The American Future (25 page)

That year I travelled 2,325 miles and preached 178 sermons.

 

On and on went the inexhaustible road warrior, Jarena Lee, walking and riding, going by gig and wagon, by steamboat and railroad, sleigh and mule train; lugging her portable lectern with her, through Ohio and Illinois, New York and Delaware, Massachusetts and across the border in Ontario, through every corner of Pennsylvania, and into the slave state of Maryland and the half-slave city of Washington; teaching in schools, exhorting in field and forest, in camp revivals and Love Feasts, comforting the dying, of which there were a good many in the terrifying cholera year of 1831 when in New York 160 perished horribly every day; clocking a record 692 sermons in 1835, the year of the great abolitionist push in the South. In her prodigious diary—one of the great unread black narratives—can be heard the exultation of those meetings and services: the shouting and clapping, the sobbing and singing, in city chapels and backcountry churches. She had begun as a little slave girl, struck by guilt when she told her mistress a fib, saved from drowning by a sense of God's help, and become an authentic American phenomenon, preaching to overflowing congregations, the first, in her way, of the great black orators. She was in her own person what W. E. B. DuBois in
The Souls of Black Folk
identified as the first kind of true black leader: the Preacher and the Teacher. And the astonishing thing is, that although revolutionary in her way, Jarena was by no means alone. By the time that she hung up her lectern in the 1840s, there was a whole black sisterhood of traveling preachers, defying mobs and magistrates, male prejudice and skeptical indifference: Amanda Smith, “Elizabeth, a Colored Minister of the Gospel,” Mary McCray in Kentucky, and Bethany Veney, “Aunt Betty.”

Though they were very much mistresses of their own vocation, all these women needed some help from the Protestant black church which was becoming powerfully entrenched in the cities, as Jarena and Bethany Veney were going on their travels. Jarena's most significant conversion was the famous Richard Allen, the black Methodist bishop of the Mother Bethel Church in Philadelphia. Once he was persuaded that Jarena was a force to be reckoned with, Allen took her along on his own preaching tours to New York and Baltimore, both
slave cities, where to be a black preacher at all was to invite assault and sometimes not just the vocal kind.

But the work of Allen and his counterparts in Savannah—Andrew Bryan and later Andrew Marshall—was to create an entire black dominion of the saved, out of reach of both the slaveholders and the patronizing plantation missionaries. In towns like Savannah, the local citizenry often had plenty of second thoughts as to whether it was such a good idea to have crowded black churches instructing their flocks. And even though Bryan in particular always claimed he was no threat to the institution of slavery, he was viciously beaten up on the streets of the town until his master Jonathan Bryan found him a disused rice barn in which he could hold services. The history of these black Baptists of the South had begun as a flight to freedom, when thousands of them had taken advantage of the British offer, made during the Revolutionary War, to give freedom to escaped slaves from rebel plantations who would serve the king. When the British cause was lost, many left with the royal army, north to Nova Scotia or to the Caribbean. But those who stayed found mutual support in worship and somehow hung on in their own churches amid intimidation and poverty. Though those first heroic generations of Savannah Baptists are buried (needless to say) in a separate lot in Laurel Grove cemetery, they were nonetheless the origin of the freedom church in the South, the first encampment of an army that would have to fight its way through war and a century of Jim Crow segregation before it got anywhere near the Promised Land.

In the histories I read at school decades ago, American slaves before the Civil War were never capable of shaking off their chains, mental as well as physical, except by flight. Their imprisonment in the system of degradation was so total that the best they could do, other than become a fugitive, was to wait for deliverance at the hands of white evangelical abolitionists like John Rankin, Charles Finney, and Theodore Weld. The notion that from North to South, New York to Baltimore to Savannah, there existed a free black church, numerous (1,400 alone at Bethel Church, Charleston, where Denmark Vesey's sect had been uprooted, maybe 400,000 through the prewar South according to W. E. B. DuBois), a church that was vigorous, well disciplined, restlessly active at saving both souls and bodies, with dauntless outriders like Jarena Lee before whom whites and blacks quailed, rejoiced, and celebrated—all this would have seemed far-fetched. But
a look at the rich trove of memoirs and spiritual autobiographies of that period, and in anthologies collected later in the century like the
Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama
, reveals an entire world of daring self-determination.

