John Jasper: The unmatched Negro philosopher and preacher

by William E. Hatcher

The attraction on the inside was out of gear and didn’t draw. My young companion, who was vastly my superior as to the Jasper situation, informed me with marked conviction that the thing for us to do, and to do at once and with a rush, was to go back to the house, swallow our dinner, and get back with the utmost speed. We did not get away, however, before we noted that all avenues in the vicinity of the church seemed to be filling. Some were coming and going; some were knotted into groups looking very solemn and apparently awestruck, and some were crowding in like late comers at a circus; but whenever you caught a word it had to do with Jasper. As we walked away, the son of my landlady, full of the fidgets and outraged by my slow motion remarked sagely: “Ain’t he got ’em?” I had to admit it; he had ’em,—by a grip tighter than if he had ’em by the nape of the neck. Evidently enough, he had them, and in a bunch as big as the town.

But I didn’t know it fully then. Being untutored in Jasper’s holding power, I was fresh enough to suppose that all that buzzing, swarming gang of negroes would scatter away to their frugal Sunday meal, and that the alleys and streets would empty into their usual vacancy, though the boy’s mien of hurry and eagerness was warning me to the contrary. He mentioned several times that from what other boys had told him we must go very early, and in order to gratify him we got out of the boarding-house at a quarter after one, and we needed only fifteen minutes of quiet walking to get a front seat.

Shades of the Pharaohs and shadows of the Pyramids! As we headed towards the seat of planetary conflict the streets looked like black rivers. Great lines of blacks, relieved here and there by companies of whites, thronged the sidewalks. Were Hannibal’s Carthagenian legions being turned loose in Richmond? Or had some mighty earthquake ripped open the foundations of Richmond, and were the people, caked with the soot, fleeing for life? It was more tranquil than that, thank heaven! It was however the town, upheaved and agitated, striving fiercely for Sixth Mount Zion, to hear the supreme sensation of all his race,—as I now began to realize he was. Squares before we got to the church we collided with the returning tide. “No use of going,” they said,—“house already packed; streets full, men fighting and women fainting,” and a deal more of the same sort.

But these appalling things only urged me on. If there was to be a congestion or a catastrophe, it was just to my taste as well as to my profession to attend. Besides, I had in me a desperate purpose to get into that house, and I promised the boy that we’d sink or swim together. I understood it was perfectly scriptural to rip off the roof as the last resort. The occasion had jumped the common road, and it was folly to falter now before any obstacle. The fight through that mob has left me some marks to be noticed when I am dressed for my burial. My toes were tramped into jelly. At one time I was lifted by a rush, and one of my knees aches yet in bad weather as a consequence. Several times I thought the landlady’s boy was doomed to become an unrecognizable mangle. It began to sift into me that Jasper was more than a man, and nothing short of an entire situation and a public menace. My business was more and more to see him.

The church, when first seen, looked like a tall boat borne on the heads of thousands, and yet I pushed along. Now, right here, I have to drop my honesty and become a hypocrite. How I got into that house must not be told. There is a muscular, ginger-bread fellow who stays in the office down town, and he broke all rules and I know not how many bones, and, miraculous as it was, landed me and the boy into the pulpit with blood on the boy’s nose.

Now, excuse me from describing the music and the praying, though I would like to mention that the song that the old darkey in the Amen corner with the white nape and the quivering voice started up, and which it looked to me like all the people in the world were singing, rather jerked me out of myself and took me off on its waves, and when I got back I had to use my handkerchief in an unusual way.

Jasper made a prayer also, and the way he talked to the Lord about his own meanness and his ignorance, knocked out of me about half of my notion that he was a dribbling old egotist and numbskull. He caused cold chills to pass up my back by several surprising things which he said to the Lord in a most serious way, and I have to own that by the time he said “Amen,” I was a little prejudiced in his favour.

Further, allow me to say right here that I know positively that I never saw so many people in a house of that size at one time as was in the church that afternoon. Women sat in each other’s laps, the pulpit was piled up, and all the spaces chinked, packed, and doubled up. I ought to add that the look of eagerness, expectation, and attention was oppressive. No whispering, no looking around; only silence, except when Jasper started them. Then you felt the mastery and the subduing sovereignty of the man. I saw that the white people had been favoured in getting seats, and there were hordes of them. The legislators abounded, and there were preachers, lawyers, notable men, fashionable women, and not a few strangers in Richmond, all herding together and very serious. It wasn’t, I confess, what I expected. I looked for a circus, and had hooked a funeral,—no, not a funeral; it wasn’t dismal enough for that, but far more thoughtful and wakeful than a funeral can be.

I looked Jasper over with a critical eye, and before he began to preach I had his age down for sixty-two, but when he began to career over the pulpit I knocked off ten years. He had an unattractive bulge on his face around his cheekbone, but his head looked like an alpine cliff. His eye, I noted, was an all sufficient redeemer, and its flash and laugh would cover acres of ugliness. His whiskers were decidedly undistinguished, except in their cut, and I marked his blood as unmixed. He dressed in a manner best suited to prevent people from noticing how he dressed, and his tall form and alert action made him attractive in the pulpit.