From the days of slavery through the civil rights era, African Americans struggling for freedom from oppression have turned for inspiration to Moses, the biblical leader who guided the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to the promised land. The slaves were so fascinated by Moses that they often called the South “Egyptland,” the North “the promised land,” and antislavery leaders like Harriet Tubman “Moses”; also, slaves praised Moses’ heroic deeds in sermons, folktales, and spirituals (such as “Go Down Moses,” “Oh, Mary Don't You Weep,” and “Little Moses”). Literary works by modern and contemporary African American authors reflect the enduring importance of Moses to the African American community. Some works, such as Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), straightforwardly retell and reinterpret the biblical account of Moses for twentieth-century African Americans. Other works, writes H. Nigel Thomas, employ Moses as a character type: according to Thomas, such works as Paul Laurence Dunbar's “The Strength of Gideon” (1900), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), and William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer (1959), present characters who attempt to help their fellow African Americans escape oppression as their prototype Moses had helped his people. Thomas also identifies a few works, like Toni Morrison's Sula (1973) and Leon Forrest's The Bloodworth Orphans (1977), that present an ironic or satiric interpretation of the Moses character type. In literary works like Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) and Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966) that attempt to chronicle an individual's or a group's particular struggle for civil rights, fictional characters frequently discuss or refer to Moses, in part to provide an example of a people who have already successfully struggled for their civil rights. For similar reasons, twentieth-century African American civil rights leaders have frequently mentioned Moses in their speeches and writings.
Bibliography
- H. Nigel Thomas, From Folklore to Fiction, 1988.—Ted Olson
The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
