Slavery to Hiroshima and beyond:African-American art and theapocalypseTANIA COSTA TRIBE

Climbing Jacob’s ladderIn 1927, when the Harlem Renaissance literary and visual movement was atits height, the influential Black poet, politician and early American civilrights activist James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) published an importantbook of African-American religious poetry entitled God’s Trombones: Seven

Negro Sermons in Verse, in which he emulated traditional African-Americanreligious oratory. In his introduction, Johnson describes how the poemsincluded in the book grew from his memories of sermons he had heardpreached during his childhood. Inflamed by the preacher’s oratory, congre-gations had been ‘moved to ecstasy’, sharing visions of an ‘anthropomorphicGod, a sure-enough heaven and a red-hot hell’.1 For generations, heexplains, such sermons had functioned as the ‘mainspring of hope andinspiration’ for North America’s African-American population, havingbeen passed down with only minor changes from preacher to preacherand from locality to locality; they remained a vital force and ‘the greatestsingle influence among the colored people of the United States’.2

In his now classic study of life in antebellum America, Roll, Jordan, Roll:The World the Slaves Made, Eugene Genovese emphasises the importance ofthe Black preacher and situates his role within the social, political andcultural context of the time. In a slave society dominated by pre-capitalistvalues, he argues, paternalism shaped the relationship between masters andslaves so that a pattern of accommodation and resistance emerged, and theclass conflict between masters and slaves mainly took the form of a racialclash.3 In this context, the Black preacher played a fundamental role,teaching some slaves to read (despite the fact that many of his eagerstudents were whipped for trying to become literate) and providing spiritualsolace and moral guidance.4 He was also a ‘bard, physician, judge, andpriest’, who worked within the narrow confines of a still ill-defined Blackchurch, mingling African-derived rites and beliefs with ‘an early veneer ofChristianity’.5

By the nineteenth century English had become the lingua franca for themany different slave communities, while the Bible provided Black commu-nities in both the North and the South with a fundamental source ofinspiration for the construction of Black morality and character as well asindividual and group notions of redemption.6 The biblical texts to whichthey were exposed ranged from Saint Paul’s message of obedience topassages that encouraged them to express both eschatological and millennialaspirations. In the narrative of her life, Elizabeth, a slave born in Maryland

1 – James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones:Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, with drawings byAaron Douglas and lettering by C.B. Falls(New York: Viking Press, 1927), 5.

2 – Ibid., 3.

3 – Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll:The World the Slaves Made (New York:Pantheon, 1974), 4.

4 – Ibid., 564–65. The 1739 revised SouthCarolina slave code specifically stated that‘No slave shall be taught to write, work onSunday, or work more than 15 hours per dayin Summer, and 14 hours in Winter’: CharlesM. Christian and Sari Bennet, Black Saga: TheAfrican American Experience, A Chronology (NewYork: Basic Civitas Books, 1998), 27–28.5 – W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk:Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg &Co., 1903), p. 138.6 – Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas,eds, Preaching with Sacred Fire: An Anthology ofAfrican American Sermons, 1750 to the Present

(New York, London: W.W. Norton, 2010),2–3.

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# 2013 Taylor & Francis

in 1766 who became a Methodist minister, puts her millennial expectationsin distinctly eschatological terms by addressing issues of suffering, last judge-ment and salvation7: ‘Then I heard a whispering voice say, “If thou art notsaved in the Lord’s way, thou canst not be saved at all;” at which Iexclaimed, “Yes Lord, in thy own way.” Immediately a light fell upon myhead, and I was filled with light and I was shown the world lying inwickedness, and was told I must go there, and call the people to repentance,for the day of the Lord was at hand; and this message was as a heavy yoke uponme, so that I wept bitterly at the thought of what I should have to passthrough. While I wept, I heard a voice say, “weep not, some will laugh atthee, some will scoff at thee, and the dogs will bark at thee, but while thoudoest my will, I will be with thee to the ends of the earth”’.8

From the late 1820s, the free Black elites — newspaper editors, leaders ofBlack literary societies, antislavery activists, lecturers, pamphleteers, as wellas churchmen and preachers — expressed their aspirations for Black com-munities by extensively employing both this eschatological tone and amillennial, triumphalist, apocalyptic language, reminiscent of the visionarypassages put forward by the first Puritan colonists as they described theirspecial role in God’s plan for the new colony.9 In the words of Blackabolitionist Hezekiah Ford Douglass (1831–1865), ‘the struggle of theoppressed against the oppressor’ was one which ‘every where marks thepages of ancient History’, from the days of Babylon to America’s ownrevolutionary struggle against Britain.10 The part the African slaves them-selves played in this divine history through their own struggle for freedomendowed their millennial aspirations with special meaning. In her speechesand public lectures, Maria Stewart (1803–1879), a Black newspaper colum-nist from New England, invoked the wrath of God against the slaveholdingpolitical aristocracy of her day:

O, ye great and mighty men of America, ye rich and powerful ones, many ofyou will call for the rocks and mountains to fall upon you, and to hide youfrom the wrath of the Lamb [Revelation 6:16], and from him that sitteth uponthe throne; whilst many of the sable-skinned Africans you now despise willshine in the kingdon of heaven as the stars forever and ever…. You may kill,tyrannize, and oppress as much as you choose, until our cry shall come upbefore the throne of God; for I am firmly persuaded, that he will not suffer youto quell the proud, fearless and undaunted spirits of the Africans forever; for inhis own time, he is able to plead our cause against you, and to pour out uponyou the ten plagues of Egypt.11

Believing the wicked would be punished and a Golden Age would begin,Black nationalists appropriated the American historical narrative of chosen-ness, modelling their vision on the parable of Salt and Light in the Sermonon the Mount, in which Jesus tells his listeners, ‘You are the light of theworld. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid’ (Matthew 5: 14). This versehad been used by the British Puritan John Winthrop, governor of theMassachusetts Bay Company, in the sermon he wrote aboard the Arbella in1630, as he led his Puritan community across the Atlantic to found the newpromised land.12 Like John Winthrop’s, the Black nationalists’ vision alsoheld America up as a ‘city on a hill’, a shining example to the world of God’srule, which was yet to be consummated.13

7 – Oxford English Dictionary (online:http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/64274,accessed January 13, 2013) defines eschatol-ogy first as ‘The department of theologicalscience concerned with “the four last things:death, judgement, heaven, and hell”’ andsecond as ‘the present “realization” and sig-nificance of the “last things” in the Christianlife’. The word is used here in both senses.

8 – Elizabeth, A Colored Minister of the Gospel,

Born in Slavery (Philadelphia: TractAssociation of Friends, 1889); publishedonline: Documenting the American South (ChapelHill: University Library, University of NorthCarolina at Chapel Hill, 2004) http://doc-south.unc.edu/neh/eliza2/eliza2.html(accessed January 15, 2013). Quotation fromp. 4, emphasis added.9 – Patrick Rael, ‘Black Theodicy: AfricanAmericans and Nationalism in theAntebellum North’, The North Star: A Journal

of African American Religious History 3, no. 2(Spring 2000): 1–23, p. 3.

10 – ‘Speech of Hezekiah F. Douglass, at theSixteenth Anniversary of West IndiaEmancipation, at Cleveland, August 1, 1850’,Anti-Slavery Bugle, August 31, 1850, in The

Black Abolitionist Papers, 1830–1865, microfilmcollection (Sanford, NC: MicrofilmingCorporation of America, 1981), reel 6, frame560. Quoted by Rael, ‘Black Theodicy’, 7.

11 – Maria W. Stewart, Maria W. Stewart,

America’s First Black Woman Political Writer:

Essays and Speeches, ed. and intro. MarilynRichardson (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1987), 39–40.12 – ‘We shall find that the God of Israel isamong us, when ten of us shall be able toresist a thousand of our enemies; when heshall make us a praise and a glory, that menshall say of succeeding plantations, “TheLord make it likely that of New England.” Forwe must consider that we shall be as a Cityupon a hill. The eyes of all people are uponus.’ John Winthrop, ‘A Modell of ChristianCharity’, discourse written on board theArbella during the voyage from Great Britainto New England, 1630. In Robert C.Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop, from

his Embarkation for New England in 1630, with the

Charter and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, to

his Death in 1649 (Boston: Ticknor & Fields,1867), 19.13 – Rael, ‘Black Theodicy’, 3.

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Apocalypse, or disclosure — a sudden lifting of the veil, a revelation —exposes knowledge so far hidden from humanity, allowing the oppressed totriumph in an end-of-time scenario, where the just will ‘inherit dominion ofthe whole earth’ and achieve the final culmination of history.14 From earlyJewish and Christian apocalypses like the Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah, pro-duced in Roman-dominated third-century Egypt, in a context of intensesocial anxiety,15 to the Puritan colonists’ search for an Edenic paradise inNew England, apocalyptic ideas were invoked to resolve the tension betweenthe unsettling inevitability of divinely ordained catastrophic events and thefrailties of the human condition. Through wondrous transformations of theworldly chaos and catastrophe, Christianity would be restored to an originalstate of purity and the providential descent of Jesus would be revealed in avision of glory, imposing moral order on an apparently anarchic world. Inthe nineteenth century such millennial discourse became a powerful vehiclethrough which North American slaves were able to re-situate themselveswithin their hostile environment. Apocalyptic biblical texts, together with thebooks of Exodus and Daniel, were regarded by the slave population as acompelling signal of God’s concern for their freedom, and provided rebelslave leaders such as Gabriel Prosser (near Richmond, Virginia, 1800),Denmark Vesey (Charleston, South Carolina, 1822), and Nat Turner(Southampton County, Virginia, 1831) with a language capable of expressingthe apocalyptic visions required to mobilise hundreds, if not thousands, ofAfrican slaves.16 Their passionate sermons showed a paradigmatic prefer-ence for eschatological and apocalyptic episodes, such as the prophetic visionin Ezekiel 37, or the Heavenly March of the faithful from earth ‘up throughthe pearly gates to the great white throne’.17 They looked towards a millen-nial order placed outside time, which would offer a ‘potential antithesis’ tothe abuses of human history.18

This visionary tone dominates, for instance, the two machine-embroi-dered quilts made by Georgia-born slave woman Harriet Powers (1837–1911), which are now kept at the National Museum of American History(Smithsonian Institution) (figure 1) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston(figure 2). In short descriptive captions given to Jennie Smith in 1891 (seeAppendix 1), Powers explained the imagery she created in the Smithsonianquilt, providing some insight into the nature of her visionary gaze and themeaning of her intensely personal iconography.19 She structured her com-position around eleven episodes selected from the Book of Genesis and theNew Testament. Skipping the Creation to concentrate on the Fall, Powers’visual narrative is dominated by the themes of betrayal and salvation. Itstarts with the Garden of Eden, where a large orange-and-black salamander-like figure in the upper right-hand corner of the scene codified what Powerscalled the serpent’s ‘subtle whisper’ to Eve and Adam (square 1). It visuallycounterbalances the more muted tones employed in the rest of the samepanel, metaphorically connoting the conflict between good and evil that ledto the fall of humankind.

