Jon Trott

This is a highly subjective Christian's response to "Just Above My Head" by James Baldwin, and can't be considered an in-depth review. That said... James Baldwin, for a variety of racial, sexual, intellectual, and familial reasons, seemed to have rejected Christianity. Yet to me it seems his world in "Just Above My Head" (and in fact all of his novels) is afire with Christian symbols, Christian sensibilities, and Christian ways of seeing. For me, I keep reading and re-reading his novels even more than his non-fiction because of his relentless focus upon suffering ("anguish") as a redemptive power and sign of becoming a more mature human being, and because his relentless assaults upon whiteness are in fact themselves done out a strangely tender, if relentlessly direct, love for us in our repressed state. (We refuse to suffer, and by refusing, are trapped in what both Baldwin and Kierkegaard would identify as despair.) Maybe critics would say - and in fact some do - that Baldwin's novels for the most part are too polemical, too "preachy." He does preach; his childhood preacher training comes forth in that way. But I want to hear him preach; I want to be convicted and scorched clean.