People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [106]
Also insisting on the strength of blacks even under slavery, Lawrence Levine (Black Culture and Black Consciousness) gives a picture of a rich culture among slaves, a complex mixture of adaptation and rebellion, through the creativity of stories and songs:
We raise de wheat,
Dey gib us de corn;
We bake de bread,
Dey gib us de crust,
We sif de meal,
Dey gib us de huss;
We peel de meat,
Dey gib us de skin;
And dat’s de way
Dey take us in;
We skim de pot,
Dey gib us de liquor,
An say dat’s good enough for nigger.
There was mockery. The poet William Cullen Bryant, after attending a corn shucking in 1843 in South Carolina, told of slave dances turned into a pretended military parade, “a sort of burlesque of our militia trainings. . . .”
Spirituals often had double meanings. The song “O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan” often meant that slaves meant to get to the North, their Canaan. During the Civil War, slaves began to make up new spirituals with bolder messages: “Before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be saved.” And the spiritual “Many Thousand Go”:
No more peck o’ corn for me, no more, no more,
No more driver’s lash for me, no more, no more. . . .
Levine refers to slave resistance as “pre-political,” expressed in countless ways in daily life and culture. Music, magic, art, religion, were all ways, he says, for slaves to hold on to their humanity.
While southern slaves held on, free blacks in the North (there were about 130,000 in 1830, about 200,000 in 1850) agitated for the abolition of slavery. In 1829, David Walker, son of a slave, but born free in North Carolina, moved to Boston, where he sold old clothes. The pamphlet he wrote and printed, Walker’s Appeal, became widely known. It infuriated southern slaveholders; Georgia offered a reward of $10,000 to anyone who would deliver Walker alive, and $1,000 to anyone who would kill him. It is not hard to understand why when you read his Appeal.
There was no slavery in history, even that of the Israelites in Egypt, worse than the slavery of the black man in America, Walker said. “. . . show me a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be found, which maintains, that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family.”
Walker was scathing to his fellow blacks who would assimilate: “I would wish, candidly . . . to be understood, that I would not give a pinch of snuff to be married to any white person I ever saw in all the days of my life.”
Blacks must fight for their freedom, he said:
Let our enemies go on with their butcheries, and at once fill up their cup. Never make an attempt to gain our freedom or natural right from under our cruel oppressors and murderers, until you see your way clear—when that hour arrives and you move, be not afraid or dismayed. . . . God has been pleased to give us two eyes, two hands, two feet, and some sense in our heads as well as they. They have no more right to hold us in slavery than we have to hold them. . . . Our sufferings will come to an end, in spite of all the Americans this side of eternity. Then we will want all the learning and talents among ourselves, and perhaps more, to govern ourselves.—“Every dog must have its day,” the American’s is coming to an end.
One summer day in 1830, David Walker was found dead near the doorway of his shop in Boston.
Some born in slavery acted out the unfulfilled desire of millions. Frederick Douglass, a slave, sent to Baltimore to work as a