By Lauren Silverman, KERA News
ARLINGTON, TX – A University of Texas-Arlington grad student uncovered a treasure earlier this year: a late-1700s poem about slavery by a former slave named Jupiter Hammon, who was the first black poet published in America. In time for Juneteenth today, the poem’s been published for the first time.
CEDRICK MAY: “Although we are in slavery / Bound by the yoke of man / We must always have a single eye / And do the best we can”
That’s UTA professor Cedrick May reading the newly discovered poem called “An Essay On Slavery”. Until 2011, it was buried among hundreds of other documents at Yale University Library.
MAY: “When shall we hear the joyful sound / Echo the Christian shore / Each humble voice with songs resound / That slavery is no more”
Julie McCown was searching the archives for a known Jupiter Hammon poem, when she stumbled upon one with a date that jumped out at her: 1786.
JULIE MCCOWN: “There is no poem that Jupiter Hammon published in 1786 that we knew of at the time.”
McCown and Professor May, who’s an expert in African-American literature, worked with a non-profit preservation group to authenticate the new poem, studying everything from the paper it was written on, to the type of ink on the page.
MCCOWN: “It’s just this sense of amazement that here’s this poem on a piece of paper that’s 225 years old, and I’m probably one of a handful of people who has seen it in the last couple hundred years.”
Jupiter Hammon was born a slave in 1711 and worked his entire life for the Lloyd Family of Queens on Long Island, New York. Unlike most other slaves of the time, Hammon was allowed to attend school and published his first poem on Christmas of 1760. He was a devout Christian and most of his works focused on religion and spirituality, skirting around the issue of slavery. In the newly uncovered work, Hammon defines slavery as a sin for the first time.
MAY: “Dark and dismal was the day / When slavery began / All humble thoughts were put away / Then slaves were made by man.”
It’s that line that intrigues Julie McCown, because she says, if you look closely at the poem, which is the only handwritten work by Hammon, you can see the evolution of his thoughts.
MCCOWN: “He had originally written ‘Then slaves were made TO man’, and he crossed out the ‘to’ and wrote the ‘by’. I just find that small change in prepositions to be very telling because, you know, it’s moving from this idea that slavery was just a fact of life to saying that slaves were made by man, this a man-made evil; it’s not something we Humans have no control over.”
McCown believes there are other works by Hammon still out there, waiting to be set free.
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