Mary’s Slave Song: The Tensions and Turnarounds of Faithfully Reading Doulē in the Magnificat

The Shadow of Slavery in the United States

The refusal of many African Americans to accept the post-racial society myth becomes evident when one surveys the non-fiction books written since the election of President Obama that center African Americans’ socio-historical experience in the United States. Books across multiple disciplines were written with the same intent: to show that life in the U.S. is still circumscribed by the vestiges of slavery and the racism that was used to justify it.

In 2008, Harriet A. Washington released Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from the Colonial Time to the Present. Washington traces the current and consistent medical mistreatment of African Americans through pseudoscientific experimentation and social Darwinism that labeled people of African descent as biologically inferior.a#6a# Michelle Alexander’s seminal work, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness reminds us that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”a#7a# Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of American Universities addresses the racial inequities in higher education as author Craig Steven Wilder examines the leading American universities’ reliance on slavery for the funding of and menial labor within their institutions.a#8a# Mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neal followed the numbers to write the New York Times bestseller, The Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. She argues that algorithms appear to be unbiased and uncontestable; however, they are used to bolster racial inequalities.a#9a# In 2019, The Atlantic described Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Belknap, 2019) as “[a] deep accounting of how America got to a point where a median white family has 13 times more wealth than the median black family.”a#10a# Most recently, Isabel Wilkerson released Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, in which she argues that “race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.”a#11a# Indeed, Saidiya Hartman aptly describes contemporary the life in the United States: “I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in a future created by it.”a#12a#

While the titles mentioned above show the pervasiveness of slavery and its racist underpinnings, what has allowed the vestiges of slavery and slavery itself to flourish on American soil has been the religious sanctuary given it by Christianity. The Christian Bible, like the holy texts of Judaism and Islam, allows and even supports slavery. The result is that adherents of all three faiths have “read these texts through the lens of slavery,”a#13a# and “most religious leaders in the past considered slavery morally acceptable, and that belief colored their thinking on all aspects of social and personal interactions.”a#14a#

Slavery and Christianity in the United States

The United States justified its slave system by appealing to Scripture. For the sake of brevity, I will highlight two primary texts used in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. By appealing to Scripture, the proponents of chattel slavery sought to establish the practice as a God-given right for slave holders. Since they viewed slavery as the will of God, owning slaves was godly.

Referred to as the “curse of Ham,” Gen 9:25 served as the biblical justification for the enslavement of Africans. According to pro-slavery readings of Gen 9:20–27, Ham was cursed for seeing the nakedness of his drunk father, Noah. Proponents of slavery traced the origin of African people to Ham and argued that all Black people were cursed because of what Ham did. Thus, Black people were eternally sentenced to be “lowest of slaves” (Gen 9:25).

“Slaves obey your masters” (Eph 6:5; Col 3:22 ) was a favorite text of the White ministers sent to preach to enslaved Blacks. Nancy Ambrose, the grandmother of Howard Thurman, described her experience:

During the days of slavery, she said, the master’s minister would occasionally

hold services for the slaves. Old man McGhee was so mean that he would not let

a Negro minister preach to his slaves. Always the white minister used as his text something from Paul. At least three or four times a year he used a text: “Slaves, be obedient to them that are your master…, as unto Christ.” Then he would go on to show how it was God’s will that we were slaves and how, if we were good and

happy slaves, God would bless us.a#15a#

While many of us reading these passages today would find several reasons to invalidate a pro-slavery position, arguments against slavery based on the Bible have always been problematic. The primary obstacle is that within the biblical texts, slavery is an acceptable institution.

The deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery was the great liberation text of African Americans. Yet, the experience of Egyptian slavery did not prevent the Israelites from becoming slave owners themselves. In the Hebrew Bible, the treatment of slaves owned by Israelites is regulated, but the slaves are not emancipated. A prime example is the Decalogue, which prohibits the Israelites’ slaves from working on the Sabbath (Exod 20:10; Deut 5:14) and prohibits the Israelites from coveting one another’s slaves (Exod 20:17; Deut 5:21). Moreover, the Israelites’ deliverance is not paradigmatic for Scripture. There is no wholesale condemnation of slavery or call for universal emancipation.