The scene depicting the serpent’s treachery is followed by a representationof the earthly life of Adam and Eve and their firstborn son, Cain (square 2).The insidious presence of evil among humankind is now signified by Powers’inclusion here of ‘Cain’s pet’ — a bird she described as ‘a bird of paradise’

14 – Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of theMillennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and

Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, revisedand expanded ed. (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1970). ‘Apocalypse’ isderived from the Greek apokalypsis: an unco-vering, a revelation, a disclosure. The litera-ture on apocalypticism and millennialism isvast, and there is no space here to examine itat length. American apocalypticism is dis-cussed by Douglas Robinson, AmericanApocalypses (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1985), and James WestDavidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought:

Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 1977). On themillennialism of the pre-Civil War period,see Michael Barkun, Crucible of the Millennium:

The Burned-over District of New York in the 1840s

(New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986),and Whitney Cross, The Burned-over District:The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic

Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1950). A morerecent study is Zachary McLeod Hutchins’sdoctoral dissertation, ‘Inventing Eden:Primitivism, Millennialism and the making ofNew England’, submitted to the Universityof North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010.15 – This anonymous apocryphal revelationgiven by an angel to Elijah, involving a cos-mic eschatological journey, is now knownfrom a fragmentary Coptic text resembling aJewish version in Hebrew (Sefer Elyahhu)from a similar date (third century CE). Bothare likely to have been based on an earliercommon version going back to the first cen-tury CE. See Richard Bauckham, The Fate ofthe Dead: Studies on the Jewish and Christian

Apocalypses (Leiden, Boston, Cologne: Brill,1998), 57–60; and David Frankfurter, Elijah inUpper Egypt: the Apocalypse of Elijah and Early

Egyptian Christianity, Studies in Antiquity andChristianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,1993).16 – Charles Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H.Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 1990), 203–4.17 – Johnson, God’s Trombones, 1.18 – Lois Parkinson Zamora, Writing the

Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary US

and Latin American Fiction (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1989), 10.19 – Regenia A. Perry, Harriet Powers’s Bible

Quilts (New York: Rizzoli InternationalPublications, 1994). All quotations of Powers’own words in the discussion below are takenfrom this work.

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resplendent in ‘red and green calico’. Portrayed as a peacock, this bird wasmeant to represent ‘the proudness before the fall’. Square 3 situates theproblem of evil within an apocalyptic context, as it depicts Satan as a largeblack figure dramatically placed amidst seven round signs signifying ‘the

Figure 2. Harriet Powers, pictorial quilt,1895–1898, Clarke County, GA, USA.Cotton plain weave, pieced, appliquéd,embroidered and quilted. 687/8 × 105 in(175 × 266.7 cm). Boston, MA, Museum ofFine Arts, bequest of Maxim Karolik; 64.619.Photo: Museum of Fine Arts.

Figure 1. Harriet Powers (1837–1910), pic-torial quilt, 1885–1886, Clarke County, GA,USA. Cotton fabric. 75 × 89 in (191 × 227

cm). Washington, DC, National Museum ofAmerican History (Smithsonian Institution),gift of Mr. and Mrs. H. M. Heckman. Photo:National Museum of American History.

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seven stars’. Betrayal and violence dominate the next composition, wherePowers depicts the murder of Abel by his brother Cain (square 4), followedby Cain’s trip to the land of Nod in order to get himself a wife (square 5).

Powers’ portrayal of the evil that beset humanity after the Fall, however,was tempered by her religious belief in salvation, and hope ultimatelydominates her Smithsonian quilt. In square 6, the popular image ofJacob’s ladder is depicted floating among Powers’ distinctive star shapes,with the inviting figure of the angel perched prominently on top. This squareis followed by the baptism of Jesus (square 7) and the three key episodes fromChrist’s Passion that she placed at the bottom of her composition: theCrucifixion (square 8), Judas Iscariot’s acceptance of the thirty pieces ofsilver (square 9) and the Last Supper (square 10), together with a portrayal ofthe Holy Family (square 11). This altering of the New Testament chronolo-gical sequence enabled Powers’ own narrative to reiterate the dichotomybetween betrayal and salvation. Betrayal is placed right in the middle of thequilt’s bottom register, next to the Last Supper. The two scenes are framedby the Child Jesus on the extreme right-hand side and the Crucifixion on theleft, thus weaving a gentler tone into the idea of human salvation throughChrist’s Passion and indicating the possibility of continuing life andregeneration.

Powers’ Smithsonian narrative was also constructed around typologicalrelationships and parallelisms. Cain’s betrayal of Abel (square 4) echoesJudas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus (square 9), and the large star-sign placedunder Judas’s feet among the thirty pieces of silver floating in the lattercomposition recalls the apocalyptic context in which Powers portrayed Satan(square 3). As Powers herself explained, this star-sign was intended torepresent ‘the star that appeared in 1886 for the first time in three hundredyears’. By indicating this cosmic event in a scene dealing with Judas’sbetrayal, Powers’ composition takes the problem of evil out of any precisehistorical time into a state of timelessness, where contemporary experiencescan be conflated with past ones, thus suggesting the unchanging nature andcontinuing presence of evil within God’s creation. Cosmic events are alsoindicated in the Crucifixion scene (square 8), where ‘the darkness over theearth and the moon turning to blood’ are represented; and in the Nativity orHoly Family scene (square 11), where the Star of Bethlehem stopped over theinfant Jesus. These cosmic signs unify Powers’ personal reinterpretation ofthe New Testament events, situating them within a wider millennial frame-work, combining both eschatological and apocalyptic imagery.

Time is again conflated in the quilt kept in the Museum of Fine Arts,Boston (see figure 2). In this case, Powers’ fifteen figurative compositions inthree registers do not offer any recognisable narrative order or clear chron-ological line (see Appendix 2). Instead, episodes from the Old and NewTestament are mixed haphazardly with natural disasters from her ownexperience and astronomical occurrences preserved in the collective memoryof her contemporaries: the ‘dark day of May 19, 1780’ (square 2); the meteorstorm of 1833 (square 8); the unusually severe cold of 10 March 1895 (square11); and the ‘red light night of 1846’ (square 12). By merging her experienceof historical temporality into the timelessness of divine action, Powerssituated these astronomical events as wondrous happenings of inexplicable

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origin, entirely dependent on God’s will and totally beyond humanunderstanding.

Although presented as apparently random and sometimes cruel, thesecelestial events did not preclude the possibility of God’s benign intervention,which remains explicit in Powers’ Boston quilt. In her own words, God’smerciful hand ‘staid the stars’ in 1833, preventing a final catastrophe; it alsoprevented any harm coming to people in 1846. The possibility of mercifuldivine intervention, however, appears counterbalanced by the equally expli-cit presence of suffering and evil in the created world: God did not stophumans and animals from freezing in the cold of 1895. Human beings areportrayed as fragile and faceless characters, totally at the mercy of thesecosmic uncertainties.

The portrayal of wondrous cosmic happenings and biblical events in theBoston quilt is complemented by compositions which account for the stagesof God’s creation in a direct and uncomplicated theological language.Square 7 translates Powers’ statement that ‘God created two of every kind.Male and Female’ into six pairs of birds juxtaposed with two star-signs, anEdenic vision which seems to be a mixed reference also to the animals savedby Noah (‘2 of every kind, male and female’) as well as the creation. Theanimal theme is reinforced in squares 9 (‘Two of every kind of animalscontinued. Camels, elephants, gheraffs [sic] lions, etc.’) and 14 (‘The crea-tions of animals continues’), where she depicts mammals to complement thebirds in square 7. Detailed listings of animals are also prevalent in Powers’written captions for the Smithsonian series, further connoting the idea of anatural paradise unsoiled by humans, where the good and the just mayexpect to attain salvation.

In the imaginary life-world constructed in the Boston quilt, humans are atthe mercy of cosmic circumstances and divine intervention. Human help-lessness is expressed in the simple emotional tone of old-time Black sermons,as in her portrayal of Jonah cast overboard from the ship and about to beswallowed by the whale (square 6). In square 13 she deals with the problemof evil in a simple moral tone, which she applies to two contemporaries: Boband Kate Bell from Virginia. She conceals their visual identity by portrayingthem as faceless silhouettes, while revealing the nature of their character inone of her descriptive captions: they were ‘rich people who were taughtnothing of God’. She shrouds her description of the nature of these twopeople’s evil deed in biblical tones: ‘They told their parents to stop the clockat one and tomorrow it would strike one and so it did. This was the signalthat they entered everlasting punishment’. This description points to the sinof pride, as the two sinners dared to alter God’s temporal setting for humanexistence. Visually, this is metaphorically connoted by the clock placed in themiddle of the scene, between Bob and Kate. The unusually large figure of abrown sow dominates the bottom of the composition, probably to signify theuncleanliness and greed of the two sinners.

Christian religious belief about the future ‘has primarily meant the escha-tological conviction that history will be brought to a close by the coming, orreturn, of a messianic figure who will vindicate the righteous, destroy theirenemies, and rule over a kingdom of peace and prosperity’.20 In Powers’narrative series, this figure functions as a powerful Old Testament anthro-pomorphic entity, who punishes as well as redeems. The eschatological

20 – Malcolm Bull, ‘On Making Ends Meet’,in Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World,ed. Malcolm Bull (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995),p. 1–17.

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dimension of this process dominates the entire compositional space of theBoston quilt, connoted by the numerous celestial signs scattered over all thescenes. This is particularly evident in the portrayal of Adam and Eve in theGarden of Eden, where the lizard-like sign representing the serpent iscounterbalanced by the presence of the large, benign hand of God, betweenthe sun and the moon and above Eve’s head (square 4).