And even where it was impossible to organize in the manner of the city black churches of Baptists and Methodists, slave religion found a way to shake off the yoke. The historian Albert Raboteau has collected evidence of a religious counterculture existing under the noses of the plantation overseers and missionaries. Their real worship, not the permitted decorum of churches like Colcock Jones's at Midway, but one inflected with the body movements, chants, and storytelling of Africa. When they could do so more or less openly in fellow slaves' cabins, the brothers and sisters worshipped as they wanted, as Jarena Lee often heard, with the power of the ring shout, call and response, handclapping, and the exclaimed A-MEN! But where such worship was suspected of instigating some sort of quasi rebellion, the slaves resorted to “hush harbors,” in woods, ravines, and gullies, where the slaves would “steal away to Jesus.” The ex-slave Washington Wilson explained that “when de niggers go round singin ‘Steal away to Jesus' dat mean dere gwine be a religious meetin dat night. De masters…didn't like dem religious meetins so us natcherly slips off at night down in de bottoms or somewhere. Sometimes us sing and pray all night.” In Prince George County, Virginia, Peter Randolph described the boughs of trees bent over and held in place to fashion a natural chapel, slaves openly recounting what they endured the past week and—just as in Raven with the Primitive Baptists—breaking off to give each other the handshakes of Christian fellowship. When they had a visit from a traveling black preacher, probably more down at heel and ragged than Jarena Lee, he would also deliver a touch of African American poetry when recounting the Exodus or the sufferings of Christ at the Passion, stories that meant something to slaves that no white oppressor or for that matter benefactor could understand in quite the same way: “I see the sun when she turned herself black, I see the stars a-fallin from the sky and them old Herods coming out…and then I knew 'twas the Lord of Glory.”

The temptation to raise the voice in praise and hope was so strong that wet quilts or iron pots turned upside down were used as mutes (how painful that must have been for a world that lived to set the voice free). Another slave, Anderson Edwards, reported “we didn't have no
song books, and the Lord done give us our song.” Sometimes, though, the music could be sung in the open, in the summer after work and supper at bonfires lit “to keep the mosquitoes away and listen to our preachers preach half the night.” There would be singing and testifying and shouting. And then, the “Frenzy” that DuBois describes, “the silent rapt countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical fervor—the stamping shrieking and shouting, the rushing to and fro, and wild waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the vision and the trance.” Often others from neighboring plantations would come and join in at the fire. And sometimes the blacks in the midst of their song would turn and notice, at the edge of the circle, white faces lit by the burning wood.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Unitarian minister turned Union army colonel, walked toward the bonfire as was his habit after supper; heading for the shout. In other regiments across the theater of war, taps would have already been sounded; men would be stretching out for the night in their tents. Not here, though, at Beaufort on the sea island of Port Royal off the Carolina coast in 1861. Higginson and his commander and comrade in arms, General Rufus Saxton, had been of one mind. Let the 1st South Carolina Volunteers sing. Had not Cromwell's men sung as they girded themselves for the morning fight? And Higginson was sure that not since the New Model Army had there been such a spirit of religion among soldiers as among his freed slaves. He and brother-abolitionists in the North had long spoken of a “gospel army,” but they had meant it metaphorically, Fighting the Good Fight, Christian Soldiers, and so forth. After a while Higginson had found, somewhat to his surprise, the figure of speech disingenuous, shaming, a sign that fighting against slavery would be done
merely
with words and prayers. Higginson, Massachusetts Brahmin, Harvard man, a fixture of the literary world, had become exasperated with the rhetoric. He hungered to smite the despotic enemy hip and thigh, to lay about them with a mighty whack. His sermons at Newburyport turned intemperate, so complained the local citizenry, and it did not help matters that he used the pulpit to castigate the way they saw fit
to run their cotton textile businesses, calling on them to feel shame for buying from the South. He was politely warned to moderate. He declined to do so, and Newburyport bid him farewell.

