The African’s Dream

The truth is often knowable, if we only listen.**

If any American meets someone who wants to talk about slavery in the United States, ask if they have (at least) listened to the voices of those enslaved. If they have not, they have nothing to say. If one even forgets, for a moment, the horrors described by the enslaved and considers only the loss of home in being brutally kidnapped and taken from home. I do not have to say anything about this, because we can listen:

The African’s Dream

By Anonymous

The Colored American, April 3, 1841

There were bright visions in my dreams,

Sights of my native land—

How beautiful her bonny streams,

Flowing o’er golden sand—

How beautiful the flowers beside,

Stooping to drink their silver tide.

My old companions bounding came

From bamboo huts and bowers,

To press my hand and call my name,

And talk of boyhood’s hours—

And there was one, my country’s pride,

My heart seemed bursting when she died.

That wife, the faithful and the fair,

Came with her lovely face—

With well known voice, and cheerful air

She rushed to my embrace,

And pressed my lips, while smiles and tears

Stole from my heart the grief of years.

Brothers and sisters, kindred, all,

With the sweet voice and eye,

Welcomed the lost one from his thrall,

To native land and sky;

Their tears of pity, fast and warm,

Fell as they marked my scar-wreathed form.

Why did ye wake me from my sleep,

To unavailing tears!

My heart is o’er the mighty deep,

Mid scenes of other years:

Better that I had waked no more,

Or died upon my own bright shore.

Well, I shall weep—and toil—and die!

Then, when my soul is free,

How quickly will it soar and fly

My native land, to thee!

There I shall roam as free as air,

With the loved ones that wait me there.*

 

When we think of slavery in the eighteenth century, about fifty years from American independence, this voice makes what was done wrong by the standards of the time. There was no excuse. Only a twisted from of Enlightenment secularism or Christian white supremacy could defend kidnapping and separating a person from their homeland. The Golden Rule of Jesus, that we should do to others what we would have done to us, applies. The national poetry of Scotland, Ireland, England, Germany are full of anguished poems about those forced to leave their homeland even when that leave taking was voluntary. Here is the voice of a person sharing the pain that is as old as Homer’s Odyssey, the man kept by force from home. How can the author of this poem not be a man and a brother? How can one justify taking this man into bondage?

White supremacy cannot last if one tries to defend it. Enlightenment intellectual dodges and Christian eisegesis cannot last before this one poem. Naturally most of us cannot write this well and we do not have less value. We are not valued by what we can do, but our very humanity, our creation in God’s own image. If a man could not write such a lament, he would still be a man, but only a man could write such a poem. Pathos is a sure sign of humanity, if a heart cry can find words.

Enlightenment scholars claimed to love reason, but ignored manifestations of reason in people they wished to enslave for profit. Naturally even the standard of “reason” was inadequate from a Christian perspective: the unreasonable still should have rights. The simple soul can make a great saint and is loved by God. The standard was bad, but then the Enlightenment thinkers would not recognize reason in the author of this poem. If you can read this work and not acknowledge deep thought and feeling, then you have a brain with arteries so hard that you can no longer reason and a heart so full of junk that it will soon cease to beat.

Few of us, one hopes, would justify the slave trade, American slavery, or the Confederacy. What voice am I missing today? What voices is the academic sub-culture not hearing? What great evil are we justifying?

Listen my soul.

*Voices Beyond Bondage . NewSouth Books. Kindle Edition.

**As a significant part of teaching, I read and listen to Black poets, writers, and thinkers each term. This semester my focus has been on the nineteenth century, particularly before Emancipation.