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Anniversary of the Arrival of the First Africans in British North America

ISAIAH 58:9B–14, LUKE 13:10–17

Walter Brownridge

If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil; if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom will be like the noonday. . . . Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt. You shall raise up the foundations of many generations. You shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of the street to live there. (Isaiah 58: 9b, 10, 12)

Let me begin with the context of this word from Isaiah 58. There are sixty-six chapters in the book of Isaiah, and scholars affirm that the first fifty-four chapters are the oracles of the prophet. Prophets are not astrologers nor soothsayers who “predict” the future. A prophet is one who looks at the present and, with the lens of the past, points to God’s promises. One could look at the present and say, “This is the trajectory that you will head into if you don’t follow God.” That’s not a prediction; it’s more of an estimation. Through their poetry and the lyricism of even their prose, prophets offer seeds of hope. Even if doom may come from human frailty and ego and sin, we can always turn around. We can still repent and find healing and hope of a new day.

Scholars also point out that the last eleven chapters (55–66) were not written by the Prophet Isaiah, but by another prophet who extensively studied Isaiah. These chapters are deeply steeped in the message and words of Isaiah but were written approximately seventy years later. Around 608 bce—during the Babylonian captivity—Isaiah himself was writing and saying, “Israel, Judea, Jerusalem, if you don’t turn back from where you’re heading, doom will come.” The Babylonian kingdom had conquered Judea. Jerusalem and other nearby towns had been destroyed. Some, but not all, Jews had been taken into captivity. Out of that experience, which Jeremiah says lasted seventy years, comes some of the most beautiful poetry in the Psalms. The writer of Psalm 137 says, “By the waters of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. . . . For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”

These are the words of lament: the lament of the formerly enslaved grieving over their history as they recalled the pain of captivity. The experience of remembering their slavery was the result of their emancipation from Babylon. The Hebrew return to their homeland was the result of a new Babylonian emperor who permitted them to go home. Some went back home, but not all returned; some stayed in Babylon, much like a hundred years earlier at the end of the Assyrian captivity. That is how word disapora gets into the lexicon: diaspora: the dispersion of the Jews. Other dispersions of captured and enslaved peoples have happened over history and continue to this day. History may not repeat itself, but it can rhyme.

When the Jews returned to Judea in approximately 538 bce, they found their towns destroyed and the temple reduced to rubble. Furthermore, social relations were fraught. Some Jews had remained in Judea during the captivity, and some non-Jews had taken up residence. Tensions between those two groups already existed. The returning exiles added a third group to the picture and they become scapegoats. The top 2 percent of the social structure were living off the rest. And the elite probably said, “The only good these new folks can have for us is if we oppress them as well.”

This is the reality Isaiah predicted of captivity, but in third Isaiah (chapters 55–66), there is the hope of a new day of return, alongside the acknowledgment that the present still held pain, oppression, and wretchedness: “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday” (Is. 58:9–10).

If we look to the stories that come after Isaiah, we hear stories of Nehemiah and Ezra and others who helped rebuild Judea and the temple. A ray of hope did come into the community. Something similar has happened five hundred years after Babylon.

Jesus of Nazareth was walking the earth and, as we heard in the Gospel lesson today, he saw a woman bent over for eighteen years. Take close note: there is no plea heard. The woman did not ask for help and healing. She did not even sneak up and try to touch the hem of Jesus’s garment. She was just stooped over. Bent over. The popular theology of the time saw her affliction as an attack of Satan. She could not lift her head toward the horizon. She could not look up at the sky. At best, she could look slightly forward, or a little to her left or to her right. She was in some ways like a small child, who, in a crowd of adults, could only see trouser legs and dresses as they frantically looked for mother and father.

The woman said nothing. She did nothing. But what did Jesus do? He saw her. He said, “Daughter, stand up straight. You are healed.”

In the context of the history of sin and disobedience, of the opportunity to repent, of healing and hope and restoration, Jesus lived out third Isaiah’s call to be a repairer of the breach, a restorer of streets to live on, and a giver of hope to the afflicted. And of course, there was a problem.

The religious authorities of the time said, “No, no, no, no. This is the Sabbath. This day is for something particular, and it is not for labor, and that includes healing.” In attacking Jesus, they also attacked the woman. And Jesus responded by essentially breaking down the meaning of Deuteronomy. Jesus said you have to untie your donkey and feed it so it will live. The critical takeaway from his words and actions is that certain things must be done out of necessity, even on the Sabbath. Wasn’t the necessity of healing this woman one of those realities? Why should a woman who had suffered for eighteen years have to wait one more day? The “proper” day for healing was one day too long. The time for hope and healing was now. As the prophet Isaiah said, “You shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in” (58:12).

Fast-forward sixteen centuries and August 1619 marks the arrival of the first Africans to British North America. These first Africans were taken from Angola in West Central Africa. They were captured in a series of wars that were part of much broader Portuguese hostilities against the Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms and other states. They were put on board the San Juan Bautista, which carried three hundred and fifty captives bound for Vera Cruz, on the coast of Mexico. Nearing her destination, the slave ship was attacked in the Gulf of Mexico by two English privateers, the White Lion and the Treasurer, and robbed of fifty to sixty Africans.

