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Books by Howard Thurman
Deep River and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death
(Thurman) /
Jesus and the Disinherited
(Thurman)
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With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman /
For the Inward Journey (Thurman)
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Racial
Roots and Religion
An Interview with Howard Thurman
By Mary E. Goodwin
Dr. Thurman, I know that your grandmother
was a slave. What do you feel were the most significant things
you learned from her.
The things that came to me directly from my
grandmother are very important. In the first place, she was a
strong, positive, self-contained human being. Her life was full
of tragedies – hunger, cold, the death of some of her
children. But she had built-in controls. Only once did I see a
tear on her cheek. That was the night, in my college years, that
the people of our church came to our house to give me a surprise
at the end of the summer during which I had been their preacher.
You felt that she contained and honored all
of your feelings and all of hers, but they didn’t spill over.
I got a certain kind of strength from her. That was very
fortunate for me, because my father died when I was seven years
old. When I was at Earlham College, one of the professors there,
a counselor and a psychologist, heard me say that I had been
reared without a father. So he said: “Oh, then I have to
revise my tests, because none of the things that go with a male
child reared in a home with women apply to you.” Well, now,
that proves this indomitable quality in my grandmother.
The other thing I got from her was an
enormous respect for the magic there is in knowledge. That came
from what she had observed as a slave child. Whenever her
owner’s wife saw he little daughter trying to teach my
grandmother the alphabet or one, two, three, she would chastise
the child and send her to bed without supper. My grandmother
said: “I saw there must be some magic in knowing how to read
and write.”
Occasionally when she was in an expansive
mood she would talk about her life as a slave on the plantation
in north Florida. Two of those stories I never tired of.
The first: sometimes the plantation owner’s
minister would be permitted to hold a religious service for the
slaves, and he always preached from the same text: “Slaves, be
obedient to your masters, for this is right in the Lord.” My
grandmother said that she made up her mind then and there that
if she ever learned to read or if freedom ever came she would
never read that part of the Bible. So all the years that I was
growing and had the job of reading to her every day, I could
never read any of the Pauline letters, except now and then the
13th chapter of I Corinthians. Maybe this experience
unconsciously influenced my thought when I wrote Jesus and
the Disinherited.
My grandmother’s second story is even more
important to me, but in a different way. She would talk about
the times when a slaver preacher was permitted to hold services
for the slaves of her master’s and all the neighboring
plantations.
I don’t remember how often this happened,
but that that it happened at all was tremendously important. And
then my sister and I would be every still, because we knew what
she was going to tell us – this: “It didn’t matter what
the text was, the minister always ended up at the same place.”
It was the sort of thing we used to say in college, that it
didn’t matter where the black preacher started out, he always
ended up at Calvary. Anyway I can see her getting ready. Then
she would say: “he would stand up, start very quietly and then
look around to all of us in the room and then he would say,
‘You are not slaves, you are not niggers – you are God’s
children’ . . .” And you know, when my grandmother said that
she would unconsciously straighten up, head high and chest out,
and a faraway look would come on her face.
Now that transmitted an idiom to me. And
there was nothing that could happen in my environment that could
ever touch this. It gave me my identity, so I didn’t have to
wait for the revolution. I have never been in search of identity
– and I think the explanation is that everything I’ve ever
felt and worked on and believed in was founded in a kind of
private, almost unconscious autonomy that did not seek
vindication in my environment because it was in me. This
is what I tried to pass on to my children. We have to have some
way to keep from internalizing our environment’s negative
judgments about us. As long as I keep the environment external
to me it cannot control me; but when I internalize it I become
captured by it.
Do you think that there is anything to the
hypothesis of social anthropologists, such as Melville
Herskovits, that the Baptist denomination had a great appeal to
the slaves because its “baptism by total immersion” took
them back to the river cults of their homeland?
No, I don’t. I may be a million miles off,
but I’ll tell you something about this. The question is: What
is there in any river cult that people are trying to fin? Once
you know what the river say to them, you are in position to get
the answer to why there is a cult about it in the first place.
