Looking at African American History through the Spirituals

Looking at African American History through the Spirituals

*A Review of: Nikki Giovanni, “On My Journey Now.”

With her opening words, author Nikki Giovanni imparts truth needed by all readers as a context for the spirituals. “We say that the slavers went to Africa to get the slaves, which is far from true. The slavers went to Africa to get Africans to make them slaves.”

How did free people, with their own cultures, their own families, their own everything survive and remain sane when overpowered and raped of everything? Captured and ruptured, how did they survive and even thrive?

Giovanni, award-winning author of “Rosa,” and University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, provides a core answer. It was through the co-created, spontaneous spirituals by which African Americans proclaimed, “I’m a child of God!”

As her aptly chosen subtitle suggests, “On My Journey Home” looks at African American history through the spirituals. Giovanni takes her readers on a journey from capture, to auction block, to daily hardships, escape, community building, the Invisible Institution, Sunday worship, heavenly hope, Emancipation, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the present, and even to the future.

Giovanni makes the vital point that we sing the slave spirituals as “cute children’s songs,” forgetting the depth, the pain, the passion, and the meaning that drove their creation and their singing. Build through the blending of Old Testament deliverance themes, New Testament redemption themes, and the pressing need for shared hope, these songs of Christian faith were anything but cute, though they did evidence the trusting faith of a child in a good Father.

Nor were these songs “polite.” Often, subtly so, they challenged the hypocrisy of their Christian masters with words such as “Everybody talkin’ ‘bout heaven ain’t going there.”

Giovanni has it right. The African American Christians “didn’t just write the songs, they lived them.” To understand African American history is to understand the slave spirituals and to understand the slave spirituals is to understand African American history. This is the gift of “On my Journey Now.”

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of “Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction,” “Soul Physicians,” and “Spiritual Friends.”