The Forty-Day Journey of Promise

Day Eight: Pulling the Rope in Unison

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.

Family Cohesion: Handling Life Courageously

It has become something of a cliché to imagine that black families today find it difficult to experience stability because of a long history of instability caused by slavery and racism. While not at all minimizing the obstacles that enslaved African American families have faced, history paints a truer and more optimistic picture of their response.

Though everything fought against them, enslaved African Americans battled gallantly to maintain family cohesion—a cohesion that provided a sturdy platform from which to handle life courageously.

Jennie Hill was born and enslaved in 1837 in Missouri. Florence Patton interviewed the ninety-six-year-old Hill in 1933. During her interview, Hill adamantly resisted the notion that enslaved families lacked closeness.

“Some people think that the slaves had no feeling—that there was no heartbreak when the children were torn from their parents or the mother taken from her to toil for a master in another state. But that isn’t so. The slaves loved their families even as the Negroes love their own today. . .”

Hardships Do Not Make It Too Hard to Love

Communicating the message of African American family love was so important to the Reverend Thomas Jones that he bore witness to it on the very first page of his narrative.

“I can testify, from my own painful experience, to the deep and fond affection which the slave cherishes in his heart for his home and its dear ones. We have no other tie to link us to the human family, but our fervent love for those who are with us and of us in relations of sympathy and devotedness, in wrongs and wretchedness.”

Satan longs to blind African Americans to their legacy of family love. He wants all of us to believe that hardships make it too hard to love. Hill’s family, Jones’ family, and millions like them, belie that lie.

Truth for Life

Enslaved African American couples sustained strong marital relationships. Venture Smith was born in Dukandarra, in Guinea, about 1729. Kidnapped at age eight, Robertson Mumford purchased him a year later. After living with Mumford for thirteen years, Venture married Meg at age twenty-two. They remained together for over forty-seven years, through many trials and tribulations, until parted by death.

Venture’s narrative contains an explanation for their marital faithfulness. On the occasion of their marriage, Venture threw a rope over his cabin and asked his wife to go to the opposite side and pull on the rope hanging there while he remained and pulled on his end. After they both had tugged at it awhile in vain, he called her to his side of the cabin and by their united effort they drew the rope to themselves with ease. He then explained the object lesson to his young bride.

“If we pull in life against each other we shall fail, but if we pull together we shall succeed.”

Premarital couples, newlyweds, and seasoned married spouses would all do well to heed Venture’s guiding wisdom.

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

1. How can these narratives counter the horrible lies that blind African American families to their legacy of love?

2. How can the witness of the African American slaves empower us to defeat the lie that hardships make it too hard to love?