You see, the things that are true in religion are in religion
because they are true. They are not true because they are found
in religion. Now the things that are true in the river cult are
to be found in the river cult because they are true. And whoever
is seeking things will find them wherever they may be found, and
one of the places he will find them is in the impact of the
river.
The river has always had a tremendous
influence in my thinking. Not in terms of anything African.
But there was a companionship, there was movement, there was a
vitality in the river, so that very early I began to see the
parable of life in the river. Yet at the same time none of my
buddies who fished with all day, for ten years, ever saw
anything in this, because you see, this was not the kind of peg
they had hanging out. I had that peg – that’s what I’m
trying to get at!
Years after, when I started to write my Deep
River, it was what I had learned out of my experiences with my
river – the Halifax – that gave me the clue to what was
implicit in the spiritual “Deep River.” You take to
life what you are trying to find in life. Remember the man to
whom Jesus said, “This can only come by faith, help thou my
lack faith.” That means that only the man who is conscious of
a lack of faith has faith, because it is faith in him that calls
for more of itself. If he doesn’t have it, then he doesn’t
know what he’s looking for. That is the way it comes through
to me.
So this is what the river meant to you
spiritually. What else did it mean to you and the community? For
instance, did it give sustenance to you in any way?
Oh, yes!. In the summer, quite a part of our
families’ support came from the river. I was so good at
getting fish that I could take orders on Mondays for fish for
Tuesda’s supper, and on Tuesdays I’d go around to all my
customers and deliver.
You see, I feel that life has to be accepted
first – that you can’s understand it before you accept it.
Now, I knew where the fish fed and I knew the times when this or
that kind of fish would bite. When the tide was reversing itself
– when, instead of going forward into
the ocean, it started going back into the lagoon –
there was a period, sometimes an hour to an hour and a half,
when the water stood still. But, if you looked down beneath the
surface you could see a movement, which indicated that the river
was making up its mind to reverse itself. Well, there was a
certain fish that only bit during that period. Things like that
were important, because for me life was at stake! It’s true
that in the interior part of the community, between Deland and
my town, there were lakes – there were lakes and there were
fresh-water fish. But I never was a fresh-water fish man; I was
for salt water.
So the river had more movement than the
lake. Was this one of the reasons why the river had more appeal
to you?
Yes, I think so. The lakes were fed by deep
springs, you see. There was movement there, but it went on way
down at the deep level. The lakes had no outlets—didn’t need
any. But the river was movement!
And sometimes storms would come. Walk along
the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, and you suddenly realize that
you noticed quite some time back that there was no wind, that
the tides were not coming in. Then all at once the winds begin
to whisper, and in five minutes there are waves eight and ten
feet high. And the storm comes up. It is elemental! I’ve done
much traveling on ships – I’ve been around the world twice
and I’ve crossed all the oceans. And I like to stand on deck
and listen to the mighty winds and watch the ship go up and down
on the giant waves. Sometimes the rudder will heave up out of
the water and give a roar, and then it will find its way back
down into the sea – and I just about burst with ecstasy
watching God at work in his universe!
The Baptist denomination was the most
popular among the slaves, and today it stands at the top
numerically among the black churches. What would you say
accounts for this?
Oh, I don’t know, I am not very smart in
these ways. I suppose some of it was just circumstantial. But if
I put my mind to it. I can think of one or two things that are
important.
First, the Baptist denomination has a highly
charged and highly convincing emotional content. Second, it has
a tradition of freedom. There is so much local autonomy that any
Baptist church can ordain its own men; it’s not accountable to
anybody beyond its own congregation. I would say that its
democratic practices in ordination account for the general
appeal of the denomination. Not its religiosity, but the fact
that in the Baptist denomination any man is as significant as
any other. Even the head man is no longer the head man when the
rest of us decide that he isn’t. And this would have a special
appeal to people who were terribly circumscribed everywhere else
in their world.
These, I believe are the primary
characteristics that made and make the Baptist denomination
popular among blacks, and among whites too. It seems to me that
in specifying them I have described the very genius of the
church. Source: The Christian Century (9 May 1973)
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update 11 July 2008 |