This messianic tone finds its full expression in square 10, where Powerspresents a direct reference to the biblical text of Revelation, employing thesame distinctive star-signs to convey this dimension and inscribe her inten-sely charged cosmic vision. Her verbal description of the scene reinforces itsmessianic connotations: ‘The angels of wrath and the seven vials. The bloodof fornications. Seven headed beasts and the ten horns which arose out ofthe water.’ In both quilts, the apocalyptic dimension of Powers’ eschatolo-gical narrative imparts coherence to her vision of the human condition,situating its meaning beyond mere historical temporality. It dominatesChrist’s sacrifice both in the Smithsonian quilt, where the large star-signtakes the place of the table for the Last Supper (square 10), and in the Bostonquilt, where she carefully frames the central crucified figure between twosuns, one black and one white, indicating the eclipse that happened at thetime of Christ’s death (square 15).

God’s thundering voiceRooted in this long Judaeo-Christian tradition of visionary, eschatological,and apocalyptic thinking, the Black preachers’ answers to the perception ofan evil world dominated by violence, injustice, and discrimination influencedthe language adopted in their sermons, and were later inherited by JamesWeldon Johnson and other African-American artists in the twentieth cen-tury. As the social circumstances of African-Americans began to changefollowing the Civil War, however, the use of biblical texts also began tochange in order to accommodate and endow with meaning their expandingrange of human experience. The eschatological and apocalyptic languageforged in the slave environment remained a culturally viable response togroup and personal tensions through being adapted to new social, political,and cultural contexts. In the post-bellum period, Black individuals began towithdraw in large numbers from white-dominated churches to found theirown, with the result that the Black church became the ‘central and unifyinginstitution’ in the Black community, providing a forum where the preachercould help his congregation ‘shape their lives in freedom’ by educating andpoliticising them.21 While reiterating the importance of the Black church andreligion at that time, Du Bois, for instance, also warned against loss of faithon the way to the modern ‘promised land of freedom’.22 In arguing forequality and self-respect among Black communities, he wrote of the millen-nial expectations of ‘a grand time of social justice and equality to come’,which would transform a nation ‘still languishing in the wilderness, stalled byracial prejudice from advancing toward divine perfection’.23 Some of DuBois’s novels also tell of Christ’s second coming from within the Blackcommunity, in ‘spectacular solidarity with the oppressed’.24

Reflecting the social concerns of the new Black intelligentsia, Blackreligious beliefs were upheld in the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies by the Social Gospel movement, a move towards social

21 – Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm so Long

(The Aftermath of Slavery) (London: AthlonePress, 1980), 471.22 – Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 222.

23 – Ibid., 47–48.

24 – Quoted by Craig Forney , ‘The Souls ofBlack Folk and the Soul of W.E.B. Du Bois’,in The Souls of W.E.B. Du Bois: New Essays and

Reflections, ed. Edward J. Blum and Jason R.Young (Macon, GA: Mercer UniversityPress, 2009), 85–109, p. 100.

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Christianity that had started among white Protestants in the North around1880. Its ideas spread among educated members of the Black churches in thefollowing decades and flourished during the Harlem Renaissance of the1920s.25 One of the eight categories in which the William E. HarmonFoundation presented awards for ‘distinguished achievement amongNegroes’ between 1926 and 1930 was religious service, particularly withsocial and educational aims.26 The church remained central to the Blackexperience, and major Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and artists, includ-ing Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson, are known to have occasionallyspoken at Black churches, despite their professed agnosticism or atheism.27

Alain Locke’s Philadelphia upbringing and his undergraduate years atHarvard, where he engaged with the principles of philosophical pragma-tism,28 nurtured in him an independence of mind which he himself came todescribe at times as ‘cultural relativism’, allowing him to view his ownculture as relative to other cultures, and also to value non-Black culturalcontributions to the development of the ‘New Negro’.29 This philosophicalindependence eventually made possible Locke’s affiliation with the Bahá’íreligion,30 while also enabling the development of his own philosophy ofvalue theory, critical race theory, and aesthetics, combining insights frompsychology, anthropology and comparative cultural history, which he for-mulated in his doctoral dissertation of 1918 and in subsequent publications.31

In his writings, Locke emphasises the role of the philosopher as a pragmatisteducator, who should aim to help ‘students and citizens better understandthe function of values within various communities and the emotional com-monalities inherent in value formation’.32 His presence in churches maywell, therefore, have been a result of his educational aims, designed toaddress the issue of ignorance among Black communities, which he some-times addressed in strong terms:

When I think of the warped and narrow beliefs and teachings Christianityrammed down our Negro throats, I really feel like burning the churches.Because no absence of church or dogma could make the Negro irreligious— while the white man even with his churches is really at bottom irreligious —I suppose that’s why he has to have so many churches!’.33

James Weldon Johnson’s attitude towards the traditions of the Black church,in contrast, appears to have been more ambiguous. He had been brought upin the South, where his father became a lay Baptist minister while hisgrandmother introduced him to the Ebenezer Methodist EpiscopalChurch, read him Bible stories at home, and encouraged him to become apreacher. As a member of his grandmother’s church, Johnson absorbed thedetails of revival meetings, the sound of spirituals, and the rhetoric of Blackpreachers, as he himself states in God’s Trombones.34 He even tells of a visionhe experienced as a boy, which greatly pleased his grandmother. By the timehe graduated from Atlanta University in 1894, however, he admitted tobeing agnostic.35 In 1934, in apparent contradiction to the views he had putforward in God’s Trombones, Johnson wrote:

The church must as nearly as it can abolish hypnotic religion, that religionwhich excites visions of the delights of life in the world to come, while it givesus no insight into the conditions we encounter in the world in which we now

25 – Jon Michael Spencer, ‘The BlackChurch and the Harlem Renaissance’, AfricanAmerican Review 30, no. 3 (Autumn, 1996):453–60.26 – Monroe N. Work, ed., Negro Year Book:An Annual Encyclopedia of the Negro 1937–1938

(Tuskegee, AL: Negro Year Book Publishing,1937), 6–9. The Internet Archive, http://archive.org/stream/negroyearbookana37-workrich/ (accessed January 18, 2013). Theother fields were literature, music, fine arts,industry, science, education, and race rela-tions. James Weldon Johnson won the goldaward for literature in 1927 for God’sTrombones.27 – Spencer, ‘The Black Church and theHarlem Renaissance’, 454–56.28 – For a comprehensive account of Locke’sformative influences, see Leonard Harris andCharles Molesworth, Alain L. Locke: Biographyof a Philosopher (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2008).29 – See, for instance, Alain Locke,‘Pluralism and Ideological Peace’, in Freedom

and Experience: Essays Presented to Horace M.

Kallen, ed. Milton Konvitz and Sidney Hook(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1947),p. 63–69.30 – Christopher Buck, Alain Locke: Faith andPhilosophy (Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 2005),passim.31 – Alain Locke, The Problem of Classification

in the Theory of Value (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University, 1918); and, for example,Alain Locke, ‘Values and Imperatives’, inAmerican Philosophy Today and Tomorrow, ed.Horace M. Kallen and Sidney Hook (NewYork: Lee Furnam, 1935), p. 312–333.32 – Linda O’Neill, ‘Tempered Dreams:Alain Locke as Pluralist and Pragmatist’,Philosophical Studies in Education 39 (2008): 106–117.33 – Quoted in Harris and Molesworth, AlainL. Locke: Biography of a Philosopher, 271.

34 – See the beginning of this article.

35 – David J. Nordloh, ed., James Weldon

Johnson (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987), 3.

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live. There is still to be found in the Negro church too much obsoletedoctrine.36

These words were written, however, within the very specific context ofJohnson’s social and political concerns: to overcome the fact that ‘the race’was still discriminated against and segregated, he advocated modernisationand education with a view to securing the full integration of Black commu-nities into the wider American body politic.37 A key part of that processwould be a root-and-branch reform of the Black church, which he held inhigh regard as ‘the most powerful and, potentially, the most effectivemedium we possess’, which had ‘brought about cohesion and stabilizationin a bewildered and leaderless mass’.38 Even so, he considered traditionalBlack culture, including spirituals, secular music, dances, and plantationstories, to be another vital asset for achieving full citizenship.39

Numerous sermons were recorded in the 1920s and 1930s, accompaniedby music and the congregations’ responses, as part of this movement for thecultural education of the Black community. The recordings helped to keepalive this form of preaching, its distinctive chanting style (or ‘whooping’), andits rhetorical and conceptual power.40 The same biblical imagery that hadinspired the southern Black folk culture Johnson had known as a boy wasnow acknowledged and adopted by the new Black intellectual elite in theirsearch for identity and dignity in the 1920s, lending its quintessentiallyapocalyptic nature to the new aesthetic requirements embodied in AlainLocke’s ‘New Negro’ artistic principles of 1925.41

In this way the conceptual world embodied in Harriet Powers’ quilts stillpermeated the work of many Black writers and artists in the 1920s, 1930s and1940s. In their new, more sophisticated literary and visual form the biblicalreferences still had the ability to move, empower, and liberate.

Johnson’s God’s Trombones and other Harlem Renaissance literary andvisual works thus inherited the rhetorical traditions of southern Blackpreachers and the oratorical qualities of traditional slave sermons. AsJohnson himself explains in the preface to this book, his intention was toreinterpret both the content and the oratorical quality of the sermons that hadbeen ‘passed down with only slight modifications from preacher to preacherand from locality to locality’ during his childhood in Florida.42 The Blackpreachers, he recalls, would suddenly close the Bible, step out from behindthe pulpit and start to preach, striding up and down in a ‘very rhythmicdance’. Their voice was used to full effect, ‘like a trombone’, producingmusical phrases that fused together expressions of African origin with BibleEnglish.43 The preachers’ effective use of emotional rhetoric, their intoning,moaning, pleading, thundering and theatrical gestures — the same rheto-rical tools used by slaves to express their millennial concerns — weretransformed in God’s Trombones into elaborate verbal and pictorial devices.Johnson had personally asked Aaron Douglas to illustrate his poems, and hissophisticated African-American Art Deco work sustained the sermons’ apoc-alyptic vitality and meaningfulness in the new social, cultural, economic, andpolitical circumstances of early twentieth-century America, and the ebullienturban context of Harlem in particular. At the same time, Johnson andDouglas turned this tradition into the intellectual property of an educatedelite, who, by virtue of the printed medium, now acted as its interpreters for

36 – James Weldon Johnson, ‘NegroAmericans, What Now?’ (1934), 138–77 inThe Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson,2 vols., vol. 2: Social, Political, and LiteraryEssays, ed. Sondra K. Wilson (New York:Oxford University Press, 1995), 146.

