laugh now. Between the two
faces there stretched a darkness and a mystery that John feared, and that sometimes caused him to hate
her.
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