“All deep things are Song,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in Heroes and Hero-Worship. “It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls.” “See deep enough,” he continued, “and you see musically.”
The “deep things” prod us to sing. So we understand the singing of Paul and Silas in a dank, dark jail at Philippi; so we understand Jesus’ singing a portion of the Hallel with his disciples in their meeting that night before the Day of the Cross. So we also understand the praise-filled chant of the psalmist, “He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God” (Ps. 40:3a, RSV): this was after he had been drawn “up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog” (v. 2), and his steps made secure. All men suffer. All men sing. Song shows the soul as “blue” or blessed. Our singing is our faith—or our sense of fate.
Realizing this, we sense the character of the Negro spiritual. These songs witness to faith in God. They show a creative adjustment to a life that could have soured the soul. They speak from a dignified depth of spirit that refused to believe life was without a managing God. These songs are “profiles in courage.”
Need we remind ourselves of how they arose? The spirituals arose in hearts made bold by God to sing against a background of continuing crisis. They are songs in the night: the night of slavery for a disinherited people snatched from their homeland, transported in irons across a wide ocean, and thrust into a hard life in a new world. Behind them was their native land, their cherished traditions. Before them was the cruel treatment of men who regarded them not as men but as flesh-and-blood machines. As weary decades dragged by, the slaves were forced to struggle for an essential human dignity and the will to live. The process was hard, but in time an optimism developed; dark moods and mystic primitivism gave way to the enlightening and heart-lifting Gospel. New insights captured their thinking and challenged their lives.
The influence of the Bible upon the spirituals is traceable in line after line. The story of the Hebrews held deep implications for these singers. The picture of God they saw there granted the Negro slaves the consolation they needed to be patient under stress. No one can understand the spirituals if he is not sensitive to the source of their exciting strains. Biblical faith influenced the mood of expectancy that underlies “Go Down, Moses.” And biblical faith stands behind the sense of discovery and identification that makes the songs about Jesus so personal to the soul.
Done made my vow to the Lord,
And I never will turn back,
I will go, I shall go,
To see what the end will be.
My strength, Good Lord, is almost gone,
I will go, I shall go,
To see what the end will be.
But you have told me to press on,
I will go, I shall go,
To see what the end will be.
Historian Arnold J. Toynbee has traced the creative response of the Negro to those conditions of servitude and suffering. He wrote,
The Negro has adapted himself to his new social environment by rediscovering in Christianity certain original meanings and values which Western Christendom has long ignored. Opening a simple and impressionable mind to the Gospels, he has discovered that Jesus was a prophet who came into the world not to confirm the mighty in their seats but to exalt the humble and the meek.
Toynbee has further disturbed us with this suggestion:
It is possible that the Negro slave immigrants who have found Christianity in America may perform the greater miracle of raising the dead to life.… They may perhaps be capable of kindling the cold grey ashes of Christianity which have been transmitted to them by us until, in their hearts, the divine fire glows again. It is thus perhaps, if at all, that Christianity may conceivably become the living faith of a dying civilization for the second time [Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgment of volumes I–VI by D. C. Somervell (Oxford, 1947), p. 129].
The core of the Negro spiritual is that the soul can know and trust his God, that good will come, that right will win—because God will handle our lives. Hebrew history influenced this faith. And the life of Jesus spoke with mystic closeness to the need of the soul in trouble. His arrest, trial, and crucifixion-faith spoke with decisiveness to their intent to hope and wait. They could steady themselves in all distress by watching Jesus:
Dey crucified my Lord,
An’ he never said a mumblin’ word.
An’ he never said a mumblin’ word.
An’ he never said a mumblin’ word.
Not a word—not a word—not a word.
In fact, the Christian virtues were all seen in connection with his life. Religious experience was viewed as a real relationship with God and Jesus, not as some ethical venture. Closeness to God and Jesus depended upon certain responses of the heart, to be sure; but the point was closeness to God and Jesus, not merely correctness of life. The importance of this for personal steadiness cannot be overemphasized. This whole matter is fundamental to a vital Christian experience.