37 – Ibid., 144–45.

38 – Ibid., 146.

39 – James Weldon Johnson, ‘Seventy-OneYears Ago Lincoln Freed the Slaves’ (1934),in The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson,vol. 2, p. 133–137.

40 – Martha Simmons and Frank A.Thomas, eds., Preaching with Sacred Fire: anAnthology of African-American Sermons, 1750 to the

Present (New York and London, W. W.Norton, 2010), 441. See also BruceRosenberg, The Art of the American Folk Preacher(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970);and Henry H. Mitchell, Black Preaching(Philadelphia and New York: J. P.Lippincott, 1970).41 – Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An

Interpretation (New York: Albert and CharlesBoni, 1925).

42 – Johnson, God’s Trombones, 1, emphasisadded.

43 – Ibid., 4–9.

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the wider Black public.44 They shifted the theological expression of theoriginal Black sermons away from the intense, raw visionary content seenin Harriet Powers’ quilts, with her unquestioning portrayal of an eschatolo-gical reality, towards a refined intellectual appropriation of this reality,designed to play a role in the active, self-conscious process of identityconstruction that characterised the Harlem Renaissance movement and itspolitical preoccupations.45

Preachers would often deliver sermons that began with the Creation,continued with the fall of humankind, the trials and tribulations of theHebrew children, and the redemption of Christ, and ended with the Dayof Judgment.46 In the same way, the sequence of poetic sermons developedby Johnson in God’s Trombones reinterprets this general structure:

Listen Lord — A PrayerSermon 1. The CreationSermon 2. The Prodigal SonSermon 3. Go Down Death — A Funeral SermonSermon 4. Noah Built the ArkSermon 5. The CrucifixionSermon 6. Let My People GoSermon 7. The Judgment Day

As in the biblical Apocalypse, this sequence deals with two parallel questions:one that seeks to understand history and the other that seeks to narrate thatunderstanding, conveying ‘the desperate longing of the narrator’47 for justiceand punishment. Describing ‘The Judgment Day’ at the close of God’sTrombones, Johnson writes:

In that great day,People, in that great day,God’s a-going to rain down fire.God’s a-going to sit in the middle of the airTo judge the quick and the dead.…Oh-o-oh, sinner,Where will you stand,In that great day when God’s a-going to rain down fire?…And those who’ve come through great tribulations,And washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb,They will enter in -Clothed in spotless white, …Singing new songs of Zion,Chattering with the angelsAll around the Great White Throne.…And I hear a voice, crying, crying:Time shall be no more!Time shall be no more!Time shall be no more!And the sun will go out like a candle in the wind,The moon will turn to dripping blood,The stars will fall like cinders,

44 – Through being published in a book,Douglas’s prints reached a far wider audi-ence than if they had been shown in a gal-lery. Caroline Goeser demonstrates thatprinted publications were the primary med-ium for visual arts in the Black communityduring the 1920s and early 1930s and wereinstrumental in developing the aesthetics ofthe Harlem Renaissance: Caroline Goeser,Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print

Culture and Modern Black Identity (Lawrence:University Press of Kansas, 2007).45 – For a discussion of the ways in whichpolitical issues affected Black AmericanChurches during the period under discus-sion, see Lincoln and Mamiya, The BlackChurch in the African-American Experience, parti-cularly pp. 197–212.46 – Johnson, God’s Trombones, 1–2.

47 – Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse, 11–14.

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And the sea will burn like tar;And the earth shall melt away and be dissolved,And the sky will roll up like a scroll.With a wave of his hand God will blot out time,And start the wheel of eternity.

Sinner, oh, sinnerWhere will you standIn that great day when God’s a-going to rain down fire?48

Johnson was pleased with Douglas’s illustrations, despite the artist’s doubts.49

Done in colour but published in monochrome, Douglas’s dynamic visualconstructions result from a clear sense of design, defined by concentriccircles, and from the use of strong background lighting to create markedtonal contrasts, hallmarks of his mature style. They are effective visualvehicles for Johnson’s apocalyptic tone and the idea of biblical salvation,and establish clear focal points in the narrative.

Douglas takes care to translate the old-time metaphors and rhetoricaldevices employed by Johnson into visual form. The hand of God, forinstance, which Johnson mentions in the preparatory prayer and sermon 1

(‘The Creation’) — and which Harriet Powers had also referred to in herdescriptive captions and included in one scene — dominates Douglas’sillustration for the Creation sermon, occupying the upper third of thecomposition (figure 3). Another good example of Douglas’s ability to manip-ulate visual metaphors is found in his illustration to the sermon ‘Let MyPeople Go’, in which two contorted horses represent the Israelites beingpursued into the Red Sea by the Egyptian pharaoh, as narrated in the Bookof Exodus (figure 4). In Johnson’s text the use of rhythmic verbal repetitionsconjures up the hordes of Egyptian soldiers and the frenzy of war:

And Pharaoh called his generals,And the generals called the captains,And the captains called the soldiers,And they hitched up all the chariots,Six hundred chosen chariots of war,And twenty-four hundred horses…..50

Douglas’s two horses metonymically represent this frenzy. The visual dynamismof the horses’ dark silhouettes is reinforced by the two tonally lighter curlingwaves that dominate the centre of the composition. They guide the viewer’s eyetowards the small figure of Moses on the lower right, outlined against a diagonalray of brilliant light shining down on him from heaven. By employing this tonalgradation—menacing dark horses, lighter grey waves, and brilliant ray of light— Douglas connotes the fundamental idea of God’s intervention to deliverthose who are being persecuted. At the same time, the headpieces worn by theEgyptian soldiers, which resemble the pharaonic crown of Upper Egypt, add atone of elegant erudition, contributing to the carefully researched aestheticappeal of the whole project and situating the work well within the ideals ofHarlem Renaissance intellectuals as summed up by Alain Locke.

In the sermon ‘Go Down Death’, Johnson makes effective use of the horseas a metaphor for death: ‘And Death heard the summons, / And he leaped

48 – Extract from ‘The Judgment Day’,53–56 in God’s Trombones by James WeldonJohnson, © 1927 The Viking Press, Inc.,renewed © 1955 by Grace Nail Johnson.Used by permission of Viking Penguin, adivision of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.49 – Amy Helene Kirschke, Aaron Douglas:Art, Race, & the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson:University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 98.

50 – Johnson, God’s Trombones, 50.

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on his fastest horse, / pale as a sheet in the moonlight. / Up the goldenstreet Death galloped …’.51 Douglas’s illustration translates the verbal ima-gery by showing the dark figure of a winged horse silhouetted against atonally lighter background representing moonlight. Like the star-signs inHarriet Powers’ quilts, this figure carries an apocalyptic overtone, pointingto Johnson’s direct references to the Book of Revelation in his sermon onDeath: ‘And Death began to ride again — / Up beyond the evening star, /Out beyond the morning star, / Into the glittering light of glory, / On to theGreat White Throne’.52

A similar tone is used in Johnson’s opening piece, ‘Listen, Lord — Aprayer’, where the world’s sufferers invoke God’s help: ‘O Lord, we comethis morning / Knee-bowed and body-bent / Before thy throne of grace’.Douglas’s illustration embodies this human multitude in one single figure ofa Black man, his face raised to the sky, bathed by rays of gradated light andsilently expressing Johnson’s request: ‘O Lord — open up a window of

Figure 3. Aaron Douglas (1899–1979), TheCreation, 1927. Gouache on paper, repro-duced in half tone. Image: 14.8 × 11.3 cm,page: 21.8 × 15.8 cm. Illustration to Sermon1 in God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse

by James Weldon Johnson. New York,Viking Press, 1927. © 1927 The Viking Press,renewed © 1955 by Grace Nail Johnson.Used by permission of Viking Penguin, adivision of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.Photo: Christopher Tribe.

51 – Ibid., 28.

52 – Ibid., 29.

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heaven, / And lean out far over the battlements of glory / and listen thismorning’.53 This figure is echoed in the illustration to ‘The Crucifixion’,where a Black Christ also raises His face to the ray of light shining downfrom heaven, within a scene framed at the bottom by the dark heads of aRoman soldier and a horse, acting as repoussoir figures and symbols ofpersecution, like Pharaoh’s soldiers in the scene from Exodus.

Douglas’s use of his silhouette figures as visual doubles for Johnson’sverbal personifications is particularly effective in the illustration for thesermon on the ‘Prodigal Son’ (figure 5). Two figures are portrayed inmodern dress, situating the idea of sin within the contemporary context ofHarlem’s night life, surrounded by objects that metonymically signify thepreacher’s ‘symbols of iniquity’ — dollar bills, musical instruments, dice, andplaying cards. This composition is counterbalanced by the straightforwardbiblical tone of the sermon entitled ‘Noah Built the Ark’. Starting with acareful description of the context which led to the fall of humankind and to

Figure 4. Aaron Douglas, Let My People Go,1927. Gouache on paper, reproduced in halftone. Image: 14.9 × 11.3 cm, page: 21.8 ×15.8 cm. Illustration to Sermon 6 in God’s

Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse by JamesWeldon Johnson. New York, Viking Press,1927. © 1927 The Viking Press, renewed© 1955 by Grace Nail Johnson. Used bypermission of Viking Penguin, a division ofPenguin Group (USA) LLC. Photo:Christopher Tribe.

53 – Ibid., 13.

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the wickedness that caused the flood, Johnson’s sermon functions as atheologically simple but stark warning to sinners, reinforcing traditionalmoral values. Douglas’s illustration, however, ignores the heavily moraltone of the sermon; he concentrates instead on a straightforward depictionof the narrative event of the flood, skilfully expressing Noah’s moral author-ity by portraying him as a disproportionately large figure.