Furthermore, the Bible records the possible freedom of only three slaves: Hagar, whose freedom was gained through expulsion (Gen 21:14); Joseph, who was sold to some Ishmaelites by his brothers (Gen 37: 28), then to Potiphar (Gen 37:36; 39:1); and possibly Onesimus (Philemon). In all three examples of (possible) manumission, liberation was achieved on an individual basis. Neither Hagar’s, Joseph’s, nor Onesimus’s freedom threatened the institution of slavery or garnered the freedom of their enslaved contemporaries.

Slaves are also primary characters in many of Jesus’s parables and sayings. Jesus mentions slaves over sixty times in the Gospels, and his parables depict slaves who are beaten, killed, and stoned (Matt 21:35). It is also clear that Jesus understood the level of control owners had over their slaves. When a centurion requests healing for his slave and believes Jesus can perform it without coming to his home, he uses the analogy of his authority over his slave as a way of acknowledging Jesus’s authority when it comes to healing (Luke 7:6–8). Jesus not only heals the slave, but he also commends the faith of the centurion expressed in the analogy of authority (Luke 7:9). The slave system that Jesus clearly knew and understood never came under scrutiny.

For the proponents of slavery, the ideology of slavery inscribed within the pages of the Bible became authoritative by virtue of its inclusion in the Bible. For abolitionists, the authority of Scripture made it difficult to find any solid purchase for wielding an anti-slavery argument from the Bible.a#16a# Sylvester Johnson puts it succinctly:

Because so few individuals ever conceived of challenging the Bible itself, religious debates over slavery typically concerned what the Bible meant and not the problem of human brutality, per se.a#17a#

The Human Brutality of Slavery

In his groundbreaking work, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Orlando Patterson examines slavery from the ancient to the modern world. Patterson concludes that slavery is a “special form of human parasitism.”a#18a# Parasitism in biological sciences is a relationship in which one organism benefits at the expense of another. Thus, what is beneficial to one is deleterious to the other. Patterson, therefore, argues that the same type of symbiosis occurs within human social relationships. Slavery is parasitic in that the slave owner benefits at the expense of the enslaved. Patterson’s work also explicates three “constituent elements” that make slavery a distinctive form of human domination.

The first element is the extremity of domination. The slave owner’s power is almost total, leaving the enslaved person virtually powerless.a#19a# The slave owner’s power is paired with coercion, usually in the form of violence.a#20a# The power combined with coercive violence is used to create and maintain one’s enslavement. Patterson asserts that the slave’s powerlessness is a substitute for death.a#21a# In other words, an enslaved person is forced to choose between death and slavery. This means that slavery, at best, is a “conditional commutation of death.”a#22a# The result of the enslaved person’s powerlessness is that they have no existence apart from the slave owner. Therefore, the enslaved person is actually a “social non-person.”a#23a#

The second essential element of slavery is what Patterson calls “natal alienation.”a#24a# The enslaved persons are no longer recognized as members of society; they do not belong to the “legitimate social order.”a#25a# Therefore, enslaved persons could not form any familial or social attachments that the greater society was bound to respect, protect, or even acknowledge. Thus, the enslaved were the “ultimate human tool[s]”a#26a# because their sole purpose was to serve the master.

Finally, slaves suffered from a “generalized dishonor.”a#27a# Their dishonor was the culmination of several factors. They were financially impoverished, owning nothing, not even themselves. They had no connection to society or power except through their owners.a#28a#

These constituent elements are clearly identifiable in the context of U.S. slavery. Indeed, the extremity of power and violent coercion to create and maintain slavery in the U.S. is well documented and included whippings, mutilation, rape, lynching, confinement, and the withholding of proper nutrition and medical care. The power and violent coercion were not directed at enslaved persons only but at the entire system. Opinions and actions perceived to be amenable to abolition could have life threatening consequences, even for White people. White and Black children were separated as they grew closer to adolescence in order to prevent any compassion or recognition of the slaves’ humanity that might interfere with the perpetuation of the slave system.

