The Forty-Day Journey of Promise
Day Six: Watered with Our Tears
Note: Welcome to The Journey, our forty-day blog series where we’re learning life lessons from the legacy of African American Christianity. The series is based upon material from my book Beyond the Suffering. To learn more about Beyond the Suffering, including downloading a free chapter, click here.
Slavery in the “Land of the Free”
They arrived on two ships, one year apart. The second ship, the Mayflower, landed in 1620 with 102 Pilgrims seeking religious liberty. The first ship, a Dutch man-of-war, came ashore in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia, with twenty enslaved African men and women. Captain Jobe of the Dutch man-of-war bartered the seventeen men and three women for food to Sir John Rolfe’s Jamestown settlement. For the leaders of the Jamestown colony, Africans were mere commodities for European trade and servitude.
In the land of the free, American slavery had begun.
Solomon Northup’s Narrative
Solomon Northup lived free for thirty-three years in Rhode Island until he was kidnapped and enslaved for a dozen years in Louisiana. When he was first stolen, he spent two weeks in a slave pen where he met an enslaved woman named Eliza, her daughter Emmy, and her son Randall. His account of her separation from her children offers insight into the agony of deprivation, the need for hearing one another’s story, how not to empathize, and how to feel another’s pain.
Northup tells the story of Eliza’s life, as she related it to him, in great detail. After years of enslavement, she was promised her freedom and told that she was traveling to Washington, D.C. to receive her free papers. Instead, she was delivered to a trader named Burch.
“The hope of years was blasted in a moment. From the height of most exulting happiness to the utmost depths of wretchedness, she had that day descended. No wonder that she wept, and filled the pen with wailings and expressions of heart-rending woe.”
Spiritual Friendship 101
Of their enslavement together, Northup writes, “We were thus learning the history of each other’s wretchedness.”
They participated in Spiritual Friendship 101 by practicing the arts of story sharing and story learning.
Northup and Eliza were eventually conducted to a slave pen in New Orleans owned by a Mr. Theophilus Freeman. A planter from Baton Rouge purchased Randall. All the time the trade was occurring, Eliza was crying aloud, wringing her hands, and begging that Freeman not buy Randall unless he also bought herself and Emmy.
When he answered that he could not afford them all, Eliza burst into paroxysm of grief, weeping plaintively. The bargain agreed upon; Randall had to go alone.
“Then Eliza ran to him; embraced him passionately; kissed him again and again; told him to remember her—all the while her tears falling in the boy’s face like rain.”
In response,
“Freeman damned her, calling her a blubbering, bawling wench, and ordered her to go to her place, and behave herself, and be somebody. He swore he wouldn’t stand such stuff but a little longer. He would soon give her something to cry about, if she was not mighty careful, and that she might depend upon.”
His callousness models exactly what not to do when responding to another’s grief.
Northup, on the other hand, entered Eliza’s agony. “It was a mournful scene indeed. I would have cried myself if I had dared.”
Join the Conversation (Post a Comment for a Chance to Receive a Copy of Beyond the Suffering)
1. What negative impact occurs when people are treated insensitively with words like: “Quit your blubbering,” and “I’ll give you something to cry about!”
2. What positive impact occurs when we treat people sensitively, as Solomon Northrup did with Eliza by listening attentively to her earthly story of suffering and by mourning and weeping with her?
Thank you for this beautiful blog. Quite moving to realize the impact we have upon one another.
Blessings, Nancy
Freeman’s response to Eliza is an extreme example of insensitivity and I am certain was devestating. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to live in such conditions. It’s past insensitive to the point of being inhumane. But than again keeping people in pens and selling and buying them is also a difficult thing to comprehend.
Thinking about that I wonder how many times we “pen” people in by trying to control their emotions for them. How sad when we do that and miss the opportunity to share in their suffering. Lord, help us not to be afraid of mourning but to be grateful for the comfort your Spirit supplies.
In answer to your question, Bob, there are only a few times when I’ve been pointedly told to “stop blubbering” etc. Yet on many occasions, including my father’s death, people have said “don’t cry.” More often than not that has the been the prompt that I’ve heard if I showed any kind of emotion other than elation. People don’t realize that tears are a language. They express what the heart feels when words won’t suffice. They are part of the human experience as is suffering, mourning, loss, and comfort.
I’ve learned that by entering into the process of another’s suffering I’m able to be an agent of comfort. I love doing it as it allows me to comfort others as Christ has comforted me. People are seeking spiritual friendships.
Thank you for increasing our understanding on what being a spiritual friend is really about.