Days of anguishAs Malcolm Bull has perceptively stated, most visions of the future ‘fallsomewhere between a pure eschatology of unmotivated disaster and a pureteleology of interminable purposefulness’.54 The vision offered by HarrietPowers’ quilts fell mostly within the first category, recalling the ‘pure escha-tology’ of traditional sermons, and it also informed the pictorial devices

Figure 5. Aaron Douglas, The Prodigal Son,1927. Gouache on paper, reproduced in halftone. Image: 15.7 × 11.3 cm, page: 21.8 ×15.8 cm. Illustration to Sermon 2 in God’s

Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse by JamesWeldon Johnson. New York, Viking Press,1927. © 1927 The Viking Press, renewed© 1955 by Grace Nail Johnson. Used bypermission of Viking Penguin, a division ofPenguin Group (USA) LLC. Photo:Christopher Tribe.

54 – Bull, ‘On Making Ends Meet’, 1.

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employed later by the Harlem Renaissance artist William H. Johnson (1901–1970). Born into poverty in South Carolina, William H. Johnson was edu-cated in New York and Europe, where he spent ‘twelve productive years’ inFrance, Denmark, and Norway before returning to New York in 1930.Johnson set up a studio in Harlem, where he shared in the social involve-ment of the 1940s; the WPA Federal Art Project assigned him to a teachingpost at the Harlem Community Art Center, where he met Jacob Lawrence,among others. As the son of a Black father and an Indian mother, Johnsonshared the contemporary desire to express his sense of racial and culturalidentity through ties with the southern Black social, cultural, and politicalenvironment. He embarked on a process of ‘formal and philosophicalexamination of the African-American self’, identifying himself with the‘racial difference, cultural distinctiveness, marginality, and the fundamental-ist spirituality’ of African-American folk communities.55

Rejecting both the conventions of his formal artistic training and theEuropean notions of exotic primitivism, around the 1940s Johnson‘embarked on a visual return to a rural, folkloric South’, observing ‘people,places, and activities engendered in reality but born of his imagination’, andproducing sketches of common rural activities, in an aesthetic journey whichseemed to have bridged the gap between his European experience and thememory of his upbringing in the South.56 William H. Johnson developed hisown style of ‘primitivism’, conceived of as bold pictorial compositionsemploying flat areas of intense, unmodulated colour and distorted figures,designed to express his sense of racial and cultural identity — what he called‘his family of primitiveness and tradition’.57 This personal and artistic pro-cess of self-fashioning, rooted in his need to recover some of the ‘timeless’existential and aesthetic qualities relating to his upbringing, was alsoexpressed in a deliberate re-appropriation of the eschatological and apoc-alyptic values that coloured the ontological and cosmological beliefs whichhad traditionally underpinned slave life and values, giving them new mean-ing. In a visionary oil painting entitled ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ (c.1944)(figure 6), Johnson depicts an elderly African-American man awaiting thedivine chariot which will carry him — like the prophet Elijah — up toheaven in a whirlwind. The angels who greet the old man are portrayed as aline of modern Black choir girls, conflating, as in Harriet Powers’ quilts, thecontemporary setting of the picture with both the biblical time Johnsonrecalls and the emotional slave context which made such recollectionsbelievable. Johnson borrowed the title of the painting from the well-knownold spiritual, popular in the hymn books of the Southern Baptist churches ofthe Deep South, which was often associated with the memory of HarrietTubman and the Underground Railway Movement.58

By presenting the old-time preacher’s traditional oratory in a carefullycrafted aesthetic vehicle, James Weldon Johnson’s text and Douglas’s andWilliam H. Johnson’s pictures were responding to the changed forms ofsocial and existential pressure that permeated the African-American experi-ence of the early and mid-twentieth century. The unquestioning belief intraditional religious values was giving way to more critical views of the‘civilising’ aspects of Christianity. Certain blues lyrics, for instance, overtlypoint the finger at the preacher, seeing him as an agent for social repressionor exploitation rather than spiritual liberation: ‘See that preacher walking

55 – Richard J. Powell, ‘“In My Family ofPrimitiveness and Tradition”: William H.Johnson’s “Jesus and the Three Marys”’,American Art 5, no. 4 (Autumn, 1991): 20–33.

56 – Richard J. Powell, Homecoming: The Art

and Life of William H. Johnson (Washington,DC: National Museum of American Art,1991), 141.

57 – Powell, ‘“In My Family,”, 20.

58 – Rosemary Sadlier, Harriet Tubman:

Freedom Seeker, Freedom Leader (Toronto:Dundurn Press, 2012), 111. The origin of thespiritual is uncertain; it may have been writ-ten by Uncle Wallace Willis, a slave belong-ing to a Choctaw chief in Indian Territory(Oklahoma), sometime before the Civil War:Frances Banks, ‘Frances Banks’, in The WPA

Oklahoma Slave Narratives, ed. T. LindsayBaker and Julie P. Baker (Norman:University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 28–30.It was first recorded in 1909 by the FiskJubilee Singers of Fisk University, Nashville(National Recording Preservation Board ofthe Library of Congress, The NationalRecording Registry 2002), http://www.loc.gov/rr/record/nrpb/registry/nrpb-2002reg.html (accessed January 19, 2013).

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down the street, he’s fixing to mess with every sister he meet’.59 Or, ‘I cried,Lord, my father, Lord, eh, kingdom come. / Send me back my woman, then“thy will be done”.’60

In visual terms, the anxiety caused by such existential conflicts was power-fully expressed by other African-American artists working at the time, eitherin Harlem or influenced by Harlem Renaissance principles. Archibald J.Motley, Jr. (1891–1981) is a case in point. Born in New Orleans into amiddle-class family of mixed African, First American, and European heri-tage, he was brought up in Chicago, where he lived in a racially tolerantenvironment and attended schools alongside white children. Having grad-uated in art from the Armour Institute in 1918, he was awarded aGuggenheim Fellowship in 1929, which enabled him to spend a year study-ing in Paris, where he became closely acquainted with the genre scenespainted by Delacroix, Hals, and Rembrandt.61 Motley incorporated thisartistic experience in his search for an African-American identity by visuallydocumenting women with different proportions of African blood (octoroons,quadroons, and mulattoes) as examples of the mixed racial types that werepart of American society.62 He also depicted the life of Black communities invivid genre scenes, including the jazz culture and night life of the Bronzevilleneighbourhood of Chicago, where Black migrants from the South congre-gated and which Motley regularly visited.63 One scene, entitled ‘Tongues’(‘Holy Rollers’), c.1929, appears to depict a group of Pentecostal Christianchurchgoers. Their ecstatic praying and frenzied dancing might perhaps

Figure 6. William H. Johnson (1901–1970),Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, c.1944. Oil onpaperboard. 285/8 × 26½ in (72.6 × 67.2cm). Washington, DC, SmithsonianAmerican Art Museum, gift of the HarmonFoundation. Photo: Smithsonian AmericanArt Museum.

59 – Hi Henry Brown, ‘Preachers Blues’.Quoted in Paul Garon, Blues and the PoeticSpirit (San Francisco: City Lights, (1975)1996), 145.60 – Texas Alexander, ‘Justice Blues’.Quoted in Garon, Blues and the Poetic Spirit,146.

61 – Oral history interview with ArchibaldMotley, January 23, 1978–March 1, 1979,Archives of American Art, SmithsonianInstitution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collec-tions/interviews/oral-history-interview-archibald-motley-11466 (accessed March 1,2012).62 – Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Raceand Visual Representation (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 2003),157.63 – Amy M. Mooney, Archibald J. Motley, Jr.

(Petaluma, CA: PomegranateCommunications, 1984), 86.

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have been criticised by James Weldon Johnson in his political writings, butthey represented a fundamentally eschatological form of Christian worship,in which believers expected Christ’s Second Coming at any time, wereconvinced that all the miraculous spiritual gifts mentioned in the Bible64

still operated within the church, and regarded the scriptures as sources forhealing prayer.65

Another of Motley’s genre scenes is also relevant to the argument beingdeveloped here. In a painting entitled ‘Cocktails’ (c.1926) (figure 7), hedepicts a group of five smartly dressed Black women with varying skintones, wearing fashionable hats, sitting around a table and smiling overtheir cocktail glasses. A waiter or servant approaches from the left, a roastchicken on his tray. On the left-hand side of the composition are the headand shoulders of a person relaxing in an armchair, next to a garmentcasually tossed over the back of the chair. The white fireplace with a clockon the mantelpiece, the candles in elegant holders, the heavy curtain on theleft, and the pictures on the wall all contribute to a decor suited to mundanepleasures and carefree night-life. Subtly, however, Motley weaves a religiousmoral tone into the scene by depicting three monks as the subject-matter ofthe picture hanging prominently on the wall behind the group. Presented inmise en abyme and reminiscent of seventeenth-century Spanish works, theasceticism of the monks’ muted black-and-white robes contrasts sharplywith the casual gaiety of the pink room. The painting expresses a deepexistential contradiction, which remains suspended and unresolved. It recallsthe artist’s own family’s middle-class values and his own internationalsophistication, while also — significantly — connoting Catholicism, a reli-gion which was often adopted by middle- and upper-class Black families,

Figure 7. Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Cocktails,c.1926. Oil on canvas. 32 x 40 in. (81.3 x 101.6cm). New York, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.Boston, MA, Museum of Fine Arts; The JohnAxelrod Collection–Frank B. Bemis Fund,Charles H. Bayley Fund, and The HeritageFund for a Diverse Collection; 2011.1859.Photo: Museum of Fine Arts.

64 – For instance, in 1 Corinthians 12: 4–11and 27–31, Romans 12: 3–8, and Ephesians4: 7–16.65 – Guy P. Duffield and Nathaniel M. VanCleave, Foundations of Pentecostal Theology (LosAngeles: Foursquare Media, 1983), 300–302and 523.

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including Motley’s,66 and which James Weldon Johnson cited as an exampleto be emulated when he argued for the improvement and education of theBlack ministry.67

In some ways, Motley’s almost anthropological documentation of racialtypes and Black society point to the success of education as a tool forAfrican-American social and political improvement in the 1920s and 1930s.These accurately observed paintings were produced by a man who to someextent was observing these ‘types’ from a social and cultural distance, intenton documenting every significant aspect of Black life, however removedfrom the values of his own upbringing — including the visionary, emotionaland ecstatic religious behaviour of so many Black communities, particularlythe more dispossessed groups. In doing so, he was engaging in a process ofidentity construction, as well as contributing to the political discussions of thetime.

