Season 1, Episode 2

Chad takes a tour through the Joseph Lloyd Manor where Jupiter Hammon, the first published African American poet, was enslaved for much of his life and where he wrote his first poem. The guides, Lauren Brincat and Andrew Tharler of Long Island Preservation, discuss Hammon’s life, poetry, and education.

The title for this episode borrows from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s persona poem, “An Ante-Bellum Sermon.” The poem’s speaker is an enslaved preacher who uses Bible stories to talk about the promise of emancipation but keeps reminding his enslaved parishioners in this utterly tongue-in-cheek way not to think that these stories have anything to do with their contemporary situation. He explains, with a wink, that he’s talking about freedom “in a Bibleistic way.” In Hammon’s life and poetry the Bible and preaching come together in similarly artful ways.

Sources and references:

Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”

Jupiter Hammon, “An Essay on Slavery” (with an introduction by Prof. Cedric May and Julie McCown, who discovered the poem)

Jupiter Hammon Project at Long Island Preservation

The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon, edited by Cedric May

For Oscar Wegelin’s remarks about the repetitiveness of Hammon’s poetry, see p. 29 of the "Biographical Sketch," in America's First Negro Poet: The Complete Works of Jupiter Hammon of Long Island. (Elsewhere Wegelin also writes about the effectiveness of repetition in Jupiter Hammon’s poetry; see his comments on “An Evening Thought” on page 38.) For Wegelin’s remarks on the religious nature of Hammon’s poetry, see p. 30.

The injunction for slaves to obey their masters appears twice in the New Testament: Ephesians 6:5 and Colossians 3:22.

Jupiter Hammon, “An Address to Negroes of the State of New York”

Jupiter Hammon, “The Kind Master and Dutiful Servant”

Jupiter Hammon, “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley”

Jupiter Hammon’s “An Essay on Slavery” interpreted by Malik Work

Jupiter Hammon, “An Evening Thought”

James Weldon Johnson, “O Black and Unknown Bards”