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Soughing Wind. It was a theological image splendid beyond any ever conceived on this continent. For a great wind of the spirit soughed through the night of slavery and, as in Ezekiel's vision, on the field of dead hope the dry bones stirred with life.
They kept stirring as, through the dismal years, the great hymnal testimonies moaned forth. Sometimes they were lyric visions of deliverance:
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin' for to carry me home;
I look'd over Jordan,
And what did I see,
Comin' for to carry me home,
A band of angels comin' after me,
Comin' for to carry me home.
Sometimes they were statements of bottomless sorrow:
Nobody knows de trouble I've seen,
Nobody knows but Jesus.
Sometimes they were rumbling adjurations :
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt land,,
Tell ol' Pharaoh
To let my people go.
Sometimes they were simple longings:
Deep River, my home is over Jordan,
Deep River, Lord,
I want to cross over into camp ground.
Sometimes they were unsurpassed paeans of death:
Ezekiel weep, Ezekiel moan,
Flesh come acreepin' of ol' Ezekiel's
bones,
Church, I know you goin' to miss me
when I'm gone.
When I'm gone, gone, gone.
When I'm gone to come no more,
Church, I know you goin' to miss me
when I'm gone.
Always they were ringing assertions of faith:
I got a home in dat Rock, don't you see?
I got a home in dat Rock, don't you see?
Between de earth an' Sky,
Thought I heard my Saviour cry,
You got a home in dat Rock, don't you
see?
The Magnificat of their music has sometimes obscured the poetry of the spirituals. There are few religious poems of any people that can equal this one:
I know moonrise, I know star-rise,
I lay dis body down.
I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight,
To lay dis body, heah, down. ...
I lie in de grave an' stretch out my arms,
I lay dis body, heah, down.
I go to judgment in de evenin' of de day,
When I lay dis body down.
The problem of the white American and the Negro American has rarely been more simply evoked than in those last lines. The problem could be explained (and must in part be solved) in political, social and economic terms. But it is deeper than that, and so must its eventual solution be.
Well might all Americans, at Christmas, 1946, ponder upon the fact that it is, like all the great problems of mankind, at bottom a religious problem, and that the religious solution must be made before any other solutions could be effective. It will, in fact, never be solved exclusively in human terms.