Harlem as a ‘site of the black cultural sublime’ was invented by writersand artists such as Locke, Johnson, Douglas, and Motley in their effortsto transform the stereotypical image of ‘Negro’ Americans as culturallyand biologically inferior ex-slaves, unfit for ‘mechanised modernity’ orcosmopolitan identity, into heroic producers of a new Black identity andBlack aesthetics on a par with those of fellow white Americans.68

Ironically, however, this literary and artistic flowering occurred precisely‘as Harlem was turning into the great American slum’, with a death-rate42 per cent higher than in other parts of the city, and 50 per centunemployment.69 In such conditions religion continued to offer a glim-mer of hope and comfort, a role not ignored by Black artists. In one ofJacob Lawrence’s paintings for the Migration of the Negro series (1940–1941), some new arrivals to Harlem sit inside a local church, some ofthem gazing at the religious pictures on the walls, others with heads bentin prayer (figure 8). The white wall with the cross illuminates theotherwise sombre tones of the scene, providing a focus for both thepainting and the migrants’ lives, as suggested in Lawrence’s somewhatneutral accompanying caption: ‘One of the main forms of social andrecreational activities in which the migrants indulged occurred in thechurch’.70

Yet as the ‘Negro’ gave way to the ‘New Negro’ and eventually topresent-day African-Americans, the straightforward biblical eschatology ofHarriet Powers’ quilts and the apocalyptic visions of William H. Johnson’sbiblical paintings could still offer answers to the complexities of the newsocial, political, and moral realities. During the civil unrest of the 1960s, forexample, reference to visionary biblical passages endowed Martin LutherKing’s powerful apocalyptic oratory with meaning:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead.(Amen) But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to themountaintop. (Yeah) [applause] … I just want to do God’s will. (Yeah) And He’sallowed me to go up to the mountain. (Go ahead) And I’ve looked over (Yes sir),and I’ve seen the Promised Land. (Go ahead) I may not get there with you. (Goahead) But I want you to know tonight, (Yes) that we, as a people, will get to thePromised Land. [applause] (Go ahead. Go ahead) And so I’m happy tonight; I’mnot worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen theglory of the coming of the Lord. [applause]’.71

66 – Mooney, Archibald J. Motley, Jr., 18.

67 – James Weldon Johnson, ‘NegroAmericans, What Now?’, 148.

68 – Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ‘Harlem onOur Minds’, in Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the

Harlem Renaissance, ed. J. Skipwith (London:Hayward Gallery, 1997), p. 160–167.

69 – Ibid., 166.

70 – Jacob Lawrence’s original caption topainting 54 in his Migration series. Reproducedin Elizabeth Hutton Turner, ed., JacobLawrence: The Migration Series (Washington,DC: Rappahannock Press, 1993), p. 120. Seealso Tania Costa Tribe, ‘Visual Narrativeand the Harlem Renaissance’, Word & Image

23, no. 4 (2007): 391–413.

71 – Martin Luther King, Jr., the final part of‘I’ve been to the Mountaintop’, his last ser-mon delivered in Memphis, Tennessee, onApril 3, 1968 (the day before he was mur-dered) on the occasion of a non-violentmarch. The Martin Luther King, Jr.Research and Education Center, KingPapers Project: Speeches. http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/kingweb/publications/speeches/I’ve_been_to_the_mountaintop.pdf, accessed January 14, 2013. Also repro-duced in Simmons and Thomas, PreachingWith Sacred Fire, 525.

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Days of doomA shift towards an even more reflective and less straightforwardly religiousunderstanding of eschatology and apocalypticism marks Jacob Lawrence’slater output. Lawrence had initially used his creative energy to research andre-inscribe the African-American experience into the wider history of theAmericas by means of epic verbal-visual narrative series produced between

Figure 8. Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000),Migration of the Negro series, picture 54 of 60:‘One of the main forms of social andrecreational activities in which the migrantsindulged occurred in the church’, 1940–1941.Casein tempera on hardboard. 18 × 12 in(45.7 × 30.5 cm). New York, Museum ofModern Art, Gift of Mrs David M. Levy.© ARS, NY and DACS, London 2013.Photo: Christopher Tribe.

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1938 and 1940, including those depicting the lives of Haitian GeneralToussaint L’Ouverture (1938), Frederick Douglass (1938–1939) and HarrietTubman (1939–1940),72 in which he celebrated the memory of these keyleaders in the resistance process. In the Migration of the Negro series, whichfollowed in 1940–1941, he produced what could be described as a socio-logical account of displacement, reminding viewers of the African-Americanexodus from the south to the industrial cities of the north, and punctuatingthis narrative with a verbal-visual commentary on the causes and conse-quences of this displacement process.73 Lawrence continued to address thesocial and political concerns of Black Americans in the decades that fol-lowed, tackling poverty in Harlem and the demand for civil rights in the1960s, among other issues. In these works, he expressed concerns about lossand fear, the violence of racial persecution, as well as poor living conditionsand unfair working demands, and emphasised the need for religious comfortin the Black population of Harlem and its many churches,74 showing com-passion for the struggles of humanity, particularly African-Americans. In theeight screen prints that the Limited Editions Club of New York commis-sioned from him to illustrate their 1983 edition of John Hersey’s bookHiroshima (first published in 1946),75 however, he ‘transcended racial andnational consciousness’,76 colouring his narrative with eschatological andapocalyptic overtones, and extending his social concerns beyond theimmediate racial issues that had dominated African-American life in thefirst half of the century to make them relevant for humanity as a whole. In sodoing, as I will argue below, he preserved a direct link with the world ofHarriet Powers’ quilts and the memory of what that world represented.

Hersey’s text recounts a series of parallel events that took place immedi-ately before, during and after the dropping of the bomb on August 6, 1945,describing how they affected six individual Hiroshima inhabitants and look-ing at the devastation caused to the city in more general terms. Herseyfocuses on the experiences and reactions of these six ordinary people, brieflysituating the immediate context of their uneventful daily lives before dealingwith their responses to the nuclear explosion and all its consequences. Thefour chapters of the text,77 for each of which Lawrence produced twoillustrations, are as follows:

1. A Noiseless Flash (6 August 1945): the sudden flash and its immediate con-sequences, such as collapsing houses and falling timbers.

2. The Fire (6 August 1945): the numerous fires across the city, the widespreadbewilderment and confusion, the first attempts at looking after thewounded, and the pouring of people into Asano Park — a private estatethat had been far enough from the explosion so that ‘its bamboos, pines,laurel, and maples were still alive’,78 attracting the refugees.

3. Details are Being Investigated (6–15 August 1945): rescue parties, countless dyingpatients; the announcement by the American president that it had been anew type of bomb — an atomic bomb; trying to get fresh water fromAsano park and going through the rock gardens, the many dead in thegardens, disposal of the dead by ‘decent cremation and enshrinement’,79

and Emperor Hirohito’s surrender.4. Panic Grass and Feverfew (18 August 1945–15 April 1946): the consequences of

the blast twelve days after the occurrence: the revival of vegetation:‘everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning

72 – See Ellen Harkins Wheat, JacobLawrence: The Frederick Douglass and Harriet

Tubman Series of 1938–40 (Hampton, VA:Hampton University Museum, 1991).

73 – Tribe, ‘Visual Narrative and theHarlem Renaissance’.

74 – Patricia Hills, Painting Harlem Modern: The

Art of Jacob Lawrence (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2009).

75 – John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York:Limited Editions Club, 1983), with an intro-ductory poem by Robert Penn Warren andsilk-screens by Jacob Lawrence. Hersey’s textof Hiroshima had first been published in The

New Yorker in 1946. See Nesbett, JacobLawrence, 42.76 – Hills, Painting Harlem Modern, 254.

77 – A fifth chapter by Hersey assessing thelong-term harm caused by the catastrophewas subsequently included in the 1985 edi-tion of the book (New York: Alfred A.Knopf), after Lawrence had produced hisscreen-prints.

78 – John Hersey, Hiroshima

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 47. The1983 edition with Jacob Lawrence’s illustra-tions is unpaginated, so page references hererefer to the 1986 Penguin edition.

79 – Ibid., 83.

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glories, and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and cloybur andsesame and panic grass and feverfew’.80 Long-term radiation sickness andits consequences.

Lawrence’s eight prints create a loose visual reinterpretation of the originaltext centred on a few thematic motifs. In no case can his figures be identifiedas the highly specific characters of Hersey’s account. His frontispiece picture(‘Playground’ — figure 9) metaphorically establishes the everyday situationof the victims at the moment of the blast by portraying five figures in a circle,running with kites and watched by a dog. The second illustration for chapter1 (print 2: ‘Street Scene’) shows the immediate consequences of the explo-sion, with figures trapped under fallen debris. Prints 3 (‘Family’) and 4

(‘People in the Park’) illustrate chapter 2; the first of these shows two adultsand two children sitting around a table, a dead bird lying conspicuously on

Figure 9. Jacob Lawrence, Hiroshima series,print 1: Playground, 1983. Screen print. Image:127/8 × 10 in (32.7 × 25.5 cm), paper: 147/8 ×11½ in (37.8 × 28.2 cm). Published by theLimited Editions Club, New York. © ARS,NY and DACS, London 2013. Reproducedby kind permission of the Syndics ofCambridge University Library.

80 – Ibid., 91.

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the window-sill, and in the second a group of six people sitting in a park —presumably Asano Park — stare at a scorched tree.

Lawrence’s next two prints, for chapter 3, portray the despair thatfollowed the event. Print 5 (‘Market’) metonymically expresses the extensivedestruction of the natural environment around Hiroshima by showing mar-ket stalls with just seven grimacing fish, a few withered plants and three deadbirds for sale. Survivors witness the scene with gestures of despair. This isfollowed in print 6 (‘Man with Birds’ — figure 10) by the image of a lonelyman holding the remains of dead birds in his hands. Print 7 (‘Boy with Kite’)illustrating chapter 4, represents the illnesses deriving from radiation sicknessthrough the figures of four adults and one child standing next to a fallen kite,all holding their bellies as if in pain. Finally, print 8 (‘Farmers’) shows threepeople with rakes, suggesting the beginnings of regeneration.