Enslaved persons in the U.S. also understood the trade-off between powerlessness and the preservation of one’s life. However, enslaved Blacks sometimes deemed death a more desirable choice than enslavement. This sentiment was articulated clearly in the lines of the Negro spiritual, Oh Freedom: “Before I’d be a slave, I’ll be buried in grave. And go home to my Lord and be free.”a#29a#

Natal alienation began when Black bodies were ripped from African soil. The destruction of enslaved Africans’ genealogies began with their removal from their families and tribes in Africa and then again on slave plantations. Moreover, African names and the speaking of African languages were forbidden. Indigenous African religions were demonized, and slave owners actively sought to replace African spirituality with a version of Christianity that endorsed slavery. Persons born under the yoke of slavery did not even know their birthdays, since the birth records of slaves were of no more use than the birth record of animals. Whereas slaves in the U.S. requested and upheld marriage vows and formed deep lasting familial bonds, society was under no obligation to acknowledge these bonds, nor did they respect them. When emancipation finally came, one of the first free acts of many newly freed slaves was to search for family that had been sold away.

The dishonor of slaves in the U.S. was generalized in the ways described by Patterson. However, slavery in the U.S. was also racialized. Therefore, the dishonored status of slaves was evidenced by the color of their skin. Black skin was equated with moral, biological, and intellectual inferiority. At the same time, enslaved Blacks also were believed to be endowed with extraordinary physical powers that made them more suited to hard labor, better able to endure physical pain, and hypersexuality. These qualities suited their particular role as “human tools.” In the minds of slave owners, it made them uniquely suitable for the grueling work of picking rice, tobacco, and cotton on plantations. It also made the rape of Black women excusable and acceptable, with the added benefit of supplying additional bodies to the owners’ workforce.

Faithfully Reading Doulos, Doulē

Given the history and enduring legacy of slavery in the U.S. in particular, and the predominance of slavery in the Bible, in general, it is not surprising that questions arise regarding the translation of the Greek words doulos/doulē. In many instances, translators have opted for “servant” rather than “slave.” The euphemizing of doulos/doulē most likely stems from an attempt on the translator’s part to render a less offensive reading or to disconnect the slavery in the Bible from its more contemporary manifestations.

Clarice J. Martin explores this translation quandary. Martin contests the more euphemistic translation of doulos/doulē as “servant” primarily because in its Greco Roman context, these words signified slaves.a#30a# Moreover, “servant” does not capture the reality of slavery and “minimizes the full psychosocial weight of the institution of slavery itself.’a#31a# Therefore, Martin concludes:

An etymologically faithful reading of doulos is preferred to the more euphemistic reading, even if the motive for the euphemistic reading is purportedly conciliatory.”a#32a#

I wish to push Martin’s conclusion further by stating that a faithful reading of doulos/doulē is preferred because it requires the reader, not just the translator, to wrestle with the tensions raised by the text. By circumventing the potential tensions of reading doulos/doulē as “servant,” we obscure the narrative turnabout that flips the slave language in the text on its head. Such is the case of Mary’s self-identification as doulē (slave) in Luke 1:38, 48.

African American Slave Songs

James Cone’s book, The Spirituals and the Blues, provides an excellent, concise history of interpretation of the slave songs. I will, therefore, utilize his insights to explicate three primary themes resident in the spirituals. Next, I will identify parallel themes in Mary’s Magnificat.

In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois penned what James Cone calls “the first significant interpretation of the slave spirituals.”a#33a# DuBois descriptively labelled the slave songs, “sorrow songs,” because they were the lyrical creation of unhappy, suffering people.a#34a# Yet, despite the horrors they endured under the yoke of slavery, Black slaves were able to infuse these songs with affirmations of life, hope, and justice. Within the lines of the spirituals, DuBois noted the juxtaposition of the hope filled themes and brutal reality of their lives. Cone writes:

DuBois was fascinated by the tension in the spirituals between hope and despair, joy and sorrow, death and life, and by the ability of black slaves to embrace such polarities in their music.a#35a#

It is apparent that enslaved Blacks were not only conscious of their mistreatment on earth, and also desired their plight as slaves to be remedied while on earth. According to John Lovell, the slave songs expressed Black slaves’ longing for freedom and justice that included the judgment of their “betrayers.”a#36a# Moreover, Lovell makes it clear that the hope for freedom and justice articulated by Black slaves was not otherworldly. Cone commends Lovell’s interpretation as the “proper context” for understanding the otherworldly components of the spirituals:a#37a#

The spirituals are the story of black people’s historical striving for earthly freedom,

rather than the otherworldly projections of hopeless Africans who forgot about their homeland.a#38a#

Not only did the slave songs hold the tension between the despairing depths of their experience as slaves and hope for its highest antithesis, the manifestation of the slave songs’ hope was grounded in an impending reversal of their circumstances. Until the hoped-for reversals turned about their enslavement, the spirituals were a tool by which enslaved blacks expressed “their determination to be in a society that [sought] to destroy their personhood.”a#39a# This disclosure was the interpretive insight of Howard Thurman, who was the first person to interpret the spirituals from a religious perspective.