The two privateers then sailed to Virginia, where the White Lion arrived at Point Comfort (ironically named), or present-day Hampton, Virginia, around the end of August. John Rolfe, a prominent planter and merchant (and formerly the husband of Pocahontas), reported that “twenty and odd Negroes” were “bought for victuals” (italics added). The majority of the Angolans were acquired by wealthy and well-connected English planters, including Governor Sir George Yeardley and the cape, or head, merchant, Abraham Piersey. The Africans were sold into bondage despite Virginia having no clear-cut laws sanctioning slavery.¹

Chattel slavery already existed in New Spain, including Florida, and the Spaniards had also brought over Africans.² But these English-speaking colonists brought over these twenty Africans; some were chattel slaves, some were indentured servants. A few, over time, may have eventually been freed. It was the beginning of one of the great foundations of the American economy: chattel slavery.

I don’t need to get into all the history here, though many people need to read it. I would advise you to go online to the New York Times. They have an incredible project called “The 1619 Project.” You will find essays and historical accounts. The point of it is what the great historian John Hope Franklin said, “We must tell the unvarnished truth about slavery.”³ I can tell you in my education, which was from the Jesuits, this unvarnished truth was never mentioned.

My intent is not to shame, or blame, the descendants of slaveholders nor those who are the descendants of the enslaved. I am telling this story because it is a biblical story. As I said, history does not exactly repeat itself, but it damn sure rhymes. Those first Africans in America, my ancestors, were a people who were born on the water: the experience of being on ships for century upon century of the Atlantic slave trade. After one week or two weeks or three weeks of seeing nothing but a horizon of water, they began to forget who they were.

When they landed on these new shores, they began the process of seasoning, as it was said, of creating a new person. One who would be, in fact, docile and obedient as a slave. Like those Jews in Babylonian captivity, they sang songs that recalled their homeland, the old continent. But they also began to incorporate new elements of those songs because even though some had been Muslim and others held traditional African beliefs, they were introduced to Christianity. When these Africans heard the psalms, they heard the stories of Isaiah and Jeremiah, the stories resonated. Many incorporated Jesus’s liberating message of hope into their reality.

My people were born on the water and came into full being on these shores. They were not Americans in their founding fathers; reality. And they were not quite Africans either to a degree. They were a “new people.” Thus, we created the name African American, which developed over the centuries. They became a people not only by recognizing their existence, but also through the challenge and struggle of Native Americans, and they recognized the struggle of other people who had come to these shores or came across the borders. In the eighteenth and nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they became the real beacons of the true democracy that we try to bring to America.

History does not repeat itself exactly, but it does rhyme.

When Martin King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,”⁴ he was diving deep into the words of Isaiah and the desire for a new day. It was the hope for one who could repair the breach. We are called to live into this calling. In her poem delivered at the inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton, Maya Angelou said that we cannot go back and undue the lessons of history, however, if we learn from history, we do not have to re-live the mistakes that were made.⁵ If we face our history honestly, openly, and lovingly, a new day can be born. Restoring relations, recognizing that all who have come to these shores and who have lived here for generations and who had lived here before anyone from Europe or Africa even arrived are called to live into a beloved community. That was the dream that Isaiah lived out. That was the dream that Isaiah called the people of Israel and Judea to live into. That was the dream of God that Jesus embodied in healing a woman who had been bent over for eighteen years.

Today, Episcopal Churches in Jamestown, other parts of Virginia, and across the United States will ring bells at 3 p.m. Eastern time to commemorate that landing at Point Comfort in Jamestown four hundred years ago. To ring the bells, as the prophet Isaiah would have rung, calling us to be something better. We are invited to be restorers of the streets we live on, to be repairers of the breach, to give hope to the afflicted, to satisfy the hungry.

This bell-ringing can be seen as a metaphor for the truth that in America, we are all aliens in a strange land, and yet we are called to sing the Lord’s song—even in a foreign land—that we might be the new people that God has called us all to be. May we live into that reality as followers of Jesus Christ.

1. This information is noted in numerous history sources. See: https://historicjamestowne.org/history/the-first-africans/ and https://www.monticello.org/slavery-at-monticello/african-slavery-british-north-america/africans-british-north-america.

2. This information is available at http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/african_laborers_for_a_new_emp/the_spanish_and_new_world_slav.

3. John Hope Franklin, “The 1619 Project,” New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2018, 1.

4. Mychal Denzel Smith, “The Truth about ‘The Arch of the Moral Universe,’ ” HuffPost, January 18, 2018, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-smith-obama-king_n_5a5903e0e4b04f3c55a252a4.

5. Maya Angelou, “On the Pulse of Morning,” a poem written on the occasion of the inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton as the 42nd President of the United States, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/21/us/the-inauguration-maya-angelou-on-the-pulse-of-morning.html.