Figure 10. Jacob Lawrence, Hiroshima series,print 6: Man with Birds, 1983. Screen print.Image: 127/8 × 10 in (32.7 × 25.5 cm), paper:147/8 × 11½ in (37.8 × 28.2 cm). Publishedby the Limited Editions Club, New York.© ARS, NY and DACS, London 2013.Reproduced by kind permission of theSyndics of Cambridge University Library.

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Lawrence’s loose visual reinterpretation creates a meta-text which notonly illustrates some of the key points in Hersey’s narrative but also com-ments on life and death, happiness and suffering. He constructs this meta-text by using a few recurring motifs and metaphors, in particular kites assymbolic signifiers for life and dead birds as signifiers for death. The scenestake place within a context of spatial depth, a device which removes theviewers from the tragedy, turning them into witnesses rather than partici-pants. The only exception to this is in print 6, where the man holding thedead birds is portrayed in close-up, his shoulder half-turned, thus invitingthe viewer to share in the intense grief and despair connoted by the scene.

Responding to the ongoing nuclear threat that had coloured contempor-ary life since the explosion at Hiroshima, and moved by the ‘power, insight,scope, and sensitivity’ of Hersey’s text, Lawrence engaged in a profoundcritique of man’s inhumanity to man, as he put it.81 All the many explicitreferences that Hersey’s text makes to Japan are carefully abolished fromLawrence’s prints; instead, the artist’s spatial treatment of his compositionremains undefined. Lawrence did admit that he had read Hersey’s textattentively, choosing to illustrate its most important narrative kernels inspatial terms: ‘The challenge for me was to execute eight works: a market-place, a playground, a street scene, a park, farmers, a family scene, a manwith birds, and a boy with a kite. [But] not a particular country, not aparticular city, and not a particular people’.82 All Hersey’s careful allusionsto Asano Park, for instance, or to a specific rock garden design, havedisappeared from Lawrence’s prints, replaced by visual signs that indicatean unspecified location.

Hersey’s six main characters are metonyms for the whole of humankind;by concentrating on their personal experiences, the writer effectively high-lights the poignancy of human pain, fear, and suffering, lessening the emo-tional distancing between the reader and the many victims of Hiroshima’scollective catastrophe. Lawrence’s eight prints intensify this metonymicquality by removing all the specific references used by Hersey to establishthem as credible individual characters. Rather, he creates visual representa-tions of Hersey’s descriptions of the anonymous masses who, unlike the mainsix characters, did not survive the tragedy. Echoing the nameless twenty menwho ‘were all in exactly the same nightmarish state’, their faces whollyburned, their eye sockets hollow, the fluid from their eyes running downtheir cheeks,83 Lawrence portrays all his human beings — men, women, andchildren — as anonymous figures, depersonalised cadavers: their bodies aremere silhouettes; their faces are skull-like; their heads, hands, and arms areshown in vivid reds to signify their physical injuries and burned flesh.

The colour Lawrence uses to depict these injured bodies echoes thedestruction of other elements of the physical world described in Hersey’stext: ‘The [Japanese] scientists noticed that the flash of the bomb haddiscoloured concrete to a light reddish tint, had scaled off the surface ofgranite, and had scorched certain other types of building material’.84 Therestricted colour palette is repeated in all eight scenes, unifying the visualnarrative. Black is also used selectively for certain carefully chosen shapes.For instance, the contorted black shape in print 4 signifies the scorchedvegetation of Asano Park; in print 6, black is the colour of the dead birds the

81 – Jacob Lawrence’s ‘Artist’s Note’, inHiroshima, John Hersey (New York: LimitedEditions Club, 1983), unpaginated.

82 – Quoted by Peter Nesbett, ed., JacobLawrence: Thirty Years of Prints, 1963–1993

(Seattle: Francine Seders Gallery andUniversity of Washington Press, 1994), 42.

83 – Hersey, Hiroshima, 1986, 68.

84 – Ibid., 95.

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man is holding, whereas in prints 1, 2, and 5 it indicates the cracks opened bythe blast in the streets of Hiroshima and in the city’s market and playground.

Most of Hersey’s text is expressed through the bewildered eyes of hischaracters. Confronted with the need to comprehend the horrific nature ofthe tragedy that befell Hiroshima, one of them, the Methodist minister MrTanimoto, feels compelled to resort to biblical eschatological language. Inchapter 3, he reads from a Japanese-language pocket Bible to a dying oldman:

For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as awatch in the night. Thou carriest the children of men away as with a flood;they are as a sleep; in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In themorning it flourisheth and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, andwithereth. For we are consumed by Thine anger and by Thy wrath are wetroubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before Thee, our secret sins in the light ofThy countenance. For all our days are passed away in Thy wrath: we spendour years as a tale that is told….85

Seen through the religious eyes of one specific character, this is but oneepisode in Hersey’s text, which is itself presented as a sensitive outsider’saccount of the characters’ experiences, without any attempt at comprehend-ing what is beyond human ability to comprehend. The personal statementLawrence wrote to accompany the illustrated edition of Hiroshima signals asimilar move by the painter away from any attempt at situating the tragedywithin the boundaries of a strictly religious understanding of eschatology.Instead, he has moved to a more all-embracing, philosophical form ofunderstanding, based on an intense concern for the destruction of all livingthings — life in general — rather than just Hersey’s six human characters:

In my attempt to meet the challenge, I read and reread Hiroshima severaltimes and, in doing so, I began to see great devastation in the twisted andmutilated bodies of humans, birds, fishes and all of the other animals and livingthings that inherited our earth. The flora and the fauna and the land that wereat one time alive were now seared, mangled, deformed and devoid of life. AndI thought, what have we accomplished over these many centuries? We haveproduced great geniuses in music, the sciences, the arts, dance, literature,architecture and oratory among many other disciplines. And we have devel-oped the means to destroy, in a most horrible manner, that life that is our God-given right.86

Days of creationBorn in 1917 and raised in Harlem, the young Jacob Lawrence had beendirectly exposed to the same passionate biblical faith and metaphoricalpoetic language of the Black preacher that had so deeply inspired HarrietPowers’ quilts and James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones. Regarding hisseries of screenprints entitled Eight Studies for the Book of Genesis (1990),designed to accompany his reinterpretation of the King James version ofthe Book of Genesis, Lawrence stated:

I was baptized in the Abyssinian Baptist Church [in Harlem] in about 1932.There I attended church, I attended Sunday School, and I remember theministers giving very passionate sermons pertaining to the Creation. This wasover fifty years ago, and you know, these things stay with you even though you

85 – Ibid., 80.

86 – Lawrence, ‘Artist’s Note’.

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don’t realize what an impact these experiences are making on you at the time.As I was doing the series I think this was in the back of my mind, hearing thisminister [portrayed in the series of screenprints] talk about these things.87

This lingering memory permeates the Genesis prints (figure 11). His visualnarrative is organised precisely around the emotional performance of theBlack preacher, whose imposing presence dominates all eight compositionsand whose contorted poses function as signifiers for the intensely dramaticoratory that James Weldon Johnson had described. The preacher is themain character in Lawrence’s Genesis verbal-visual narrative; through himthe events of the Creation are told and shown at the same time. His sermonis depicted as a theatrical event, while the episodes from the Book of Genesis

Figure 11. Jacob Lawrence, Eight Studies forthe Book of Genesis, No. 1: In the Beginning All wasVoid, 1990. Screen print. Image: 19⅝ × 14¾in (49.8 × 36.5 cm). Published by the LimitedEditions Club, New York. © ARS, NY andDACS, London 2013. Reproduced by kindpermission of D. C. Moore Gallery, NewYork.

87 – Quoted by Nesbett, Jacob Lawrence, 50,from a lecture given by Jacob Lawrence atHenry Art Gallery, Seattle, August 12, 1993.Eight Studies for the Book of Genesis was pub-lished in 1990 by the Limited Editions Club,New York.

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that he narrates to his congregation are presented in mise en abyme, framed bythe windows of the church in which the sermon is being delivered.

With his violent bodily contortions, the preacher recalls not only an OldTestament prophet, but also God himself, as his gestures appear to beconjuring up the events that are being portrayed in the windows, makingthem happen. These windows, like Aaron Douglas’s rays of light, offer yetanother distinctive visual counterpoint to James Weldon Johnson’s words in‘Listen Lord — A Prayer’: ‘O Lord — open up a window of heaven, andlean out far over the battlements of glory’.88 Rather than metaphoricallyrepresenting divine light, however, as in Douglas’s prints, Lawrence’s win-dows remove the biblical narrative from the viewer’s immediate apprehen-sion. By showing it in mise en abyme they focus the viewer’s visual experienceand invite a more analytical attitude to the content.

Changes in the colour of the preacher’s robes add a visual signifier for thediachronic dimension of the series, helping mark the different moments inthe preached narrative as portrayed in the windows in each print.Additionally, Lawrence’s titles to the prints indicate the unfolding of theevents of God’s Creation, summarising and subtly reinterpreting the biblicalaccount (table 1).

Together with the visual devices he employs in the prints, Lawrence’stitles contribute to the artist’s personal reinterpretation of the events of theCreation, turning his series of screen-prints into a meta-text which not onlygives an account of these episodes but also comments upon and interpretsthem. His titles significantly reflect the concerns of the late twentieth century.Instead of choosing to interpret the version of the Creation given in chapter2, verses 21–22 of Genesis, in which Eve is created from Adam’s rib,Lawrence’s title to print 7 states simply ‘And God created man andwoman’. This corresponds to the account of human origins given in chapter1 (verse 27): ‘So God created man [i.e. humankind] in his own image …

Table 1. Correspondence between verses from the Book of Genesis and Lawrence’s titles to his Genesis prints.

Book of Genesis Lawrence’s titles

1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the

deep…. [First Day]

1) In the beginning all was void.

1:7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmamentfrom the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. [Second Day]

2) And God brought forth the firmament and the waters.

1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruittree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.[Third Day]

3) And God said ‘Let the Earth bring forth the grass,trees, fruits and herbs.’

1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the dayfrom the night; … 1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day,and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. [Fourth Day]

4) And God created the day and the night and Godcreated and put stars in the skies.

1:21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which thewaters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind:and God saw that it was good. [Fifth Day]

5) And God created all the fowls of the air and fishes ofthe seas.