The creators of the spirituals were deeply concerned about the inner life of the soul. They sensed, quite rightly, that the real quality for courageous living comes from the depths of the heart. They sought an inner possession by which conditions and contacts, however dastardly, could be managed—as Jesus had managed them. These singers did not want to hate, because Jesus had a ready love against the misdeeds of the unloving.
Down on me, down on me,
Looks like everybody in the whole round world is down on me.
Talk about me as much as you please,
I’ll talk about you when I get on my knees.
Looks like everybody in the whole round world is down on me.
These singers understood that to “love your enemies” was a real essential for walking humbly with God.
But there were times when love did not flow freely from the heart. There were times when the heart’s attitudes provoked alarm and dismay, when there was passion and the strong impulse to deal with life on purely personal terms. Conscious that this whole inward affair needed a proper handling, penitent as he faced the inner demands of the walk with God, one creator voiced the longing of so many, many others when he sang:
It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, O Lord,
Standin’ in the need of prayer.
It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, O Lord,
An’ I’m standin’ in the need of prayer.
Tain’t my mother or my father
But it’s me, O Lord,
Standin’ in the need of prayer.
Tain’t my mother or my father
But it’s me, O Lord,
Standin’ in the need of prayer.
Always and increasingly, these were men in quest of God and his guidance. The desire was deep within them to “be like Jesus.” Spiritual experience with him—and like his experience—was a primary concern.
In how many settings did they think of Jesus in connection with themselves? In as many ways as they had seen in the New Testament and in the demands of their own days. Consider some of their thinking about him.
1. Jesus could give them character aid. That is the hope behind the prayer,
Lord, I want to be a Christian
In-a-my heart,
In-a-my heart.
Lord, I want to be a Christian
In-a-my heart.
2. Jesus grants guidance and companionship in life.
Oh, my good Lord, show me the way.
Enter the chariot, travel along.
3. Jesus hears prayer with the interest of a concerned friend.
Steal away,
Steal away,
Steal away to Jesus.
The readiness of Jesus to help is highlighted in “Steal Away.” Even nature is his tool to summon the singers into his presence—“He calls me by the thunder,” one line puts it. Another song is full of trust in his help, saying,
Just a little talk wid Jesus makes it right.
The friendship of Jesus with the soul took into account his own understanding of life under torrents of abuse, as this song tells:
Oh, nobody knows de trouble I see,
Nobody knows but Jesus.
Oh, nobody knows de trouble I see, Lord,
Glory, hallelujah.
The insistence, then, was rightly upon closeness with Jesus. He was a concerned helper, a companion, a brother, although he was also Lord. He was alive, near, ready, listening. These singers knew that their lives were-being lived under his scrutiny and concerned supervision. They believed this and they sang this.
4. Since such a relationship was essential, hypocrisy was discouraged and honesty stressed.
My Lord’s a-writin’ all de time.
Oh, he sees all you do,
He hears all you say,
My Lord’s a-writin’ all de time.
5. Jesus was considered personal supervisor of the Christian’s death. So, then, not even death was to be feared; it was to be entered in courageous trust.
You needn’t mind my dying,
You needn’t mind my dying,
You needn’t mind my dying.
Jesus goin’ to make up my dying bed.
The Negro spirituals, rightly understood, are songs of aspiration and longing. There is the longing for heaven. There is the longing for freedom and fulfillment of life. There is the longing for friends separated by the selling process or by death. There is the longing for fair life and for the end of a cruel night of dispossession. And sometimes there is the open longing for death as the most immediate release from it all.
But woven throughout these songs is the deep longing for the felt love of Jesus for the soul. These singers were greatly influenced by such a faith. They sought value in themselves and a means by which that value could be strengthened despite their lot. They sought to discover a quality about themselves that would endure. They sought diligently for a material out of which they could fashion a structure for faith. And all this they found. For these men found Jesus. In a faith directed by biblical truth, they found an experience with Jesus and with God. It was the central issue of their total selves, and they gained a strategic mental and spiritual advantage for life. These men were not only aware of life but also seriously aware of God, who created and controls it.
