Go Tell It on the Mountain: Part 3: The Threshing-Floor Summary & Analysis

Without knowing how, John finds himself on the threshing-floor. He feels “like a rock,” or like “something that has no power of itself, any more, to turn.” Deep inside John, “something moves” as if he is “possessed.” It begins to fill him “with an anguish” that he has “never imagined” and can’t “endure. He feels broken— “cracked” in half—but he does not feel the “wound,” only “the agony” and “fear.”

A mysterious voice tells John “to rise” and “leave this temple and go out into the world,” and while he wants to go, he can’t move. “Something” is happening to John. He can’t move his arms or legs to rise from the threshing-floor, and he begins to scream. The voice again tells him to get up off the “filthy floor” if he doesn’t “want to become like all the other [n_____s].” John tries again, but the “darkness” has “no beginning, and no end.” John is falling and is “going down.”

“Set thin house in order,” John hears Gabriel say, “for thou shalt die and not live.” John again hears the mysterious voice. “Get up, John,” it says. “Get up, boy. Don’t let him keep you here. You got everything your daddy got.” Gabriel looks to John, and John “screams.” Gabriel’s eyes “strip him naked,” and “hating” what he sees, John again begins to fall.

John doesn’t know where he is. There is only “silence” and a “faint trembling far beneath him.” He thinks perhaps it is “the fires of Hell” he is hearing, and then he hears Gabriel’s voice. “I’m going to beat sin out of him. I’m going to beat it out.” John knows he has sinned. Once, in their “dirty bathroom,” when Gabriel was in the tub and asked John to wash his back, John had “looked, as the accursed son of Noah had looked, on his father’s hideous nakedness.” John wonders if he lay here now, unable to rise, because looking unto his father had caused him to be “cursed.”

“All [n_____s] have been cursed,” the mysterious voice says, “all [n_____s] have come from this most undutiful of Noah’s sons.” John wonders if a curse can “come down so many ages.” Does a curse “live in time,” he questions, “or in the moment?” With Gabriel standing over him on the threshing-floor, John knows that a curse is “renewed from moment to moment, from father to son. Time is indifferent, like snow and ice; but the heart, crazed wanderer in the driving waste, carries the curse forever.”

“John,” says Gabriel, “come with me.” He leads John down a “narrow, narrow” street. The street is abandoned, and John is “frightened.” He looks to the buildings and knows they are “not for him—not today—no, nor tomorrow, neither!” A strange woman comes out of nowhere and passes them. “You mighty proud, ain’t you,” Gabriel says, “to be the Devil’s son?” Gabriel motions toward the woman. “You see that? That’s sin. That’s what the Devil’s son runs after,” he says. “Whose son are you?” John asks, and Gabriel slaps him.

“I seen it. I seen it,” John says as he runs from Gabriel. “And I heard you—all the nighttime long. I know what you do in the dark, black man, when you think the Devil’s son’s asleep. […] I ain’t the Devil’s son for nothing.” Gabriel stares as his son, not speaking. “And I hate you,” John says. “I seen under the robe, I seen you!” Gabriel raises his hand to strike him, and just like that, there is “silence” again, and Gabriel is “gone.”

John tries to run, but he can’t, and he begins to call out for help. “Oh, Lord, have mercy on me,” he cries. “Yes,” the mysterious voice says, “go through. Go through.” John tries again to move but is thwarted by the darkness. “Call on Him,” the voice says. “Call on Him. Ask Him to take you through.” It occurs to John that there must be “light somewhere, and life, and joy,” and he begins to cry again. “Oh, Lord, have mercy. Have mercy, Lord.”

Suddenly, John sees the Lord, “for a moment only; and the darkness, for a moment only, is filled with a light he cannot bear.” Then, John is “free.” His tears flow “as from a fountain; his heart, like a fountain of waters, bursts.” John continues to cry and is faintly aware of Elisha’s voice in the background. “Oh, yes!” Elisha cries. “Bless our God forever!”

John approaches Gabriel. “I’m saved,” John says to his father. “It come from your mouth,” Gabriel says. “I want to see you live it. It’s more than a notion.” Florence approaches John as well. “You fight the good fight,” she says, “you hear? Don’t you get weary, and don’t you get scared. Because I know the Lord’s done laid His hands on you.”

Florence walks ahead with Gabriel. “You always been saying,” she says to her brother, “how the Lord would answer prayer.” She smiles, but Gabriel does not reciprocate. “[John] going to learn,” Gabriel says, “that it ain’t all in the sinning and the shouting—the way of holiness is a hard way. He got the steep side of the mountain to climb.” Gabriel isn’t convinced John will remain saved, but his own “name is written in the Book of Life.” He knows he will see his “Savior’s face in glory.”

“Yes,” Florence says to Gabriel, “we’s all going to be together there. [Rachel], and you, and me, and Deborah—and what was the name of that little girl who died not long after I left home?” she asks. “Is her name written in the Book of Life?” Gabriel stares at his sister. “He knows my life—He done forgive me a long time ago,” Gabriel says.

“Looks like,” Florence says to Gabriel, “you think the Lord’s a man like you; you think you can fool Him like you fool men, and you think He forgets, like men.” She pulls Deborah’s letter from her purse and tells him she has carried it for more than thirty years. “Who is you met, Gabriel,” she asks, “all your holy life long, you ain’t made to drink a cup of sorrow?”

“I got a son,” Gabriel says, “and the Lord’s going to raise him up.” Florence laughs. “That son,” she says, “that Roy. You going to weep for many a eternity before you see him crying in front of the altar like Johnny was crying tonight.” Gabriel grows angrier. “I going to tell you something, Gabriel,” Florence says. “I know you thinking at the bottom of your heart that if you just make her, her and her bastard boy, pay enough for her sin, your son won’t have to pay for yours. Bu I ain’t going to let you do that. You done made enough folks pay for sin, it’s time you started paying.”

“What you think,” Gabriel asks Florence, “you going to be able to do to me.” She tells him that she will give Elizabeth the letter and tell everyone that “the Lord’s anointed” has “blood on his hands.” It will be good for Elizabeth to know, Florence says, that she isn’t “the only sinner,” and it will be good for John to know that he isn’t “the only bastard.” Gabriel sneers at her. “The Lord ain’t going to let it come to pass,” he says. “You going to be cut down.”

“Deborah was cut down,” Florence says to Gabriel, “but she left word. She weren’t no enemy of nobody—and she didn’t see nothing but evil. When I go, brother, you better tremble, ‘cause I ain’t going to go in silence.” Florence turns and walks in the direction of her subway, leaving Gabriel in the street. 

John walks ahead with Elisha, feeling an “unspeakable joy” flood his heart. “Elisha?” John asks. “It was you, wasn’t it, who prayed for me?” Elisha laughs. They were all praying, he says, but he was praying too. “Was you glad,” John asks, “to see me at the altar?” Elisha says he was. “I was mighty glad to see little Johnny lay his sins on the altar.” With the word “sin,” John “shivers.” He asks Elisha “how many faces the Devil” has, and Elisha confirms there are many. “But ain’t nobody seen them all,” he says.

“Elisha,” John says again, “no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember—please remember—I was saved. I was there.” Elisha nods and smiles. He kisses John’s forehead, “a holy kiss,” and walks away toward his uncle’s house to rest before Sunday morning service. John can feel Gabriel standing behind him and Elizabeth is standing on the front steps of their home, waiting for them to come inside. John turns and stares at Gabriel. “I’m ready,” John says. “I’m coming. I’m on my way.”