Hard Truths
Josiah Henson: A New Look at 'Uncle Tom'
Thus began the life and times of escaped American slave Josiah Henson, his wife Charlotte and their four children, to Dresden, then the heartland of Black settlement in Ontario. By the time of his death Rev. Josiah Henson had helped build a 500-person settlement for freed slaves; returned to America dozens of times to rescue 118 enslaved Blacks; won a medal at the First World's Fair in London; and been personally entertained by dignitaries from Queen Victoria to the American President. Prohibited under slavery from learning how to read, he narrated his autobiography: The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada.
As we bid farewell to Black History month today, let us allow the story of Josiah Henson to challenge our common humanity and to inspire our commitment to ending racism.
Why Black History Month?
There are those who question the need for Black History Month. Some see it as an interminable re-hashing of the same old, same old about slavery and racism. In some ways Josiah Henson's story does follow that script. And yet, watching Jared Brock's intriguing documentary "Josiah" this week, I see a far deeper reflection of our collective human experience with slavery and its legacy. It's an experience that continues to this day, made all the more relevant by Josiah's back-story.
In 1852 Harriet Stowe, the White, upper-class daughter of a Connecticut Presbyterian minister, published her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The novel chronicled the stultified, oppressed lives of slaves ("the lowly") through the eyes of it's main character Uncle Tom, a faithful, saintly man who puts up with his enslavers' brutality until they whip him to death. The book is credited with starting the anti-slavery movement in America. It was also inspired by the life of Josiah Henson.
Time won't allow us the details of the story, however, thanks to racist caricatures of Uncle Tom through blackface theater in the years that followed, he became a derogatory term for Blacks considered 'sellouts' to their race by embracing or seeming to embrace rather than resist White oppression. Jared Brock and his commentators offer us a more nuanced picture of Josiah Henson. He was, they said, a man tasked with navigating two worlds; who who knew how to survive; and who, when he realized the futility of compromise, knew when to leave. In their account of Henson he lived by his own code of honor--an enormous sense of commitment to his word. But rather than reward this honor, his oppressors preyed on it, one time tasking him with transporting 18 enslaved Blacks into Kentucky via Ohio, a key escape point for slaves fleeing to Canada through the Underground Railroad. Josiah later described denying his people this opportunity to escape as the worst mistake of his life.
We all know the horrors of slavery, having seem movies like Roots (depending on our generation) or perhaps the more recent Twelve Years a Slave. Slavery was a destruction of body and soul that reverberates to this very day. Young Josiah watched as his own father was beaten with a multi-pronged whip until his skin peeled off and his bones were exposed. The man's ear was then pinned to a building and cut off--all because he beat the White enslaver who was raping his (Josiah's Dad's) wife. Broken in body and spirit, his Dad was then sold "further south" into the swampy, malaria-infested regions of Louisiana. Josiah never saw or heard from his Dad again.
The 'Other' Victims of Slavery
As someone whose own ancestors faced similar fates on Caribbean sugar plantations, I have no kind words for those who, claiming God as their wingman, brutalized my people. So I hope you won't be shocked when I say that slavery had two victims: the humans who were trafficked, brutalized and discarded like thrash when they were no longer economic assets...and the humans who, reducing themselves to a state lower than animals, treated Black people in this way.
I use animals as a point of reference because animals when they kill do so to eat, in the same way humans consume beef or chicken. Enslavers on the other hand killed and mutilated for economic greed and to exert power. They deceived (once Issac Riley the plantation owner rewarded Josiah's faithfulness by duping him after he had paid an agreed-upon sum for his freedom). They bred in themselves a callous disregard for humans they deemed inferior, that caused pains for generations hence. They deprived themselves of --to use Lady Macbeth's term-- "the milk of human kindness". Josiah Henson used that same reference in his autobiography.
Casting aside the capacity with which God imbued them to "loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and (to) break every yoke (Isaiah 58:6), they resorted to a cruelty no animal can muster. In so doing, they lost out on the opportunity the prophet Micah (6:8) offers to "do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with (their) God." And so Marie-Josephe dite Angelique, an enslaved Black woman in Quebec was hanged on orders of the Court in 1734, after being arrested and tortured for setting fire to Montreal buildings in her attempt to escape slavery. So the world is bestowed with the pernicious legacy of belief in racial hierarchy and White supremacy (and I don't mean just by the Klu Klux Klan).
If still we are tempted to say "Oh, that was then. Today is different", let's consider the heartlessness of South African apartheid; the footage of Rodney King almost beaten to death by White police officers, subsequently deemed innocent; the number of Black men shot--even in the back--by White police officers subsequently absolved of wrongdoing. Let's think of people like Nova Scotia's Viola Desmond (now gracing a Canadian stamp) fined for sitting in the 'Whites-Only' section of her local movie theater. Indeed, let's think of Canada's own "long shadow" of slavery that, in the words of historian Afua Cooper, has spawned our collective "erasure of Blackness" from important portions of our history.
From Slavery to Today
Black History Month is an opportunity to recount tales of survivors like Josiah Henson. But it's more than that. It's a time to honor Christians like the Quakers, who did not participate in slavery and who were the first religious group in the English colonies to formally protest it. Let us ask ourselves, if they could recognize the evils of slavery and eschew its rewards, what prevented others from doing the same? What drove White anti-slavery champions like Moravian Baptist preachers who came to the Caribbean to pronounce what some were trying to hide from enslaved Blacks--that they were free. Why were these men and women willing to pay with their lives, as some did?
It's our answer to these questions that will advance us as a human race. For if we are unable to understand our potential for doing Right alongside our potential for greed and callousness, we will miss the continued impact of slavery's legacy. And we will miss the power we together have to end it.
That would be a very sad day indeed.
One Root...One Life
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