Gloria Sesso teaches American history at Half Hollow Hills High School East in Dix Hills, New York.

"Initially, the students tend to dwell on the explicit message of the spirituals. They assert that the spirituals focus on another world and encourage slaves to passively accept their fate . . . Gradually, the classroom dialogue shifts to the implicit messages."

The Lion's Den
Gloria Sesso

He delivered Daniel from de lion's den,
Jonah from de belly ob de whale
And de Hebrew children from de fiery furnace,
And why not every man?

Frederick Douglass claimed that African American spirituals like "Oh Canaan, sweet Canaan. / I am bound for the land of Canaan," symbolized something more than the hope of reaching heaven. To Douglass, these spirituals carried a powerful message about the North and potential freedom. And scholars agree that there was a latent and symbolic element of protest in the slave's religious songs, which frequently became overt and explicit. Even Harriet Tubman, "the Moses of Her People," sang "Sweet Low, Sweet Chariot," to signal her presence and willingness to lead men, women, and children escaping along the Underground Railroad.

Frederick Douglass, autograph letter signed, dated 17 November 1870, to T. B. Pugh. In this letter Douglass refuses to speak at the Philadelphia Academy of Music because of its discriminatory policies towards blacks. Courtesy of the Gilder Lehrman Collection, on deposit at the Pierpont Morgan Library.

Analyzing slave spirituals is an integral part of the study of the pre-Civil War era in my Advanced Placement United States History classes at Half Hollow Hills High School East in Dix Hills, New York. As part of an overall discussion on how slavery affected African Americans, my students closely read these spirituals for both their religious and secular meanings.

Half Hollow Hills High School East, while situated in a mainly middle-class community, is ethnically and economically diverse and is part of a high achieving district on suburban Long Island. The Advanced Placement U.S. History classes include enthusiastic juniors and seniors who reason at different levels, but are looking for the challenge of a college-level course in the high-school environment. Tasks like the analysis of slave spirituals give them an opportunity to hone their critical thinking skills.

One way I introduce the analysis of slave spirituals is through John Lovell Jr.'s book Black Song, the Forge and the Flame (New York, 1972). Lovell suggests that spirituals reflected the values and concerns of blacks in the antebellum South in the five ways: by providing the community with a true, valid, and useful song; by keeping the community invigorated; by enabling the group to face its problems; by helping to stir each member to personal solutions and to a sense of belonging in the midst of a terrifying world; and by providing a code language for emergency use.

The five meanings suggested by Lovell guide my class's close reading of spirituals like "Joshua, Fit de Battle of Jericho"; "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel"; and "Steal Away." We listen to recordings and read lyrics, and I ask my students to use these songs to assess the validity of Stanley Elkins's view of slavery as a "closed system of dehumanization," destructive of community.

Initially, the students tend to dwell on the explicit message of the spirituals. They assert that the spirituals focus on another world and encourage slaves to passively accept their fate. They perceive slave spirituals as a coping method: "They are talking about heaven," students are likely to say. Or, "They are using God in a passive way," or, "They are using the song to connect them to the master and his religion, thereby isolating them from one another."

Gradually, the classroom dialogue shifts to the implicit messages. One student indicates that the language of flight is predominant: there is mention of transportation, places to go, and signals to decipher. Other students begin to see expressions of joy in the activities that are shared. Some students skilled in music often hear the rhythms and begin to explain work movements. The music is seen as proof of slaves saving themselves from dehumanization. Working together creates community, offers one student. "Go Down, Moses," believes another, has references to Canaan, the wilderness, and means of travel. These all become signals of flight.

By the end of our discussion, many students have become suspicious of Elkins's theory; others still support it. "You are reading too much into it. Look at what it says: 'This world's a wilderness of woe, O'let my people go.'" After analyzing the implicit and explicit messages of the slave spirituals, I direct my students to visual sources like the painting of a slave scene, The Old Plantation. The Old Plantation shows slaves gathered together celebrating with music. The musical instruments include hollowed-out gourds and reveal the continuity of African heritage. The colored kerchiefs of the women are in the style of the Yoruba of Nigeria.

The Old Plantation. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Williamsburg, Va.

Students employ the details of The Old Plantation to draw conclusions about the nature of community, the retaining of the African culture, and religious ceremonies. Which details help to explain community? Religious ceremony? What evidence does the painting provide to assess Elkins's thesis?

I also occasionally use other paintings that can be read for suggestions about African heritage and religious ceremony including John Antrobus's A Plantation Burial (1830) in the Historic New Orleans Collection; Henry Latrobe's Enslaved Women Cultivate Tobacco on a Virginia Plantation (1798); George Washington and His Family (1800-01) in the National Gallery of Art; and J. S. Copley's Watson and the Shark (1778) in the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

To conclude our discussion of slavery, I distribute excerpts from Stanley Elkins's book Slavery (Chicago, 1959) in which he connects the institution to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Students are asked to note the similarities and differences between antebellum American slavery and Nazi camps and to evaluate Elkins's thesis. They draw upon the evidence from the slave spirituals, paintings, stories, slave narratives, and the textbook discussion of slavery. Observations about the heroism of surviving slavery, the nature of community, a symbiotic religious culture that emerges, and the meaning of open and closed institutions are generated in this concluding dialogue.

Viewing the array of evidence, students tend to argue that while the concentration camp was what Elkins calls a "total closed system" focused on extermination, the slave system was not closed since it afforded access to other places and often used spirituals to provide signals. As one student noted during our recent classroom discussion, "The goal of the system is not death but production and prosperity. It benefits the owner to create warmth and community. Washington included a slave in his family painting."

The study of American slavery is a valuable opportunity to expand the traditional collection of text-based primary documents to incorporate music and art--important windows into the impact of America's "peculiar institution."

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