The spirituals and liberative Black preaching emphasized the “somebodiness” of enslaved Black people.a#40a# They reaffirmed enslaved Blacks as part of God’s good creation, made in the image of God. Therefore, the spirituals were a part of the slave arsenal used to protect them from the relentless barrage of psychological, physical, and spiritual attacks that told enslaved Blacks that they were “nobodies.” To use Orlando Patterson’s nomenclature, the spirituals created by enslaved Blacks served to mitigate the dominant culture’s efforts to make them social non-persons.

Mary’s Magnificat as a Slave Song

Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder affirms Luke’s theology as “congruent with African American ‘God talk’” because both are born from a context of “suffering and oppression.”a#41a# Crowder also finds correlation between African American faith and the faith exemplified in Luke’s Gospel. Both expressions of faith are not limited to the spiritual health of the believer, but they encompass “social, political, and economic enhancement.”a#42a# Furthermore, she notes Luke’s use of “imagery reminiscent of the coded language of the spirituals and other slave songs.”a#43a# Given the similarities between Luke’s theological perspective and that of African Americans, it is not surprising that Mary’s song and the Negro spirituals bear resemblance to each other.

OPEN IN VIEWER

The Black Madonna of Czestochowa. Collection of Jasna Gora, Czestochowa. HIP / Art Resource, NY.

The Magnificat, although found on the lips of Mary, is believed to be a hymn that derives from 1 Samuel 2 (the Song of Hannah) and other passages that lift up the “poor” (Hebrew ‘ănāwîm, among other words) as favored by God. The “poor of the Lord” included those who were economically and socially poor, which would include widows, orphans, and foreigners.a#44a# Thus, Mary’s song and the spirituals of enslaved African Americans share a remarkably similar context of origin. Not only are the contexts of Mary’s song and slave songs similar, I would argue that by placing the Magnificat on the lips of Mary, who self-identifies as a doulē (Luke 1:38, 48), Luke has made the Magnificat a “slave song.” Moreover, Mary’s slave song shares three of the overarching themes I previously identified in Negro spirituals: tension between one’s current oppression and articulations of hope, the longing for freedom and justice in this life, and the affirmation of one’s personhood.

The Tensions in Mary’s Slave Language

In this section, I will highlight the tensions of reading Mary’s slave language in the Magnificat from the socio-historical context of U.S. slavery. The primary tension is Mary’s self-identification as “his slave” (Luke 1:48) with “him” being the God that she magnifies and rejoices in. It is also the God that she declares to be her savior (Luke 1:46–47). Mary’s self-designation as God’s slave evokes the myth of the happy slave. Images of Uncle Tom and mammy, the African-American stereotypes that were used to promote Black submissiveness, loyalty to White masters, and self-sacrificing service, shadow Mary, who rejoices in her enslavement. Like mammy and Uncle Tom, Mary is just happy to serve. Since her “owner” is God, her enslavement must be good. God as owner euphemizes the institution of slavery and suggests that good, even godly, slave owners exist.

Another tension arises when we consider the fact that Mary’s enslavement entails her body being used for God’s reproductive purposes. The Magnificat records the second time Mary self-identifies as a slave. The first instance occurs in Luke 1:38. Here Mary offers herself as a “slave of the Lord” in response to Gabriel’s announcement of Jesus’s birth.

Although Luke is careful to avoid any hint of sexual relations between God and Mary, Mary’s body will be used by God for God’s purposes. The history of African American women is replete with slave owners’ exerting sexual and reproductive control over Black female bodies. Whether it was for sexual gratification or to increase slave labor, Black female bodies were the possession of their owners in ways Black male bodies were not. Black male bodies could be sexually exploited, mutilated, and abused. However, Black male bodies could not bear the master’s offspring. Thus, Mary as God’s reproductive slave conjures a uniquely horrific African American female experience.

