Some scholars have noted that Phillis Wheatley’s frequent writing about sea voyages demonstrated not only the reality of her life in a port town serving a merchant family but also the sense of her own divided life. Her own experience of what in Wolof cosmology is the space of death, a watery space that separates the living from the ancestors. In this case, the poet is separated by an ocean from her lineage and community.
Navigating that space through the supernatural and extraterrestrial technology of her own poetry may have given her access not only to those of us waiting for her in the future but also to those whom she lost, who indeed may have “made their beds down in the shades below” the boat, to use the imagery of this solstice poem. In her death-focused poetry of elegy and survival, is she making space to do the ancestral work she needs to do to honor the people who did not survive the Middle Passage with her? Who jumped or were thrown overboard during the journey of the ship Phillis that substantiated the future poet into a Negro Girl? Family? Community members? Her own parents? Who is actually sleeping in those beds?
In her invocation with seraphic ardor of the ocean beds in the shades, or (s)hades below, she links herself to contemporary musicians and speculative authors (including myself) who imagine the social lives of the captives submerged in the Atlantic as an ongoing space of engagement and accountability. She claims the power to heal with her words, to reach beyond her time, place, condition, and realm.
Maybe there should be limits on the extent to which I speculate on the ongoing spiritual work of an artist whose very body was stolen in an act of capitalist speculative value. Maybe there should be no limits at all. But what we do know is that on Winter Solstice 1767 a young poet made space for her own work and a layered journey in multiple directions across and through the ocean, backward and forward in time. Her own offering in the dark, black words, claimed by a Negro Girl. An intervention in print, facile in the shadows of the language of commerce. On solstice. And yes. Even the sun would wait.
1769–1774
DAVID GEORGE
William J. Barber II
When David George was born in Essex County, Virginia, sometime around 1742, the man who claimed to own him and his parents was named Chapel. By his own testimony, George’s parents “had not the fear of God before their eyes.” But after his own religious conversion, George wrote as one who had both escaped bondage and learned the fear of the Lord that is, according to Proverbs 9:10, “the beginning of wisdom.”
If the enslaver who had claimed to own George in colonial Virginia bore the name of a house of worship, Chapel’s slaveholder religion did not define God for David George. A free man who was determined to free others through the good news he found in the Bible, George went on to establish the first Black Baptist church in the United States. In defiance of the first Chapel he had known, he established a chapel for freedom in the colonial South.
African Americans began to establish a shared religious life and culture in the late colonial period. While enslaved people from Africa had brought with them an array of cultures and religious practices, their Christian enslavers rationalized their use and abuse of enslaved people by investing in the salvation of their souls. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts sent missionaries to catechize children like George who had been born into slavery, teaching that it was the spiritual duty of Christian enslavers to provide for the religious education of the people they held in bondage. This top-down effort to Christianize enslaved Africans met with limited success.
But the First Great Awakening, which swept through the colonies just before George was born, popularized an evangelical form of Christianity that emphasized the individual’s decision to recognize their need for God’s grace and accept Christ for themselves. The fear of God that George said his parents lacked became real to him through revivalist preaching that offered relief from that fear.
By the early 1760s, George had fled bondage in Virginia. He ventured south, negotiating a fugitive existence in and among Creek and Nautchee people as well as white settlers who were debating their loyalty to Britain. While Chapel’s family for a short time reclaimed George as property, he escaped again, and unlike many who would travel northward on the Underground Railroad, he kept heading south.
Though he was Black according to the law of the plantation, George found another identity in the evangelical faith he embraced while living in South Carolina. After marrying and starting a family, he met a Black Baptist preacher, George Liele, who worked with a white minister, Brother Palmer.
White historians believe that the church they established together in Georgia was the first Black Baptist church in America, but it is more accurate to say that George joined and established a freedom church that interrupted the lies of racism. While the circumstances of the Revolutionary War took George and his family to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, the testimony he left us makes clear that he joined an interracial evangelical movement in the Georgia colony that offered him a way toward freedom for the rest of his earthly journey.
I was introduced to the freedom church that George joined and helped spread by my parents, William and Eleanor Barber. Though they were born two centuries after George, they told me stories of my father’s family’s fugitive existence among Black, white, and Native people in eastern North Carolina that also stretches back to the colonial period. The day I was born in the hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana, where my father was in graduate school at the time, he argued with the hospital administration to insist that I was not simply “Negro.” He was not ashamed of our African American heritage; he was, instead, determined to tell the truth about the fusion history he knew we had inherited in our place.
When we consider the origins of Black Christianity in America, I am equally determined to tell the truth about what we learn from stories like that of David George. Yes, he was a Black man determined to be free. But he did not negotiate his fugitive existence on his own. He worked with white, Black, and Native people to get away from the oppression he had been born into. And when he heard the good news of the gospel and became a preacher himself, he was not building up a “Black church.” He was demonstrating the potential of a freedom church to interrupt the lies of slaveholder religion.
About 250 years have passed since David George received the call to preach good news to all people. But the tension between the Chapel he grew up knowing and the chapel he helped to build is still central in American life. Though slavery officially ended after the Civil War, the Christianity that blessed white supremacy did not go away. It doubled down on the Lost Cause, endorsed racial terrorism during the Redemption era, blessed the leaders of Jim Crow, and continues to endorse racist policies as traditional values under the guise of a “religious right.” As a Christian minister myself, I understand why, for my entire ministry, the number of people who choose not to affiliate with any religious tradition has doubled each decade. An increasingly diverse America is tired of the old slaveholder religion.