At Worcester Free Church, the people were more inclined to allow Higginson to agitate hard for the Anti-Slavery Association, although his appetite for action could still try tempers. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 requiring the return of runaways triggered the creation of a Vigilance Committee organized to thwart seizure. Higginson was one of their most ardent militants, participating in an attempt to storm the Boston Courthouse in order to liberate the ex-slave Anthony Burns. Even this was too remote a gesture for the handsome, tirelessly immoderate Reverend Higginson. He had run for election to Congress as a Free Soil candidate, so the division of republic into free and slave worlds was, for him, the ultimate national question. In Kansas, on the frontier between those versions of America, Higginson swore to be the scourge of the slave hunters, the refuge of the escaping slaves. Known from Wichita to Lawrence as a dangerous traveling preacher man, Thomas kept the outward sign of the cloth but rode with a revolver at his belt; running guns to the blacks and their helpers, getting food to the fugitives, laying on shelter and his own hands (as much in aid of homeopathic cures as blessings), still the smooth white hands of the Harvard divinity student. One night in a saloon (for even God's ministers needed a little warmth against the prairie bitterness) he heard men talking about someone they were going to have to deal with, tar and feather, maybe, but run out of town for sure: a preacher man. “First he has his text,” the ringleader looking for like-minded men explained, “and he preaches religion, then he drops that, pitches into politics, then he drops that too and begins about the suffering niggers. Well boys we've got to take care of that.” Higginson was unafraid. God and Samuel Colt would shield him from harm; the Lord's work had still to be done. The true fight had scarcely begun. There were those among his bien-pensant friends in the North who frowned on those such as John Brown as a raver, a mischief-maker. But he thought Brown, with his silvery mane and his high exhortations, another such as had come at the time of Oliver: a holy warrior. And Higginson raised secret funds for Brown's raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry and when it went awry, raised more money for his hero's defense. After Brown was hanged, Higginson went to see his widow and children at New Elba and offered what poor comfort he could.

Perhaps it was the sense that some outlet must be found for the fighting minister before some serious harm befell him that moved General Rufus Saxton—who was himself a transcendentalist-feminist-abolitionist West Point graduate—to offer Higginson a military posting. And the post was not as chaplain but regimental colonel! The notion was less outlandish than it seemed for after the execution of John Brown, Higginson had removed his cloth and put himself through a second ordination as soldier, teaching himself from manuals of arms, drill, firing, maneuvers. Word had got around, for the circles of the righteous were in communication with each other, and the perfect opportunity seemed to arise in 1861, when a Union expedition to the sea islands off the South Carolina and Georgia coast had liberated tens of thousands of slaves on rice and cotton plantations. Land had been distributed to the ex-slaves in what thus became the first “experiment' in free black farming. Those who wished were offered service in the Union army. With such a force of devoted soldiers, fighting, as Higginson would write, “with a rope about their necks,” those islands, Port Royal in particular, could be held as strategic posts between the Carolinas and the Georgia–Florida coast. Saxton was set in command of almost a thousand blacks, transformed from slavery to soldiering almost overnight: the first ex-slave regiment.

So there was Higginson, now thirty-seven years old, still wearing his hair long in the manner of a Boston poet, approaching a cabin roofed with palm and palmetto fronds: the tabernacle of worship, around which a line of men was circling, chanting their songs, clapping their hands, bodies swaying, as they moved. Somewhere a drum was beating, and it wasn't to marching time. Listening to this, Higginson felt lifted into a state of grace. He was beholding the perfect innocence of the church primitive in all its ancient purity.

On the morning of New Year's Day 1863, the soldiers of the 1st South Carolina and the men, women, and children of the islands were assembled by General Saxton to hear President Lincoln's proclamation of their freedom. Saxton had sent steamers to the neighboring islands to fetch the people, and most of them were women, fine-looking, with brilliant African kerchiefs on their head, many carrying children in their arms or holding hands as a crocodile line made its way to an improvised parade ground, beneath overarching live oaks. A little platform had been erected for the speakers and officers, and
to Higginson's surprise, some white visitors had arrived in gigs and carriages, parked under the trees in which they sat listening attentively to the proceedings.

After prayers, colors were presented to the black regiments and a South Carolinian doctor who had long since freed his own slaves read “Pres Linkum's” words. “The very moment the speaker had ceased and just as I took and waved the flag which now for the first time meant anything to these poor people, a strong male voice (but rather cracked and elderly) into which two women's voices blended, singing as if by an impulse that could no more be repressed than the morning note of the song sparrow

“People looked at each other and then at us on the platform to see when this interruption came not set down in the bills. Firmly and irrepressibly the quavering voices sang verse after verse; others of the colored people joined in; some whites on the platform began but I motioned them to silence. I never saw anything so electric. It made all other words cheap. It seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed.”

Colonel Higginson had found his moment. A good officer to his men, he led them on gunboat raids up the Southern rivers, liberating slaves as they went, getting the proclamation read and understood. On the Edisto in South Carolina, his soldiers saw a water meadow all at once “come alive with human heads…a straggling file of men and women, all on a run for the riverside…old women trotting on the narrow paths, would kneel to pray a little prayer, still balancing the bundle, and then would suddenly spring up, urged by the accumulating procession behind.” “De brack sojer so presumptuous,” said one of the freed slaves, “dey come right ashore, hold up dere head. Fus' ting I know dere was a barn, 10,000 bushel rough rice, all in a blaze, den mas'rs great house all cracklin up de roof. Didn't I keer for see em blaze. Lor mas'r, didn't care nothin at all.
I was gwine to de boat.
”

Every moment when he wasn't commanding the liberator boats, or
seeing to the orderly welfare of the camp, Higginson devoted to the African American music, already known as “Spirituals”; the “Sorrow Songs” that DuBois described, rightly, as “the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on American soil.”

