What happens in Part Two of Go Tell It on the Mountain?
Elizabeth's Prayer unfolds as a deep, introspective flashback, revealing the life Elizabeth has kept hidden beneath her exterior as a Saint of the Temple of the Fire Baptized. The chapter shifts from her current position kneeling on the threshing floor to the pivotal moments of her past: the early death of her mother, her cold relocation to live with a devout aunt in Maryland, and her painful separation from the father she loved. In Baltimore, she meets Richard—brilliant, angry, and irreverent—and falls into a love that feels like the first genuine warmth she has experienced. They move to New York together, unmarried, and Elizabeth becomes pregnant. Before she can share the news with Richard, he is arrested with other Black men on a false robbery charge. He suffers a brutal beating in jail, is eventually released without an apology or compensation, and, devastated by the humiliation, takes his own life. Elizabeth is left alone, pregnant with John, and it is only then that she meets the older, reliable Gabriel Grimes, who agrees to marry her and raise Richard's child as his own—though the chapter clearly indicates that Gabriel's acceptance has always felt more like a transaction than an act of grace.
Analysis
Baldwin crafts Elizabeth's Prayer as a counter-testimony: while the church presents a singular redemptive story, Elizabeth's inner world contains a more complex history. The chapter's most skillful technique is its handling of time—Baldwin intertwines the present tense of the service with deep memories, allowing Elizabeth's physical collapse on the church floor to serve as a psychological unearthing. This creates a sense of both surrender and defiance.
Richard acts as the chapter's moral and emotional anchor, even in his absence. Baldwin portrays him with detail—his self-taught reading, his barely suppressed fury at white America, his gentleness towards Elizabeth—making his destruction by the carceral system resonate as a political statement rather than just a tragic plot point. The scene of his false arrest is stark and procedural, which only intensifies its brutality.
Themes of silence and hidden truths permeate the narrative. Elizabeth has never revealed to John who his father is; she has never fully shared the depth of her grief with Gabriel. Baldwin employs free indirect discourse to allow readers to experience what Elizabeth cannot articulate, creating an irony that the congregation around her remains unaware of. The tone shifts significantly when Richard appears in memory—prose becomes looser and warmer—then tightens again whenever Gabriel is present, reflecting the emotional toll of the life Elizabeth chose or was compelled to live. The chapter subtly critiques a social structure, a church, and a marriage all at once.
Key quotes from Part Two
“She had not known that she could feel so strongly, or that she could feel so much, or that she would ever feel anything again.”
Baldwin's free indirect discourse captures Elizabeth's stunned recognition of her love for Richard, framing feeling itself as something that had been taken from her long before he arrived.
“He had been beaten, he said, to make him confess to something he had not done; and no one had come to help him, no one had said a word.”
Elizabeth recalls Richard's account of his jailhouse ordeal, the flat declarative syntax enacting the institutional indifference that will ultimately destroy him.
“She was not the same Elizabeth who had walked into the church that evening, who had knelt down in prayer.”
Near the chapter's close, Baldwin marks the tarry service's transformative claim on Elizabeth while leaving open whether the change is liberation or further enclosure.