Hearing God in the Field – Our Black Superpower

Friday, March 27, 2020

Fannie Moore’s enslaved mother is plowing a cotton field when she begins to shout and sing. Afterward, when she enters her enslaver’s house, Granny Moore asks about the shouting. Granny Moore reminds the enslaved mother that her priorities are neither to sing nor to shout. They’re to work. If she fails to work, she’ll be beaten.

Fannie’s mother replies, “I’m saved. The Lord told me I’m saved. Now I know the Lord will show me the way. I’m not going to grieve anymore. No matter how much you all beat me and my children the Lord will show me the way. And someday we’ll never be slaves.” Granny Moore responds by slashing Fannie’s mother across her back with a cowhide. Fannie says, “But mother never yells. She just goes back to the field singing.”

Last week, I asked God something I haven’t needed to ask in a while: “Where are you?” While tens of thousands have died in isolation from Covid-19, and hundreds of thousands similarly infected contemplate if they’re next, millions consider their seemingly instantaneous status as the newly unemployed. They too may be asking God, “Where are you?”

To keep from succumbing to despair and hopelessness, during this international health and financial crisis and my own private hardships, I think of how Fannie’s mother encountered God in a cotton field.

As it relates to our experience in the U.S., African-Americans have a monopoly on trauma. We wish it were otherwise. Since 1619, when 20 enslaved African-Americans arrived in British America, to today, our collective African-American experience is a harrowing one. Slavery, the Oscars, Jim Crow, the prison system, Rodney King, Civil Rights, Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, the educational pipeline, redlining, Trayvon Martin, death row, the Civil War, the healthcare system, and so on. Rest assured: we’re overcoming something.

While we’re overcoming, we’re praying for the intervention of God, whose identity and activity varies for each of us. Our black trauma and black spirituality are so inextricable from one another, it’s no wonder African-Americans are the most religious ethnic group in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center.

Consider Delia Garlic. She was enslaved in Virginia. She recalls a moment when her enslaver realized that she was afraid of him. He responded to her fearful expressions by sending his proxy to “beat some sense into her.” Nothing like beating a woman who fears you because she fears you. Delia ran out of his house and into the woods. She heard her mother, also enslaved, calling her. Delia recalls that when she returned to the house:

“…Right away they come for me. A horse was standing in front of the house and I was taken that very night to Richmond and sold to a speculator again. I never saw my mother anymore. I thought many times through the years how mother looked that night. She pressed my hand in both of hers and said ‘Be good and trust in the Lord.’ Trusting was the only hope of the poor black critters in those days. We just prayed for strength to endure it to the end.”

While many enslaved African-Americans rebelled publicly, and even more rebelled privately, most enslaved African-Americans had little to no agency over their daily lives or livelihoods, ever. Living in chains will do that. Living under the incessant threat of being sold arbitrarily, of being beaten arbitrarily, of being raped arbitrarily, and of being killed arbitrarily, lest an enslaved person demonstrate agency, will do that. Many, in response, prayed. Perhaps like Delia Garlic, they prayed for strength to endure it to the end, or like Fannie Moore’s mother, they prayed for freedom. Others prayed for the deaths of their enslavers. In many instances, God answered their prayers.

This tradition of trusting God and/or gods has played a prominent role throughout African-American history, partly because trauma has continued throughout African-American history. Since our coerced and shackled arrival in the U.S., African-Americans have never possessed a socio-economic or racial privilege with which we could bribe our way out of life-or-death situations. So we pray—as both a first and last resort—hopeful that the one(s) to whom we pray will make a way out of no way.

Our proximity to trauma is why our spiritual tradition is predominately a corporeal experience, rather than an exclusively intellectual one. What good does philosophizing over the relevance of written scripture do for millions of enslaved people who cannot read but need access to the preternatural anyway? In the absence of an ability to read sacred texts, they scream, weep, shout, dance, fall out, tear their clothes, and catch the Holy Ghost in what they believe to be the presence of someone entirely other.

Our proximity to trauma is why black gospel music, the old songs and the new ones (below), not only sing of a God who values and sees us in a country that refuses to value and see us, but also of a God who is present in impossible circumstances. Songs like:

Travis Greene’s, “Made A Way”
JJ Hairston’s “Miracle Worker”
John P. Kee’s “I Made It Out”
Isaiah Templeton’s “Everything Will Be Alright”
Jonathan Nelson’s “Anything Can Happen”
Candy West “Watch God Work It Out”
VaShawn Mitchell “God Can Do Anything”
Miranda Curtis’s “Open Heaven”
William Murphy’s “Already Getting Better”
Jonathan Nelson’s “My Name is Victory”
Tasha Cobbs Leonard “You Know My Name”

Attend a black church revival. Listen to black gospel music. There, you will encounter a people familiar with pain and a God we believe to be present in it.

I’m a theist. I believe in prayer. I trust God to be active in this difficult moment only because I’ve experienced God to be active in other difficult moments, in my life and in the lives of others. Like Fannie Moore’s mother, I believe in a God that shows up. Not in spite of trauma. Because of it.

When I asked God last week where God was, the response I received was simple: “Same place I’ve always been: right here.”

For many worldwide, the Covid-19 pandemic-recession will shatter them. For others, it will save them. It will bring some closer to providence; it will drag others further away. I continue to work on being counted among the former. Our African-American spiritual tradition assures me that’s the safest place to be. You’re welcome to join us. We’ve got plenty of room.