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The Christian Slave
By John Greenleaf Whittier A Christian! going, gone!
Who bids for God's own image? for
his grace,
Which that poor victim of the marketplace
Hath in her suffering won?
My God! can such things be?
Hast Thou not said that whatsoe'er is
done
Unto Thy weakest and Thy humbles
one
Is even done to Thee?
In that sad victim, then
Child of Thy pitying love, I see Thee
stand;
Once more the jest-word of a mocking
band,
Bound, sold, and scourged
again!
A Christian up for sale!
Wet with her blood your whips, o'er -
task her frame,
Make her life loathsome with your
wrong and shame,
Her patience shall not fail!
A heathen hand might deal
Back on your heads the gathered
wrong of years:
But her low, broken prayer and
nightly tears,
Ye neither heed nor feel.
Con well thy lesson o'er,
Thou prudent teacher, tell the toiling
slave
No dangerous tale of Him who came to
save
The outcast and the poor.
But wisely shut the ray
Of God's free Gospel from her simple
heart,
And to her darkened mind alone
impart
One stern command, Obey!
So shalt thou deftly raise
The market price of human flesh; and
while
On thee, their pampered guest, the
planters smile,
Thy church shall praise.
Grave, reverend men shall tell
From Northern pulpits how thy work
was blest,
While in that vile South Sodom first
and best,
Thy poor disciples sell.
Oh, shame! the Moslem thrall,
Who, with his master, to the Prophet
kneels,
While turning to the sacred Kebla
feels
His fetter break and fall.
Cheers for the turbaned Bey
Of robber-peopled Tunis! he hath
torn
The dark slave-dungeons open, and
hath born
Their inmates into day:
But our poor slave in vain
Turns to the Christian shrine his aching
eyes;
It rites will only swell his market
price,
And rivet on his chain.
God of all right! how long
Shall priestly robbers at Thine altar
stand,
Lifting in prayer to Thee the bloody
hand
And haughty brow of wrong?
Oh, from the fields of Cain,
From the low rice-swamp, from the
trader's cell;
From the black slave-ship's foul and
loathsome hell,
And coffle's weary chain;
Hoarse, horrible, and strong,
Rises to Heaven that agonizing cry,
Filling the arches of the hollow sky,
How long, O God, how long? |
In a publication of L.F.
Tasistro—Random Shots and Southern Breezes—is a
description of a slave auction at New Orleans, at which the
auctioneer recommend the woman on the stands as "a good
Christian!"
John
Greenleaf Whittier (December 17, 1807 –
September 7, 1892) was an influential American
Quaker
poet
and ardent advocate of the abolition of slavery
in the United States. He is usually listed as
one of the
Fireside Poets.
Whittier was strongly influenced by the Scottish
poet,
Robert Burns.
Highly regarded in his lifetime and for a period
thereafter, he is now remembered for his poem
Snow-Bound,
and the words of the hymn
Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,
from his poem
The Brewing of Soma,
sung to music by
Hubert Parry.—Wikipedia
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank B. Wilderson, III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student, Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America.
Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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