1:25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, andevery thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.[Sixth Day]

6) And God created all the beasts of the earth.

1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; maleand female created he them. [Sixth Day]

7) And God created man and woman.

1:31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And theevening and the morning were the sixth day. [Sixth Day]

8) The Creation was done — and all was well.

88 – Johnson, God’s Trombones, 13.

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male and female created he them’, conflating the creation of woman andman.

Moreover, whereas the biblical text suggests that man should have controlover the created natural world (Genesis 1.28: ‘And God said unto them, Befruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and havedominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and overevery living thing that moveth upon the earth’), Lawrence depicts man andwoman in print 7 as tiny, flimsy-looking figures (figure 12). Their portrayal isin stark contrast to the larger mammals depicted in print 6 and the com-paratively gigantic insect that appears in print 3 (figure 13); these sizealterations visually reinforce the idea of ‘man’ as a mere part of creation,rather than its ruler. The predominance of nature over humanity, which

Figure 12. Jacob Lawrence, Eight Studies forthe Book of Genesis, No. 7: And God Created Man

and Woman, 1990. Screen print. Image: 195/8× 14¾ in (49.8 × 36.5 cm). Published by theLimited Editions Club, New York. © ARS,NY and DACS, London 2013. Reproducedby kind permission of D. C. Moore Gallery,New York.

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colours Lawrence’s account of God’s creation, negates the idea of an ever-continuing ‘progress’ consistent with the religious millennarism that haddominated traditional Black sermons. It thus changes biblical theology,signalling a significant shift in the function of old-time sermons for latetwentieth-century audiences.

Gazing at God’s white throneThe apocalyptic literature written around the beginning of the Christian erahad situated future hope on another plane, stressing the supernatural andotherworldly. In Revelation 21 the seer looks forward to a new heaven and anew earth, to be attained with the end of the old creation. Such hopes are

Figure 13. Jacob Lawrence, Eight Studies forthe Book of Genesis, No. 3: And God Said Let theEarth Bring Forth the Grass, Trees, Fruits and

Herbs, 1990. Screen print. Image: 195/8 ×14¾ in (49.8 × 36.5 cm). Published by theLimited Editions Club, New York. © ARS,NY and DACS, London 2013. Reproducedby kind permission of D. C. Moore Gallery,New York.

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also linked to the preoccupation with theodicy and suffering expressed inRabbinical wisdom literature such as Ezra 4.89 The pictorial languageemployed by Harriet Powers in her quilts visually situates the reality ofthis otherworld plane by shaping a metaphysical place which remainsundefined and insubstantial, and quite removed from direct everyday reality.Powers’ is very much a ‘personal apocalypse’, made up of her own indivi-dual dreams and visions, which required the fashioning of specific and newlycodified pictorial signs, involving her memories of an African worldviewwhich was now, in practice, inextricably enmeshed with her immediateAmerican experience.

Aaron Douglas’s illustrations for James Weldon Johnson’s re-working ofold sermons appropriate this apocalyptic memory, re-situating it in Harlemitself. The biblical apocalyptic narrative, addressed to early Christians at atime of political persecution, ‘attempts to make sense of present suffering byseeking a design in history’.90 As the New Negro himself became theobjective of this historical design, inhabiting an exciting world of promisesand possibilities, eschatology could now be pushed into a more remote planeand presented in a fashionable theatrical vehicle. Douglas’s is still a biblicaleschatological vision. The reaching of God’s distant White Throne, how-ever, has been postponed. His apocalypse is primarily a social one, designedto shape a language of intense hope and belief in the ability of humans totransform circumstances in order to reach their vision in the present ratherthan the future.

In the Hiroshima series of prints, Jacob Lawrence’s apocalyptic under-standing remains poised between eschatology and teleology, upholding thereligious traditions and immediate social preoccupations which lie at theroot of his Harlem-based upbringing, while at the same time re-arrangingthe biblical focus of this tradition — as he would again do in the Genesis

prints — to concentrate on wider ethical issues, including environmentalones. Yet he goes beyond the ecological concerns he later hinted at in theGenesis prints, permeating his Hiroshima series with a subtle secular escha-tological tension and forcing himself to ‘think the unthinkable’: the possibilityof a real end to the world, an end now made possible by humans themselves.His illustrations for Hiroshima are a highly emotional re-working of a text thatis designed to make the viewer-reader face the enormity of this man-madeevent, take responsibility for it, and hopefully avoid the impending nucleardoom that still plagued late twentieth-century life. They reflect a vision thathas moved away from a well-circumscribed ‘African-American’ context topursue an anguished inquiry into the very ontological nature of the whole ofhumanity. Similarly, his depiction of human beings in the Genesis series,produced not much later than his portrayal of the Hiroshima catastrophe,as a flimsy and vulnerable part of nature rather than as its masters suggeststhe artist was concerned with a much wider range of human experiences andwas moving towards an ecological and environmental form of eschatology,which had come to colour human anxiety about the impact of science andtechnology on the survival of humankind at the end of the secondmillennium.

89 – Christopher Rowland, ‘“Upon Whomthe Ends of the Ages have Come”:Apocalyptic and the Interpretation of theNew Testament’, in Apocalypse Theory and the

Ends of the World, ed. Malcolm Bull (Oxford:Blackwell, 1995), p. 38–57.

90 – Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse, 34.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, forfunding my research in North America on which this work is based, and to the organisersof the conference on ‘The Harlem Renaissance: Tensions and Stereotypes’ at the UniversitéFrançois Rabelais, Tours, France, February 6–8, 1998, for enabling me to present a pre-liminary version of this article at that meeting. The article has benefited considerably fromperceptive comments by Maria Lucia Pallares Burke, Peter Burke, Christopher Tribe, and ananonymous reviewer on an earlier draft.

Appendix 1

Harriet Powers’ Bible quilt in the Smithsonian’s collection is informed byPowers’ own descriptions, as recorded by a young local artist, Jennie Smith,in about 1891.91

Top row:

Square 1: ‘Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, naming the animals andlistening to the subtle whisper of the “serpent which is beguilingEve”…’

Square 2: ‘A continuation of Paradise, but this time Eve has “conceived andborn a son,” though he seems to have made his appearance inpantaloons, and has made a pet of the fowl. The bird of paradisein the right lower corner is resplendent in green and red calico.’

Square 3: ‘Satan amidst the seven stars…’

Middle row:

Square 4: ‘Where Cain “is killing his brother Abel, and the stream of bloodwhich flew over the earth” is plainly discernible…’

Square 5: ‘Cain goes into the land of Nod to get him a wife…’Square 6: ‘Jacob’s dream when “he lay on the ground” with the angel ascend-

ing or descending the ladder…’Square 7: ‘The Baptism of Christ…’

Bottom row:

Square 8: ‘“Has reference to the Crucifixion.” The globular objects attached tothe crosses like balloons by a string represent the darkness over theearth and the moon turning into blood, and are stretched in red andblack calico’.

Square 9: ‘Judas Iscariot and the thirty pieces of silver. The silver is done ingreen calico. The large disk at his feet is the “star that appeared in1886 for the first time in three hundred years.”’

Square 10: ‘The Last Supper, but the number of disciples is curtailed by five.They are all robed in white spotted cloth, but Judas is clothed indrab (being a little off-colour in character)’.

Square 11: ‘“The next history is the Holy Family: Joseph, the Virgin and theinfant Jesus with the star of Bethlehem over his head. Them is thecrosses which he had to bear through his undergoing. Anything forwisemen. We can’t go back no further than the bible.”’

91 – Perry, Harriet Powers’s Bible Quilts, 6–7.See also Mary E. Lyons, Stitching Stars: TheStory Quilts of Harriet Powers (New York:Aladdin Paperbacks, 1993), which containscommentary and quotations from descrip-tions given by Mrs Powers.

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Appendix 2

Harriet Powers’ descriptions of the quilt now in Boston were recorded by ananonymous writer in about 1898.92

Top row:

Square 1: ‘Job praying for his enemies. Job’s crosses. Job’s coffins’.Square 2: ‘The dark day of May 19, 1780. The seven stars were seen at 12 N. in

the day. The cattle all went to bed, chickens to roost and the trumpetwas blown. The sun went off to a small spot and then to darkness’.

Square 3: ‘The serpent lifted up by Moeses [sic] and women bringing theirchildren to be healed’.

Square 4: ‘Adam and Eve in the Garden. Eve tempted by the serpent. Adam’srib with which Eve was made. The sun and moon. God’s all-seeingeye and God’s merciful hand’.

Square 5: ‘John baptizing Christ, and the spirit of God descending and restedupon his shoulder like a dove’.

Middle row:

Square 6: ‘Jonah cast overboard of the ship and swallowed by a whale. Turtles.’Square 7: ‘God created two of every kind. Male and Female’.Square 8: ‘The falling of the stars on November 13, 1833. The people were

fright [sic] and thought that the end of time had come. God’s handstaid the stars. The varmits rushed out of their beds’.

Square 9: ‘Two of every kind of animals continued. Camels, elephants, gheraffs[sic] lions, etc’.

Square 10: ‘The angels of wrath and the seven vials. The blood of fornications.Seven headed beasts and ten horns which arose out of the water’.

Bottom row:

Square 11: ‘Cold Thursday, 10 of Feb. 1895. A woman frozen while at prayer. Awoman frozen at a gateway. A mule with a sack of meal frozen. Iciclesformed from the breath of a mule. All blue birds killed. A man frozenat his jug of liquor’.

Square 12: ‘The red light night of 1846. A man tolling a bell to notify the peopleof the wonder. Women, children, and fowls frightened but God’smerciful hand caused no harm to them’.

Square 13: ‘Rich people who were taught nothing of God. Bob and Kate Bell ofVA. They told their parents to stop the clock at one and tomorrow itwould strike one and so it did. This was the signal that they enteredeverlasting punishment. The independent hog that ran 500 milesfrom GA to VA. Her name was Betts’.

Square 14: ‘The creation of animals continues’.Square 15: ‘The crucifixion of Christ between the two thieves. The sun went into

darkness. Mary and Martha weeping at his feet. The blood and waterran from his right side’.

92 – Perry, Harriet Powers’s Bible Quilts, 8–9.See also Lyons, Stitching Stars.

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