Guiomar
Goransson
Professor Carmen Gillespie
ENGL 5660 African American Literature
30 November 2003
The Importance of Spiritual
Strength in Modern African American
Literature and Storytelling
Spirituality and insight as a means of strengthening a character or story has been woven throughout many of our modern African American stories and novels, especially those of the Harlem Renaissance period.
Prior to the
Harlem Renaissance period, African-Americans considered their church the most
important organization within
their community. Besides providing spiritual strength and comfort, it was a center for social, political, and economic life. The minister, their spiritual leader, became a leader of his people. The church taught religion which strove to provide
strength to help endure the sorrows of
this life, but it
did not try too actively to change the
world around them. Most African-American religious leaders counseled patience
and caution, advising people to wait for God to work in His own way. Meanwhile,
the person was to practice obedience to God and to his master. (see The
Black Experience In America, The Immigrant Heritage of America, 46-48)
In some
African-American churches when the spirit
of the Lord passed by, and, seized the
supplicant, it made him mad with supernatural joy. This was an essential of
some African-American religions and the one more devoutly believed in than all
the rest. (see The Black Experience In America, The Immigrant Heritage of
America, 50)
Going back even
further, in Africa, religion was nature-worship, with belief in invisible
surrounding influences, good and bad, and worship was more primitive using
incantation and sacrifice.
In the novel Cane, by Jean Toomer, there are hints at primitive circumstances. A rather difficult to understand, slim volume, Cane is filled with poetry and short stories. Cane is also a plant after which this novel is titled. It is a crude, unprocessed form of sugar, found in fields. This also seems to me to be an allusion to at least one of the characters in the novel, Fern.
In one short
story, Fern fell to her knees and began swaying, making convulsive sounds
mingled with calls to Jesus Christ. And then she sang brokenly before she
fainted in the cane field. (Cane 32)
In Their Eyes
Were Watching God, Janie struggles to assert a place for herself by
undertaking a spiritual journey toward love and self-awareness. As the title of
this book implies, God plays a major role in it, however, God is not monolithic
but a diverse force. The title refers to these divine forces that Janie
experiences. Her journey is a spiritual one because her goal is to find her
place in the world, find herself, and be at peace with her environment.
Says Hickman in
the novel, Juneteenth, "you're going to make a fine preacher and
you're starting at just the right age. You're just a little over six and Jesus
Christ himself didn't start until he was twelve." A full third of
Juneteenth covers a young man’s electrifying ecclesiastical education.
This passage
closely follows the odyssey of the Negro preacher in the previous century. The
first African-American churches were not at first Christian, nor organized;
rather they were an adaptation and mixture of heathen ceremonies among members
of each plantation and called Voodooism.
These rites were given the appearance of Christianity, for
safety’s sake, and after several generations the Negro church actually
became Christian. However, this was the origin of the of the electrifying, fire
and brimstone Negro preacher-man. African-American faith even to today was
deepened and strengthened through this history. (see The Black Experience In
America, The Immigrant Heritage of America, 102-105)
In the
introduction to her 1939 novel, Moses Man of the Mountain, Hurston says
that Africans revere Moses "not because of his beard nor because he
brought the laws down from Sinai" but "because he had the power to go
up the mountain and bring them down. . . . who can talk with God face to face?
Who has the power to command God to go to a peak of mountain and there demand
of Him laws with which to govern a nation? . . . That calls for power, and that
is what Africa sees in Moses."
And that is the kind of
power that the young man named Bliss in Juneteenth was being groomed for by
Hickman.
Ellison's
conclusion in Juneteenth is that African Americans are martyrs because
of their acceptance of the suffering imposed on them by whites, and that whites
are irredeemably evil and damned to spend eternity in hell as a result.
In River
Cross My Heart Clarke illustrates
the extraordinary church scenes almost entirely in the give-and-take of
voices….the electrifying preacher's sermon and the congregation's
"Praise Jesus, Amen" exclamations. The author based her novel on
stories handed down in Georgetown--stories of the area's first African-American
churches, founded when people decided they wanted their own place of worship
and God.
“I do not
stand by myself, but on the shoulders of all the great people who went before
me.” (see Opening to Spirit) This is an African dictum meaning
that all will be well as long as we remain open to the Spirit. Many of the
characters in these Harlen Renascence novels would agree.
Clarke, Breena.
“River Cross My Heart” Boston: Little,
Brown and Co.
1999
Coombs, Norman.
“The Black Experience In America, The
Immigrant
Heritage of America” Boston: Twayne, 1972
Ellison, Ralph.
“Juneteenth” New York: Random House, 1999
York: Harper
& Row,1994
York: Harper
& Row,1998
Shola Arewa,
Caroline. “Opening to Spirit” Introduction, London:
Thorsons, 1998
Toomer, Jean.
“Cane” New York: Harper & Row, 1969