The Forty-Day Journey of Promise

Day Nine: My Spirit Is Free!

Note: Welcome to The Journey, our forty-day blog series from MLK Day through the end of Black History Month. We’re learning life lessons from the legacy of African American Christianity. The series is based upon material from my book Beyond the Suffering. To learn more about Beyond the Suffering, including downloading a free chapter, click here.

You May Enslave My Body, But You Can Never Enslave My Spirit!

Some historians have depicted the African American male and the African American father as beaten down by enslavement and racism, and therefore incapable of functioning as a positive role-model in society and the home. The slave narratives and interviews tell a very different story.

One ex-enslaved person recalls his enslaved father’s character.

“I loved my father. He was such a good man. He was a good carpenter and could do anything. My mother just rejoiced in him. . . . I sometimes think I learned more in my early childhood about how to live than I have learned since.”

All he ever needed to learn, he learned in his enslaved home—from a father whose spirit was never enslaved.

Will Adam’s father, a foreman on a Texas plantation, always came home exhausted after a long day’s work. However, he never failed to take his son out of bed and play with him for hours.

Martin Jackson, enslaved in Texas, and interviewed there at age ninety in the 1930s, remembers his father always counseling him. Over half-a-century later, Jackson notes that his father’s reconciling advice and guiding prescriptions still ring in his ear. Among samples he includes:

“No use running from bad to worse, hunting better.” “Every man has to serve God under his own vine and fig tree.” “A clear conscience opens bowels, and when you have a guilty soul it ties you up and death will not for long desert you.”

Clearly, these sons honored and respected their godly, wise enslaved fathers.

Mother Wit: Victors Not Victims

Mothers, too, left a lasting, positive impression on their children. Lucy Dunn was ninety years old when Mary Hicks interviewed her in Raleigh, North Carolina. She shares the standards and premarital counsel that her mother provided when Lucy fell in love with Jim Dunn.

Because purity was so central to her family, Lucy’s mother would not allow Jim to walk Lucy to the gate unless she was sitting there on the porch watching. After a year, without ever having kissed, Jim finally proposed—asking her mother for Lucy’s hand in marriage. Mother told him that she would have to talk to Lucy and let him know.

“Well all that week she talks to me, telling me how serious getting married is and that it last a powerful long time. I told her that I know it but that I am ready to try it and that I intend to make a go of it, anyhow.”

The next Sunday night, her mother informed Jim that he had her permission to marry her daughter. He was so excited that he picked Lucy right up out of her chair there in the moonlight on the porch and kissed her right before her mother who was crying with joy. The next Sunday they were married in the Baptist church at Neuse. Lucy had a new white dress, though times were hard.

Lucy offers a beautiful testimony concerning their marital relationship.

“We lived together fifty-five years and we always loved each other. . . . And though we had our fusses and our troubles we trusted in the Lord and we got through. I loved him during life and I love him now, though he’s been dead for twelve years.”

Her mother’s protection of Lucy’s purity, her pre-marital counsel, and her interaction with Lucy’s future son-in-law all strikingly display how enslaved African American families were victors, not victims. Lucy and Jim’s marriage, for richer for poorer, for better for worse, in good times and bad, provides a shining example of marital fidelity.

Join the Conversation (Post a Comment for a Chance to Receive a Copy of Beyond the Suffering)

1. What can we learn about freedom of spirit from men and women whose bodies were enslaved, but whose spirits could never be enslaved?

2. What relationship commitment lessons can we learn from Lucy’s mother, Lucy, and Jim?