This Land that I Love by John Shaw

Author:John Shaw [Shaw, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610392242
Publisher: PublicAffairs

PAINFULLY AND PROUDLY, African Americans had embraced, in song, the complexity of loving and remaining loyal to a country that had mistreated and continued to mistreat them. What W. E. B. Du Bois called the “double consciousness” of American Negro life found expression in music. In his landmark 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote:

It is a peculiar feeling, this double-consciousness, this sense of ever looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Double consciousness had pervaded African American culture probably since the dawn of the spirituals—the sense of being Christian, but enslaved by other Christians; American, and yet despised by America. That double consciousness comes through in the spirituals, with their twinned strains of piety and protest. Disobedient slaves were subject to a gruesome array of physical punishments, from the lash of the whip to mutilation, to the amputation of ears or other appendages, all the way to execution, with the slave’s owner acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Under such a regime, protest had to be surreptitious.

Having adopted the religion of their owners, slaves relied on the Bible to sing of their hopes for a better world. The story of the Hebrews enslaved to the Egyptians fit the bill, with its imagery of the Promised Land, the Land of Canaan. A white overseer could imagine that his slaves were hoping for a heavenly reward after death. But Frederick Douglass wrote of his own experience as a slave when he said,

A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of

“O Canaan, sweet Canaan

I am bound for the land of Canaan,”

something more than our hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the north, and the north was our Canaan.

Myriad spirituals had similar double meanings. Listening with emancipation in mind, “The River of Jordan” becomes the Ohio River, the border between North and South, between the slave state of Kentucky and the free state of Ohio. Escaping slaves had to ford the “Deep River” and “Wade in the Water” not only to cross boundaries, but to elude trackers.

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