Bury Me in a Free Land
Make me a grave where’er you will,
In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth’s humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.
I could not rest if around my grave
I heard the steps of a trembling slave;
His shadow above my silent tomb
Would make it a place of fearful gloom.
I could not rest if I heard the tread
Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,
And the mother’s shriek of wild despair
Rise like a curse on the trembling air.
I could not sleep if I saw the lash
Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,
And I saw her babes torn from her breast,
Like trembling doves from their parent nest.
I’d shudder and start if I heard the bay
Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,
And I heard the captive plead in vain
As they bound afresh his galling chain.
If I saw young girls from their mother’s arms
Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,
My eye would flash with a mournful flame,
My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.
I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might
Can rob no man of his dearest right;
My rest shall be calm in any grave
Where none can call his brother a slave.
I ask no monument, proud and high,
To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;
All that my yearning spirit craves,
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.
****
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper – abolitionist, orator, poet and novelist – was a free African American, born in Baltimore in 1825, who wrote about slavery from an informed personal perspective. The infamous death of a free man, resulting from his recapture and re-enslavement under a brutal new law intended to reduce black settlement in Maryland, was an important factor in her decision to leave her job as sewing teacher in Ohio and work for the anti-slavery cause full-time. I’m indebted to an essay by Donald Yacovone, Sacred Land Regained, for this and other information about Harper and her work.
Bury Me in a Free Land, first published in the Anti-Slavery Bugle on 20 November 1858, rings out timelessly, a declamatory work tooled with the hard directness of a folk ballad. Whether in refrain-like rhyme-sounds or individual words, Harper uses repetition to clever, but wonderfully natural-sounding effect. The “grave/slave (s)” rhymed couplet recurs at significant moments: although the grave in the first verse is the speaker’s own imaginary future grave, all the connections between slavery and death are invoked, and copper-fastened by the pairing.
When she picks up the rhyme from the end of the first stanza to begin the second, Harper shifts from plural to singular. And it’s as if, from the abstract mass of slaves, a single person emerges, made distinct and real by the terror of his or her “trembling”. That adjective recurs in the third stanza, where nature itself seems disturbed by the movement of the chain-gang. And, of course, it is not only terror that trembles. Rage does, too.
Harper is writing at a time when poets of a more literary persuasion freely indulge in the adjective as shorthand piety or decorative colouration. She doesn’t entirely avoid this kind of metric padding: “youthful charms” is a phrase that sounds rather dulled by use, at least to contemporary ears. Elsewhere, though, there are some arresting adjective-noun combinations. The word “galling” in “galling chain” is a brilliant choice, combining an echo of the Crucifixion narrative with its colloquial, metaphorical meaning, an allusion to the chain’s power of embittering and shaming those confined. The hellish colours in the sixth stanza mime and mock the roses and lilies of desire and flirtation when the blushing is induced in the face of a horrified and furious corpse. In another shockingly vivid image, the slaver’s lash drinks a woman’s blood, the babies are torn from her “like trembling doves from their parent nest”. Such metaphors are reconfigured by their context: we read them through a new glare of realism.
The underground thrum of anapaests is relentless. Every stanza creates a different sense of movement, primarily that of bodies being physically used, driven and violated, until the seventh, when there’s a fresh gathering of personal emotion, and a direct address to the audience. It’s a magnificent stanza, bringing back the engrained “slave” rhyme with renewed force: “I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might / Can rob no man of his dearest right / My rest shall be calm in any grave / Where none can call his brother a slave.” Finally, Harper returns to the theme of her own future grave, with a potent revision of the “exegi monumentum” motif.
Harper had direct experience of helping fugitive slaves, whose hopes were often set on Canada. According to Yacovone, her own first experience of “a free land” was when she gazed across Lake Ontario. “Tears sprang to my eyes and I wept,” she reported. “There, the slave becomes a man and a brother.”
Frances Harper is buried at Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, Pennsylvania.