I real’y do b’lieve widout a doubt,
Dat de church hab a mighty right to shout.
I tell you what I lak de bes’,
It is dem shoutin’ Mefodes’.
If the negro’s mother and sister and father and preacher and the others, as the songs put it, “died a shoutin’,” why he is “goin’ die shoutin’ too.”
Gwine hab happy meetin’,
Gwine shout in hebben,
Gwine shout an’ nebber tire,
O slap yo’ han’s chilluns,
O pat yo’ feets chilluns,
I feels de spirit movin’
O now I’m gittin’ happy.
Of true love and devotion to God one finds little definite and concrete expressions as compared with other themes. The negro is constantly affirming his love for “his Jesus” and offering his eternal allegiance in a general way. But in the average instance the testimony is subordinated to some special word or phrase which receives the greater part of the significance in the song. What does he mean when he asks: “Does yo’ love continue true?” or when he insists: “I wants to know, does you love yo’ Jesus?” The negroes are often heard to say that they want to do something “for the Lord”. In the same way they sing “I goin’ to weep all I can for my Lord, I goin’ pray all I can for my Lord, I goin’ do all I can for my Lord.” In each case the relation of the negro and his God are ideal and he conceives of his own deeds as being, not the practical every-day life, but as coming in the future when there will be nothing unpleasant about them. It was doubted if the negro’s ideas of God and Heaven and his relation to them were truly expressed in his songs. A series of experiments were made with negro children, wherein questions were answered by them at the time they were given, others being carried to their homes or teachers. Their ideas of hell and heaven, God and the angels are almost identical. Perhaps some of them were gained from the songs; some of them were certainly not; all seemed to agree with each other and with those of the race in a remarkable way.
Nature contributes something to the negro spirituals. Certain parts of nature are symbolic and serve to convey the picture of a vivid imagination as nothing else can do. The wonders of God and the terrors of the judgment must be seen in their relation and effect upon the forces of nature. Certain natural phenomena inspire awe and reverence; they add thus to the conception of his religious fear. Other references to nature convey, as they only could, pleasing features of life, hence of heaven and God. The negro refers to the “break o’ day”, the “settin’ o’ the sun”, the “cool o’ de evenin’” and each is very expressive. Morning and evening are common; he prays in the evening perhaps; in the morning he is going to heaven. The hillside, the mountain and mountain top, the valley, signify and typify the experiences of the Christian of the past and present; the heavenly breeze comes from the valley. The negro sees a paradise and a wilderness, a sunshine and a storm. But
Dere’s a tree in paradise,
Christians call de tree ob life,
and he faithfully believes “I specs to eat de fruit off’n dat tree”. The earth trembles and is jarred; the sky is “shook.” The river is “chilly an’ cold, wide an’ deep.” The “rock” is better than the miry clay and “nebber mind de sun—see how she run.” The stars, moon, and world fall, bleed, and burn. The thunder and the lightning are in the stormy cloud; Jesus may be, too. Satan is a snake in the grass and a hunting dog. Young lambs and “de sheep done know de road.” The summer, spring, flowers and the field are mentioned. The negro wishes he had wings like Noah’s dove. He is sometimes awed:
I looked toward dat northern pole,
I seed black clouds of fire roll.
With his vivid imagination the negro feels much of the thought expressed in the folk-song. Thus sin and the sinner are intimately connected with life and death, religion and repentance. How skillfully the songs express the folk-feeling may better be inferred in the further analysis of the following