Furthermore, the son that Mary bears is “mixed.” Although it will take another 300 years to declare Jesus “fully human and fully divine,” it is clear from Luke’s account that Jesus’s parents are God and Mary (Luke 1:35). Gabriel tells Mary that the child will be called the “Son of God” (Luke 1:35). However, Jesus suffers the same hypodescent as biracial African American children. The society at large and the power systems assign Jesus to the parent of lower social stature. For all practical purposes, Jesus is by default “Mary’s boy” and will have to prove that he is his Father’s son.

Mary’s son will suffer the same fate as so many Black women’s sons: he will die a state-sanctioned death. Jesus’s death provides one of the most well-known parallels to African Americans’ history of slavery and lynching. However, the parallels have often been drawn between Jesus’s crucifixion and the lynching of African American men. The cross and the lynching tree mutually inform each other. As James Cone writes: “The cross helped me to deal with the brutal legacy of the lynching tree, and the lynching tree helped me to understand the tragic meaning of the cross.”a#47a#

Yet, Luke acknowledges the pain Mary will feel. Jesus’s execution will have maternal effects that only Luke records in his Gospel:

Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2:34–35, italics added).

Moreover, Luke is also the only Gospel that depicts the pain of women, who “were beating their breasts and wailing for him” (Luke 23:27) as Jesus made his way to the cross. Mary, then, reminds us of the pain and devastation of the African-American mother who bears and beholds the death of her child who is executed by the socio-political powers that dominate her and her son’s lives. She is powerless to protect him; and his Father, who has the power to stop it, does not step in.

Finally, Mary’s sexuality, like that of African American women, is defined by others and in ways that benefit the definers. While this similarity speaks to the church’s historical understanding of Mary’s virginity, I have included it here because the discussion about Mary’s sexuality has influenced many of our interpretations. Since the earliest church fathers, Mary was believed to be (and proclaimed to be) a virgin before and after the birth of Jesus. At the Fifth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople (553CE), the church declared Mary to be “ever virgin.”

The Catholic dogma that affirms Mary’s perpetual virginity maintains her status as “the Lord’s slave” in perpetuity. She is forever God’s woman. Although married to Joseph, Joseph’s conjugal rights are nullified by Mary’s enslavement to God. In this sense, God, like the owners of enslaved Blacks, did not have to respect the marriage vows between their slave and her partner. Moreover, Mary as “the Lord’s slave” forever defines her sexuality, leaving no room for her to become a sexually active adult female without marring her moral standing. Consequently, Mary epitomizes one end of the spectrum imposed upon female sexuality: the virgin. She is then juxtaposed to the other Mary (Magdalene), often depicted as the whore.

African American women’s sexuality has been defined using a similar spectrum. On the one side is the asexual, unattractive, overweight mammy. On the other end is the licentious, beguiling, hypersexual Jezebel. Both definitions have been imposed on African American women since slavery in efforts to either excuse the raping of Black women by White men or to assuage the fear and jealously of White women who used Black women as domestic workers in their homes. Dorothy Roberts argues that “slavery’s identification of black female sexuality with licentiousness and black female acceptability with asexuality led to silencing the subjective sexual experiences of black women.”a#48a# While the reasons are different, the slave experiences of both Mary and African-American women has led to the silencing of their expressions of their sexuality.

The Turnabouts in Mary’s Slave Language

Conclusion

Faithfully reading doulē as “slave” in Mary’s annunciation and Magnificat allows us to view the points of connection between Mary and enslaved Blacks. The tensions that arise from such a reading stem from the correlations between Mary’s slave language and the unique characteristics and legacies of Black female bondage. However, Mary also serves as a beacon of resistance. Although she is a slave linguistically, Luke positions her narratively as one who defies the deleterious elements that Orlando Patterson uses to define slavery.

Mary’s narrative depiction and use of slave language is a homeopathic practice. A homeopathic practice involves injecting a modified dose of the disease to cure the disease (e.g., vaccinations).a#52a# The modified dose “mimics the disease enough for the body to rally its defenses against it.”a#53a# In this case, Mary’s slave language is the modified dose of the disease of slavery. Mary’s narrative depiction rallies against it.

Finally, Mary as “slave” is the embodiment of an African American woman’s slave song. Our points of connections with her speak to our greatest pains as her song articulates our highest hopes. She sings of the liberation and justice for which we still long. She affirms her/our “somebodiness” in a world that seeks to strip away our power to define ourselves.

Mary, slave of the Lord, we call you sister. Mary, slave of the Lord, we call you mother. Asè.