America's Prophet (13 page)

“What did slaves hear about?” Jerry said. “They didn’t hear news from the newspaper. Many of those men and women couldn’t read. They heard news from Bible stories. And they looked at those stories and said, ‘Wow. It says all God’s children should be free. You’ve got Joshua fightin’ the battle of Jericho. Moses partin’ the Red Sea. Slavery may be hell, but there’s still a miracle chance that I might be free.’”

“So they had a choice,” I said. “Either ignore the Bible, or turn it into their own story.”

“That’s what the African did. He turned the Bible into his own salvation history. Even though things are terrible now, it’s still gonna be all right.” Jerry closed his eyes and began to sing.

Or a song like:

He opened his eyes and looked back at me. “That’s a coded song,” he said. “It’s a call to the slaves saying, ‘There’s a conductor here, and I’m goin’ the next day.’”

Songs were not the only source of codes for the Underground Railroad. Along routes used by runaway slaves, conductors would drive nails into trees at forks in the road. The nails would be precisely three and a half feet above the ground and affixed to the right side of the tree if the right fork was to be taken, the left side for the reverse. The painted black coachmen used as hitching posts sometimes doubled as signposts. If the coachman’s lantern was lighted, fugitives could consider the home a safe house; if not, they should keep running. Some scholars believe quilts were also full of codes and were hung over fence posts to guide fleeing slaves. Five square knots would indicate that a slave should travel a certain distance to a safe house. The carpenter’s wheel pattern evoked Jesus and, if placed in a certain quadrant of the quilt, told the slave to head in that direction.

But the most comprehensive use of codes was in the rich canon of slave spirituals. Slave songs, as they were known, grew out of
the African tradition known as the “shout,” in which people would gather in a circle, stamp and clap in a carefully choreographed call-and-response. The term “spiritual” was first applied in 1909 on Saint Catherine’s Island, Georgia, about fifty miles south of Savannah. As with slave religion in general, practitioners replaced African gods with biblical figures to create an entirely new form. Spirituals were potent because to the naked ear, that is, the white overseers, the songs were about reaching heavenly redemption.
Great! They’re worshiping our God!
But to the slaves, the spirituals also evoked a this-worldly liberation. As Frederick Douglass, the most famous former slave in America, wrote of his own escape, when he and his fellow runaways sang
O Canaan, sweet Canaan, / I am bound for the land of Canaan,
the words had double meaning. To the outside “it meant the expectations of a speedy summons to a world of spirits, but on the lips of our company it simply meant a speedy pilgrimage to a free state, and deliverance from all the evils and dangers of slavery.”

The story of the Israelites’ escape from slavery and flight to freedom became the single greatest motif of slave spirituals. The Exodus was the sound track of the Underground Railroad. A partial list of titles includes: “Didn’t Ole Pharaoh Get Lost [in the Red Sea],” “Turn Back Pharaoh’s Army,” and “I Am Bound for the Promised Land.” Slave spirituals demonized the pharaoh and glorified Canaan.

And they heralded the man who led the Israelites to freedom.
De rough, rocky road what Moses done travel, / I’s bound to carry my soul to de Lawd
.

Moses starred as the hero in many songs, particularly in what may be the most recognized slave spiritual of all, “Go Down, Moses,” which Isabella Beecher Hooker, the half sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, called “the Negro Marseillaise.” In Washington, on Thanksgiving Day 1862, Harriet and her sister visited the barracks of fugitive slaves who had joined the Union forces and were celebrating their first Thanksgiving on free soil. After the blessing, the choir sang in jubilant call-and-response style the song “forbidden to them down South,” Isabella wrote. The song uses as its refrain the words Moses says to Pharaoh in Exodus 5:1: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: ‘Let my people go.’”

The song, which some credit to Denmark Vesey, a free black in Charleston, South Carolina, continues for twenty-four verses. Like most spirituals, it compresses time, making the daring escape of the
chosen people of Israel a model for the forgotten children of Africa. The last verse captures the moment of liberation.

I asked Jerry Gore why Moses was so popular to the slaves.

“It goes back to what it means to be enslaved. Once somebody breaks your will, you can be made to do anything. But as long as your will is not broken, you can always resist. You can always hope. And as long as you have hope, you’re human.”

“But when you’re singing to Moses,” I said, “he was living in Egypt. He was traveling in the desert. It seems like long ago and far away.”

“No, it’s not. Because what Moses went through, you’re going through. What you draw on is the analogy.” He gestured to the home behind us. “When I was five years old, my mother brought me up here to the Rankin House,” he said. “We climbed the steps you just walked up. We sat in this very spot. I was looking out at the green hills of Kentucky, and I was thinking about how my little feet hurt. And my mama told me the story of Moses. I had never heard it before.”

“So what did you think?”

“That Moses must be somethin’ special to have God talk to him like that!” he said. “You gotta understand, black folk look at systems. And the system is that Moses is part of God. He’s a door. Not just a door to salvation but a door to living. You walk through Moses to get up this hill. You walk through Moses to get to this light.” Then Jerry Gore began to sing.

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center sits on the banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati. On the second floor is an empty, two-story log cabin, a little bigger than a boxcar. It has four small windows and a red door and is the kind of house schoolchildren imagine as the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. But it was a slave pen, where slaves were packed for days or months at a time, some chained to wrought-iron rings still visible on the rafters. Found in northern Kentucky, the pen housed slaves as they waited out price fluctuations in the market before being shipped down the Mississippi to auction sites in Natchez or New Orleans.

