Slavery to Hiroshima and beyond: African-American art and the apocalypse TANIA COSTA TRIBE Climbing Jacob’s ladder In 1927, when the Harlem Renaissance literary and visual movement was at its height, the influential Black poet, politician and early American civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) published an important book of African-American religious poetry entitled God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, in which he emulated traditional African-American religious oratory. In his introduction, Johnson describes how the poems included in the book grew from his memories of sermons he had heard preached during his childhood. Inflamed by the preacher’s oratory, congre- gations had been ‘moved to ecstasy’, sharing visions of an ‘anthropomorphic God, a sure-enough heaven and a red-hot hell’. 1 For generations, he explains, such sermons had functioned as the ‘mainspring of hope and inspiration’ for North America’s African-American population, having been passed down with only minor changes from preacher to preacher and from locality to locality; they remained a vital force and ‘the greatest single 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 of the Black preacher and situates his role within the social, political and cultural context of the time. In a slave society dominated by pre-capitalist values, he argues, paternalism shaped the relationship between masters and slaves so that a pattern of accommodation and resistance emerged, and the class conflict between masters and slaves mainly took the form of a racial clash. 3 In this context, the Black preacher played a fundamental role, teaching some slaves to read (despite the fact that many of his eager students were whipped for trying to become literate) and providing spiritual solace and moral guidance. 4 He was also a ‘bard, physician, judge, and priest’, who worked within the narrow confines of a still ill-defined Black church, mingling African-derived rites and beliefs with ‘an early veneer of Christianity’. 5 By the nineteenth century English had become the lingua franca for the many different slave communities, while the Bible provided Black commu- nities in both the North and the South with a fundamental source of inspiration for the construction of Black morality and character as well as individual and group notions of redemption. 6 The biblical texts to which they were exposed ranged from Saint Paul’s message of obedience to passages that encouraged them to express both eschatological and millennial aspirations. 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 by Aaron 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 South Carolina slave code specifically stated that ‘No slave shall be taught to write, work on Sunday, or work more than 15 hours per day in Summer, and 14 hours in Winter’: Charles M. Christian and Sari Bennet, Black Saga: The African American Experience, A Chronology (New York: 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 of African American Sermons, 1750 to the Present (New York, London: W.W. Norton, 2010), 2–3. 354 WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 29, NO. 3, JULY–SEPTEMBER 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2013.822146 # 2013 Taylor & Francis