Moses, Man of Oppression: A Twentieth-Century African American Critique of Western Theocracy

Abstract

If Allen Dwight Callahan, author of The Talking Book: African and Bible, is to be believed, African monolithically revere as a venerable ideal of African American (98), since he provided oppressed people with perfect model for setting captives free. So instrumental was figure of in project of emancipating blacks that he has been considered almost as important as Jesus, for as James Cone claims in My People: Black Theology and Black Church: Christians have always known that God of and of Jesus did not create to be slaves or second-class citizens in North America (8). No doubt figured prominently in nineteenth-century African American literature and culture, as can be seen in traditional spirituals (Thus saith Lord, bold said, / Let my people go [Go Down, Moses]), Frances Harper's Moses: A Story of Nile (Moses brings about great deliverance [l. 153] of enslaved and oppressed) and Paul Laurence Dunbar's An Ante-Bellum Sermon (de Lawd will sen' some / Fu' to set his chillun free [ll. 30-31]). (1) But there was a palpable split in black community's representation of in twentieth-century African American literature, which poses a substantive challenge to Callahan's monolithic interpretation. instance, in a letter to Carl Van Vechten about what she considered her most important work, Herod Great, Zora Neale Hurston claims that Moses forced his laws on ancient Hebrews and and that Moses was responsible for actual death of at least a half million of people in his efforts to force his laws upon them (Zora 529). So ruthless, monomaniacal, and fanatical was that Hurston refers to him as a dictator (530), a description that certainly had profound implications in 1945, just after end of World War II, when Hurston penned letter. Hurston's remarks about are interesting in themselves, but they are even more significant in relation to black community's treatment of and Exodus. Let me state my point more directly by challenging Callahan's monolithic interpretation of African and Moses. Callahan claims: For African Americans, was more than an expert magician or antimagician. He was, first and foremost, a leader of his people. personifies leadership as divine vocation (93). Based on her 1945 letter, Hurston certainly does not subscribe to view that was a divinely inspired leader. Indeed by linking with terror and and by calling him a dictator, Hurston indicates how he can be defined as perfect enabler of an oppressive and unjust political regime, a position that directly contradicts Callahan's interpretation of black appropriation of Exodus myth. As I will demonstrate throughout this essay, Hurston was not alone in thinking of figure as a potentially dangerous and ultimately destructive model of a political leader. In James Baldwin's Go Tell It on Mountain, Gabriel Grimes's mother has clearly internalized standard view of Exodus story in which the national quest of Israel became an analog for aspirations and aims of African Americans (Glaude 54). As Gabriel's sister Florence paraphrases her mother's view, God wants black community to hear, and pass thereafter, one to another, story of Hebrew children who had been held in bondage in land of Egypt; and how Lord had heard their groaning, and how His heart was moved; and how He bid wait but a little season till He should send deliverance (70). In Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin explains that the Negro identifies himself almost wholly with Jew. In fact, Baldwin writes, It]he more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for a to lead him out of Egypt (55). But in his prefatory comments to this claim, Baldwin offers a psychological rather than a theological explanation for black appropriation of Exodus myth: religion operates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: white people own earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it; bad will be punished and good rewarded, for God is not sleeping, judgment is not far off (54). …