He understood just what the songs had meant in slavery; knew that some of them had been jailed in Georgetown, South Carolina, at the start of the war, just for singing:

“Dey tink
de Lord
mean for say
de Yankees,
” a drummer boy told him, smiling, though they did mean the Lord. But when they sang “Many Thousand Go,” there was no ambiguity:

Whenever, wherever they could, they sang. One morning it was raining, the last drenching after a night's evil storm. Higginson was concerned for the pickets out in exposed country and walked to the edge of the camp looking for their return like a fretful mother. Then he heard the sound of voices:

And there were the soldiers, water streaming from their black rubber blanket-coats, marching into camp, broad smiles and big baritones.

Transcribing the songs, “the vocal expression of the simplicity of
their faith and the sublimity of their long resignation,” now became Higginson's obsession, his personal battle against the oblivion he thought could swallow up folk culture. The notebooks tucked inside his coats grew thicker like quilting. “Often,” wrote Higginson, “in the starlit evening, I have returned from some lonely ride by the swift river or on the plover-haunted barrens, and entering the camp, have silently approached some glimmering fire, round which the dusky figures moved in the rhythmical barbaric dance the Negroes call a ‘shout,' chanting, often harshly, but always in the most perfect time. Writing down in the darkness as I best could with my hand in the safe covert of my pocket—the words of the song. I have afterwards carried it to my tent, like some captured bird or insect, and then, after examination, put it by.” The gap between listening and recording meant that, often enough, some words slipped away; others made no sense to Higginson. But he had help filling in those gaps from his black corporal Robert Sutton, “whose iron memory held all the details of a song as if it were a ford or a forest.” The melodies he could “only retain by ear” and few can have survived the way the black soldiers sang them. But his collection—some of it published in the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1869—is still a precious document; the first anthology of the Sorrow Songs.

Queen Victoria quite liked this, thought it charming; so did Mr. Gladstone, one of the few judgments they had in common. Having listened to the Fisk Singers in the spring of 1873, the queen noted in her diary, “they are
real
Negroes; they come from America and have been slaves.” And with some amazement, “they sing extremely well together.” Like most everybody else, the queen was more accustomed to hearing fake Negroes: the blackface whites doing doo-dah minstrelsy; the music that DuBois in particular singled out as a degradation of the true soul-liberty music. But everyone who heard Ella Sheppard, Fred Loudin, and the other five knew they were hearing
something raw and unsettling in its passion. Only the irreproachable devotional intensity saved it from indecorousness. But the voices conquered just as surely as had the black soldiers. The year before their English tour, the Fisk Singers had performed in the White House at the invitation of President Grant before an audience of congressmen and senators, the diplomatic corps and cabinet members. But they had still been expelled from their Washington hotel for defying the conventions of segregation.

Their manager-mentor George White was pitched into a fury about this, but recognized there was little he could do about it, for all the fame of his ex-slave singers. They must needs take an event at a time, and he had pledged his life to the concerts, which raised funds for Fisk University in Nashville where all this had started. White was a blacksmith's son from rural New York who had seen the worst at Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, and Chattanooga, where he had seen Montgomery Meigs bringing in wagons of provisions for the beleaguered Union soldiers. Like Higginson, White had listened to the sorrow songs he had heard at the campfire, had begun to take notes; and when, after the war, he had offered his services to the Fisk Free School for Negroes in Nashville, it was music (as well as penmanship) that he taught.

The school, hard up, even in the heyday of Reconstruction, recognized in White someone committed to build a new life of the ex-slaves; someone who understood that the Teacher alongside the Preacher was to be the way ahead. He was appointed school treasurer, which kept him awake at nights worrying about its future. When he heard one of the students, Ella Sheppard, who had spent most of her sixteen years as a slave, sing more sweetly than anything he had ever heard, White conceived of a choir that might give public performances of the spirituals to raise money for Fisk. This was mostly frowned on even by those sympathetic to the Negro colleges, like the American Missionary Association. Taking young blacks on the road with no support but what a collection plate might yield, and in an atmosphere of, at best, mixed sentiments, even in the North, was a provocation.