Who Speaks for Whom? Why? When?

A challenge to church leaders about social justice, a guest article about Hariette Beecher Stowe and William Wells Brown.

Even though William Wells Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe speak from widely divergent backgrounds (black/white, slave/free, male/female, richer/poorer), their concerns unite when they speak about the pivotal role which Christian Education assumed for itself in the lives of antebellum slaves. As will be seen in this short essay, Stowe and Brown recognize not just the Bible hermeneutics of the oppressor, but also the application of the same through catechesis to the lives of the oppressed. Brown’s chapter “The Religious Teacher” appearing in his novel Clotel, Or the President’s Daughter; and Stowe’s, chapter “Topsy” located in her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; reference a very common practice amongst slave holders, the use of catechisms.[1]

As regards the narrators’ perspective in these passages, Stowe looks especially from without to within with full compassion, but with the limited access of a non-slave. Her narrator voice, naturally different from Brown’s, is a voice affected by looking across the Ohio River. Biographer Noel Gerson explains how

In 1833 … Harriet Beecher Stowe first became aware of the slavery as a living institution. In New England she had politely deplored slavery as an abstraction and remained untouched… But no one who lived in Cincinnati could ignore the challenge of slavery which existed across the Ohio in Kentucky. (Harriet 36)

Even as narrator Stowe sees an enslaved community by looking across the Ohio, Brown looks at and within his community, looking across to the oppressed. As a slave participant, Brown certainly sees what an antebellum white normally cannot; Stowe as an abolitionist white woman sees many times what a White man won’t. What antebellum Whites cannot or will not see concern both Stowe and Brown.

Specifically, in Brown’s “The Religious Teacher”, social control shapes a Bible hermeneutic favoring those who tower above, the slave owners. Human owners of other humans equate their words with God’s words, establishing oppressive norms to become the locus of authority. Twice in the catechetical moments of this chapter, Brown represents how religious slave owners read the New Testament to slaves who, interestingly, cannot read for themselves: “Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eye-service as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart fearful, fearing God” (an isolated quotation of Colossians 3:-23); and, “He that knoweth his Master’s will, and doeth it not shall be beaten with many stripes” (a quotation of Luke 12:47, a phrase removed for social expediency from its original New Testament context). Furthermore, Brown unites these catechetical questions and answers, the call and response, with a then commonly held belief. Africans bear in their persons the curse of Ham: “The Lord intended the Negros for Slaves” (“The Religious Teacher”). For Brown, masters do more than speak for God. They speak as god.

If Brown captures the violent coercions of the Black catechized, then Stowe particularly shows how catechisms manipulate the most vulnerable of all—a young child.

Topsy, who had stood like a black statue during this discussion, with hands decently folded, now, at a signal from Miss Ophelia, went on: “Our first parents, being left to the freedom of their own will, fell from the state wherein they were created.” Topsy’s eyes twinkled, and she looked inquiringly. “What is it, Topsy?” said Miss Ophelia. “Please, Missis, was dat ar state Kintuck?” “What state, Topsy?” “Dat state dey fell out of. I used to hear Mas’r tell how we came down from Kintuck.” St. Clare laughed. “You’ll have to give her a meaning, or she’ll make one,” said he. “There seems to be a theory of emigration suggested there. (Stowe “Topsy”)

Here Topsy, a little slave girl who cannot read becomes the amusement of the hour for those who can. Of her owner it is said, that: “St Clare took the same kind of amusement in the child that a man might in the tricks of a parrot or pointer” (Stowe “Topsy”).

These passages say much to us pastors and teachers who would serve Christ in and through His church.

Let us, as Stowe, see humanity. Let us really see the human condition. Let us be

happy, and often haunted by what we see. Then let us seriously, deeply, consider what we will do in response to that vision.

For those of us who would dare to speak a word for God on Sunday, and a needy world on Monday, let us remember that we must carefully earn the right to speak. Hermeneutics is primarily an extension of our hearts made right.

Let our words lack authoritarian resonances. Let us labor to only reflect the most anciently received Gospel, and refuse to recreate it in the socially expedient image of our own ideologies.

Let us serve others with perennially purified hearts. Let us quickly eradicate ulterior motives too often disguising themselves as ‘servant leadership’. Let us simply serve others. Let us serve others, simply.

Let us remember the upside nature of God’s realm. The least are the greatest; the greatest the least.

Let us best remember others by first remembering ourselves: we too are the vulnerable. Christ alone is beautifully believable, and it still requires a cross to show it.

Let us, recall that when God came to earth and studied us, He did it by wearing our skin. His Good News—and ours—is only for the vulnerable. It is only the vulnerable who can truly understand it.

Let us, therefore, work in the spirit if the Episcopal liturgy of Lessons and Carols, being always reminded of “the things that rejoice His heart”: the poor and the helpless, the cold, the hungry and the oppressed; the sick in body and in mind and them that mourn; the lonely and the unloved; the aged and the little children; all who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love” (Lessons and Carols 2013.)

And above all, let us approach our work as Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its final book form was published years after Stowe saw slaves suffering on the other shores of the Ohio. These horrific scenes never left her. She might have forever dismissed her responsibility; or maybe responded in the oppressive heat of the moment as a frenzied female. She did neither. Her activism was not immediate but it was eventual. It was deeply thoughtful, timely, and above all timeless.
PR

Originally published on the Pneuma Foundation (parent organization of PneumaReview.com) website. Later included in the Summer 2024 issue.

Work Cited

Beecher, Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. n.d. 10 February 2014. <http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Harriet_Beecher_Stowe/Uncle_Toms_Cabin/Topsy_p11.html>.

Brown, William Wells. Clotel, Or The Presidents’s Daughter. 1853 Version. <http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2046/pg2046.txt>.

Cambridge. “Lessons and Carols 2013.” Cambridge: BBC, 2013. Live Broadcast. 24 December 2013.

Gerson, Noel B. Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976. Print.

 

Notes

[1] Both of these catechetical moments can be seen for themselves in the on-line chapters mentioned in this article’s Work Cited.