A Perilous Proposal Read Free

so easy.Once a people who have been oppressed get a notion of what freedom is like, they want it more and more. That’s how it was for the black slaves in America’s South. They started thinking about Moses and the children of Israel in their slavery in Egypt. They realized that they might someday have a Moses to deliver them too, or lots of Moseses working together. And they started talking and singing about their own promised land, and the day when they’d be free just like the Israelites.
    Though the white masters and their white families all went to their white churches all prim and proper every Sunday, when their Negro slaves started talking and singing about Israel and Moses and the Promised Land, they started to get nervous. They didn’t like their slaves getting too familiar with the white man’s religion because that could lead to only one thing—talk of freedom. That’s what salvation was, after all—freedom from sin . . . and maybe other kinds of freedom too.
    So it was outlawed throughout the South for Negroes to preach to other Negroes. Black churches had white preachers who preached to them about obedience and submission and the sin of rebellion. The most quoted verses of Scripture in those black churches were Ephesians 6:5— Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters —and Colossians 3:22— Servants, obey in all things your masters .
    For two centuries white masters had kept their black slaves mostly uneducated and illiterate. When a black man or woman taught himself or herself to read the Bible and to speak with sense and intelligence, there was nothing so threatening to the white man’s world.
    Most dangerous of all to their white masters were those uncommon blacks of strong religious conviction. They knew they could never subdue the spirits of such men and women. And that made them dangerous. Hardworking and obedient, taking whippings without complaint, their strength camefrom within. Such men were the most respected of all in the Negro community. As stirrings of freedom mounted, whites hated spiritual leaders more than every other kind of black. A fiery slave-prophet called Nat Turner had proved that in 1831. Ever since, whites had feared the appearance of his like again.
    Among black slaves there was rebellion and there was religion. Put the two together, and by the mid-1850s there were runaways everywhere. The white schoolteachers had their three Rs. But white masters had another “three Rs” they hated when they saw them among their slaves— rebellion, religion , and runaways . They were determined to get rid of them.
    They weren’t afraid of their slaves, like slaves were of their masters. But they were afraid of what might happen if enough blacks felt the stirrings of those first two Rs down in their hearts. And all the while, out in the fields more and more of the low melancholy music of freedom spirituals could be heard.
    [1] . This “nigger dog” description was recounted in the book Black Bondage: The Life of Slaves in the South , by Walter Goodman. Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1969.

B OY , P APA, AND M ASTER
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    J AKE’S PAPA WAS ONE OF THOSE KINDS OF SPIRITUAL men that the white masters hated.
    He wasn’t what folks might call a “religious” man, he was a spiritual man. His faith was his own. He wasn’t interested in leading a slave rebellion. He knew well enough about Nat Turner and other black preachers who intermingled religion and rebellion.
    But that wasn’t his kind of spirituality. He knew the two passages from the Bible just like everyone else. But the difference was, he took them to heart. He believed that he really was supposed to obey his master. And not just the first part of the verses either—he believed he was supposed to obey the rest of them too, which said that slaves were to obey their masters cheerfully as if they were serving the Lord instead of a man.
    If