Worst of the worst

I’m really enjoying Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which I’m reading as part of The Classic Slave Narratives. Douglass had a remarkable intellect, which is evident even in the first few pages of his autobiography. Because the premise of my embryonic alt history involves both slavery and religion, I’ve been particularly attentive to Douglass’s thoughts in that regard. This passage piqued my interest:

Another advantage I gained in my new master was, he made no pretensions to, or profession of, religion; and this, in my opinion, was truly a great advantage. I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,–a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,–a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,–and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in a community of such religionists.

Berkeley Digital Library has Douglass’s Narrative in full text here. This should be required reading for high school US History students, or at the very least the AP students. Probably too much to ask that US History textbooks quote liberally from this work, since Texas controls textbook content in this country.

This Christian Odyssey page contains an interesting discussion touching on the Old Testament-inspired theories prevalent during the 17th to 19th centuries, regarding Africans, blacks, and slavery. Probably the most common attitude was the “Hamite view,” which held that blacks were descendants of Noah’s son Ham (or possibly Canaan), whom Noah cursed for undressing him whilst the old Arkist was in his cups. But a curse of slavery for all generations to come has always seemed a bit extreme to me as a punishment for such a seemingly trivial offense, so I’ve always wondered if there was more to the story. Wikipedia’s article touches on the Talmudic interpretations, which delve deeper:

The Talmud deduces two possible explanations (attributed to Rab and Rabbi Samuel) for what Ham did to Noah to warrant the curse. (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 70a.) According to Rab, Ham castrated Noah on the basis that, since Noah cursed Ham by his fourth son Canaan, Ham must have injured Noah with respect to a fourth son, by emasculating him, thus depriving Noah of the possibility of a fourth son. According to Samuel, Ham sodomized Noah, on the analogy between “and he saw” written in two places in the Bible: With regard to Ham and Noah, it says, “And Ham the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his father (Noah)”; while in Genesis 34:2, it says, “And when Shechem the son of Hamor saw her (Dinah), he took her and lay with her and defiled her.” According to this argument, similar abuse must have happened each time that the Bible uses the same language. The Talmud concludes that, in fact, “both indignities were perpetrated.”

In more recent times, some scholars have suggested that Ham may have had intercourse with his father’s wife. Under this interpretation, Canaan is cursed as the “product of Ham’s illicit union.”

If this discussion stirs a sense of deja vu, it may be because in Greek mythology, Chronos castrated his father, Uranus, and in Egyptian mythology, Osiris’s death and resurrection involve a somewhat more than symbolic castration in the form of a missing penis.

But I digress. The point Douglass makes here and elsewhere is that religious slave owners were adept at using religion to justify their worst excesses; elsewhere, he discusses an overseer (if I remember correctly) whose knowledge of the Bible seemed limited to a passage enjoining slaveholders to punish their disobedient slaves with the lash.

Slaveholders in Douglass’s account seem more than a little ambivalent about providing their slaves with religion. I suspect a good part of that ambivalence related to their desire to keep their slaves ignorant and illiterate, a goal that runs contrary to the judaeochristian tradition, in which textual study is a core value. Indeed, one of the common tropes of the slave narrative is that literacy will set you free: the slave’s acquisition of reading and writing was instrumental to his eventual emancipation.

So here’s my thought, the kernel of an idea which I think could spawn a corker of a novel: aside from a desire for freedom, what other ideas might a group of slaves derive from a careful reading of the Old Testament?

D.

Walnut, May 1, 2010. Category: Books 'n' Authors, Opium for the masses, Writer's Life.

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