The En-Slaving Bible
A Brief Flash of Freedom
On the first day of Black History Month, I must confess a liberating experience I had related to blacks and slavery made a couple years ago back when Trump was president and I was dreaming of freedom from his oppression. For a glimmering moment, when I first heard about the so-called “Slave Bible”, I had envisioned a world where all blacks would just throw it off once they learned how it was a tool, a weapon really, of further enslavement. They would return to their roots.
No pun intended about roots. I saw Roots, the Alex Haley book come to life, as a kid and was taken in by this ‘slave’ drama. It seemed was most of the nation at the time was, too. I believe I was six or seven. I didn’t have American history yet in school.
The story was the first successful instance of the ‘mini-series’ format, a multi-day intensive TV experience. It’s rating went through the charts. It ended with the famous line (at least to our household), “Kun-the Kin-te, I found you!” I’m not writing the words properly, but only as I remember it some forty plus years later.
It’s sequel was the next successful one that spawned a new narrator int style.
And to think a black story of slavery introduced the America to the modern Netflix notion of streaming. That’s history of a sort, too.
But this last moment, this one exhilarating shard of joy shared between two blacks, separated by more than a century, was joyous for me. Something had happened. Some freedom obtained. The narrator had to overcome his investigation into such a history of oppression and hideous acts by other humans to find his ancestor, his roots in Africa from before the white man came. It was the first time I learned what bittersweet was. He did it. He was freed. His journey had broken some long chain it felt like.
It’s hard to believe that the ‘whole nation’ was watching back then in the 70’s. It’s hard to believe that a story about slavery and the horrors of it could launch a whole genre, the mini-series. For a flashing glint, to my innocent mind that didn’t know much history, it seemed racism was over at last.
I wasn’t fooled for long though. Although my parents were the socialist professor types, the rest of the blue collar area was, well, blue collar. I moved from Niagara Falls school district where there were some blacks and I had befriended one named Floyd to wholly blue collar next door. This neighboring town had no blacks. But they had a lot of Irish, Polish and Italians, and so all the jokes were really centered around those ethnicities: wops, micks, pollacks, among many derogatory synonyms. Words that hardly seem as loaded now as those for negro. I learned the other bad words for blacks, of which there were many, even though there were no black kids.
But the Slave Bible was something I had never known or heard of. History classes never mentioned it. My lack of knowledge was especially strange since my father was a secular biblical theologian who studied the history of the Bible’s creation, how the text was created, layered over centuries, phrases added and subtracted. How original words meant something different in translations. To me, it seemed like a puzzle more then a holy scripture. But he never heard of a slave bible. The field was dominated by white men who didn’t look to slavery.
So for one flashing second when I heard the ‘Slave Bible’s’ history, how it was created to subjugate, convert, train, brainwash blacks into greater servitude something snapped. A link in the chain.
I saw how it served to wipe their connection to their oral past and ‘primitive’ beliefs, how it was used to get to make more babies and to be more productive by being obedient. That’s when I saw it’s original purpose revealed, I thought. The Bible was brought in as a political weapon of repression. Now they know. Now they are free.
Free of this whole cultural religious deception thrown on them. Free of this white man’s religion and it’s socio-economic intent of repression. Free! Free at last, free at last. In a micro-second of joyous revelation, like when James Earl Jones thunderous bass bellowed in exaltation, “Kunta Kinte, I found you!” (I looked up the saying and I was surprisingly accurate after the 1977 debut. I guess it had stuck with me. The phrase actually appeared in the second part of the series, Roots: The Next Generation.)
But that’s not how it ends. Once that flashing moment of insight vanishes, we are left again in the wash of the present. In the muddle of the history around us. Though I’m no longer a follower of that religion or any other, I. think many blacks still follow it. And many whites who watched it moved on, it’s hold and meaning now lost on them.