“The day we found this, I stepped in here and wept,” said Carl Westmoreland. A descendant of slaves from Virginia, Westmoreland is a veteran of the civil rights movement, an urban planner, and the curator of the $110 million museum, which he helped found. As folksy as Jerry Gore was, Carl Westmoreland was genteel. Nearing seventy years of age, with pale brown skin dappled with freckles, he wore a black-and-white tweed jacket, a white shirt, and an air of taut authority that came from half a century of fighting inner-city battles. I came to see him to discuss how blacks in the nineteenth century transformed themselves from a population of slaves into a “black nation” and how much that process drew on the Israelites’ experience in the desert.

“The first time I came here, I had the same emotional reaction as when I went to Auschwitz,” Carl said. “It reminded me of a day back in 1943, when I was six years old. I was sitting in Miss Watt’s Sunday-school class at Saint Simon’s Episcopal Church, and we were talking
about the Exodus. After Mass, we would join our parents at the parish house, and I said to Momma and Daddy, ‘The same thing happened to the Jews is happening to us! Only for us, the white people are Pharaoh.’”

“You were six!” I said.

“I was a kid in short breeches, in an all-black town,” he said, chuckling. “The only white people I knew were the nuns at Saint Simon’s, and I didn’t like them.”

“So what did your parents say?”

“They just took it up. They talked to me as if I were a college freshman. My dad explained the parallels between the Jewish experience and the black experience. He talked about the atrocities going on in Europe. He said similar things were happening to us. He said if we weren’t careful, they’d lock us up, too. Why did he do it? Because he wanted me to stay in church, and school, and he knew that the two were connected.”

The idea that Africans in the United States might form a cultural tradition separate from whites began almost as early as the United States. From its inception, black nationalism was modeled to a large degree on Israelite nationalism. On January 1, 1808, Absalom Jones, the first African American priest in the Episcopal Church, delivered a sermon in Philadelphia celebrating the end of the transatlantic slave trade. He opened with a quotation from Exodus 3: “And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people.” Jones declared that if blacks hoped to become a chosen nation like Israel, they also had to subscribe to the ethical standards of the Israelites. He proposed five commandments for all blacks to follow, including remembering their enslavement, expressing gratitude to God, and conducting themselves in an honorable manner. Jones also suggested a festival of “publick thanksgiving” on January 1 to remember the “sufferings of our brethren and their deliverance.” In addition, more
such holidays came to be celebrated in black communities: July 4, the end of slavery in New York, and July 5, the day of emancipation in the West Indies. The beginnings of a rival calendar were being formed.

Orators at these black festivals often made the direct connection between the liberation of Israel and the emancipation of black America. Eddie Glaude, a professor at Princeton, examined hundreds of these speeches, as well as sermons, newspaper articles, and letters. As he concludes in his book
Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America,
by the 1840s, metaphors of the Exodus had become “the predominate political language of African Americans.” “Exodus, in effect, was no longer the story of Israel,” Glaude wrote, “but an account of African-American slavery and eventual deliverance—the taken-for-granted context for any discussion of slavery and freedom.” The story had become what he calls “the covenant of Black America.”

What’s striking about the use of Exodus language in nineteenth-century black America is how closely it parallels what happened in Puritan New England in the seventeenth century and Revolutionary America in the eighteenth century. In all three cases, the Exodus first provides a language of chosenness for a beleaguered population, then a rhetoric of mission that emboldens the aggrieved people to strive for their own liberation, and then—in a part of the story I never fully appreciated before embarking on this journey—a rhetoric of control that allows the newly emancipated community to rein in any tendencies toward excess. The Puritans did this by imposing Mosaic-inspired laws across New England. Early Americans did this by crafting the Constitution.

African Americans attempted something similar by adopting an informal covenant for the new black nation that stressed faith, work, and education. As contraband slave Brother Thornton warned his
fellow refugees in 1862, Egypt may be behind them, but the Promised Land was still far away. “There must be no looking back to Egypt,” he said. “We must free ourselves from the shackles of sin, especially the sin of disbelief…. We must educate ourselves and our children.” Here was the true power of Exodus. It helped create a new meta-narrative of what it means to be a nation: revolution, followed by covenant, together creating an adhesive community that is both supportive of ongoing change yet resistant to it as well. This ideal manages to balance both dissent and consensus at the same time. For African Americans, this narrative created a vision of a nation within a nation in which they would try not to overthrow the American Dream but to join it. For them, the Promised Land became a place in the middle class.

“There was a mistaken belief on the part of the Anglos,” Carl Westmoreland said, “that because we couldn’t read English, we were illiterate. Well, we couldn’t read English, but we in our own cultures knew about social justice, we had measurements of ethical behavior and heroic behavior. And I don’t know how much of the story of Exodus is mythical, but I know enough to know that it’s true. And in our community that story resonated, and continues to resonate. I can talk about it on the corner with drug dealers, or in a bar with alcoholics, and it will stop them in their tracks because it says to them what it said to my dad, that there is opportunity available out there.

“We would get to the lines in the 1960s,” he continued, “knowing we were going to get our asses whipped. And the kids would start singing,