My senior year of college, one of my favorite professors was on sabbatical. I had an idea for an independent study that I wanted to do with him, but I did not want to commit the impertinence of asking. His spouse happened to be a librarian at the college, so I asked her if she thought it would be ok to ask. The next day I got a note from the professor in my mailbox that simply read, “What is the topic?”
What I had in mind — what in fact I could not get off of my mind — was an idea that was popular around the American Revolution and the early days of our Republic. It held that small farmers who owned their land would form the backbone of our political, social, and economic lives. This “agrarian ideal” was championed with particular eloquence by Thomas Jefferson, a person whose life and writings had captured my imagination. This being the early ’90s, neither scholarship nor DNA technology had quite matured to the point of revealing Jefferson’s specific and troubling relationship with the people he enslaved. I had not matured to the point of scrutinizing how enslaving another person might disqualify one as an authority on anything related to freedom.
It’s a good thing that I did not encounter Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States for another 20 years or so. In the intervening time, I not only learned more of the truth about Thomas Jefferson, I also heard the voices of the Black Lives Matter movement and read the work of scholars like Isabel Wilkerson. In short, I came to see much more clearly that slavery was not just bad; it was terrible. The intense dehumanization of some people by other people that was integral to slavery as it was practiced here resulted in economic, physical, mental, and emotional degradation of the enslaved and the spiritual degradation of the enslaver.1 All of which is to say that it took me a long time to get ready to hear what Zinn has to say.
Towards the end of the book, Zinn relates the story of the Attica Prison Riot which took place in a New York correctional facility in 1971. After suffering years of physical abuse, inadequate medical care, severe limitations on visitations and communication, denial of access to books or religious practices, substandard food, and a host of other dehumanizing treatments, the men incarcerated in Attica petitioned the state board of corrections and the governor, Nelson Rockefeller, for relief. They got no response. After yet another incident of violence from the guards, all of whom were white, toward the prisoners, 65% of whom were Black or Puerto Rican, a revolt broke out during which 42 guards and other employees were taken hostage.
While he initially seemed to be willing to negotiate with the prisoners, Rockefeller eventually ordered armed officers to storm the prison. 10 correctional officers and civilian employees and 29 incarcerated people were killed by the gunfire of those who stormed the building. The Governor immediately blamed these deaths on the inmates, but medical examiners later documented that all had died from gunshots. Howard Zinn points out that, despite his reputation as a social liberal and fiscal conservative, Rockefeller was willing to sacrifice the lives of the guards in order to preserve his sense of social order. Zinn asserts that it is actually false to separate fiscal and social conservatism because the acquisition and accumulation of wealth depends to a large extent on the depredation of others, and their natural reaction to being deprived of what they are due has to be suppressed by social means.
The agrarian ideal, in Howard Zinn’s view, is an elaborate way to recruit less affluent members of the privileged caste to have a stake in preserving the status quo against the caste that would seek to regain what they have been deprived of. It is a way, in other words, to get the middle class to act as prison guards for the wealthy. The racial dimension of wealth inequality in the United States makes it more immediately obvious who is to do the guarding and who must be guarded against. Nelson Rockefeller’s actions at Attica make clear that the richest folks are willing to sacrifice their hired help when the status quo is truly threatened.
I’m not crazy about the idea that my imagined existence as a yeoman famer turns out to be nothing more than three prison guards in a trench coat. I’m even less enthused by the realization that Nelson Rockefeller doesn’t give a damn about me.2 But what is a prison guard to do? To ignore the demands of the keepers of the status quo is to risk one’s livelihood and maybe even one’s life. On the other hand, what can one expect from people who have been imprisoned by violent means except retribution in kind?
This, Willie James Jennings suggests, is the exact dilemma of the prison guard in Acts 16:27.3 He has been tasked with guarding Paul, Silas, and their companions, all of whom have been accused of “advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” What Paul had, in fact, done is to drive a spirit of divination out of an enslaved girl. The problem was that she made money for her owners, and Paul’s actions had produced a marked decrease in shareholder value.4 As a result, the offenders are put into the maximum security part of the prison.
Which might never have brought our attention to the jailer had not an Act of God (in the form of an earthquake) flung open the doors and loosed all the chains. Seeing this, the jailer prepared to kill himself because, Jennings suggests, he fears the wrath of both his superiors and the prisoners. The surprise is that Paul and his companions have not gone anywhere, and they don’t want the jailer to harm himself in any way. Upon further investigation, the jailer learns that his anxiety, at least in regards to the revenge of the captives, was of his own making. Can it be that ours is too?
It makes sense to assume that people who are treated unjustly will be angry. I get angry when I perceive that I have been treated unfairly. I want the situation to be made right and to be made whole, but I do not really want to harm the person I see as the perpetrator. Still, we assume that the people we have injured will want vengeance. It’s truly a devil’s bargain that we perpetuate harm because we fear that we will be harmed if we stop our behavior. The evidence, at least in the scripture passage, doesn’t support that conclusion. Paul and Silas were singing in prison, not rioting. That doesn’t mean they were happy, but it does give an indication that their souls were intact.
And they had the power to restore the soul of the jailer. Their power lay in their mercy toward him. How long will we wait before we hear the voices of the prisoners crying “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here”? When will we be willing to shine a light into the dark places to which we have relegated those we fear? It is our shame, not their anger, which keeps all of us in darkness. The bravest thing that the prison guard can say is, “What must I do to be saved?” It was not too late for him, and it is not too late for us to live in the light, to bind up the wounds, and to share our tables in the expectation that they will be filled and filled again.
- I don’t mean to romanticize the spirituality of enslaved people or their descendants (which happens all the time) nor diminish the significance of the injustice perpetrated by enslavers or their descendants by limiting the self-inflicted damage to our souls. From my point of view, no wound could be more primary than a spiritual one, rendering economic and physical prosperity hollow and mental and emotion thriving illusory. While I do believe there is much more reparative work to do before descendants of enslaved people and enslavers can be reconciled in a way that is truly just, I hope that Lorraine Hansburry was right to say that “when you’re young, gifted and Black, your soul’s intact.” ↩︎
- Or maybe he does at this point, given that he has joined the great cloud of witnesses who cheer us in the race. ↩︎
- Jennings, Willie James. Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017. pg. 164 ↩︎
- Innumerable modern business decisions are made in the name of shareholder value. That layoffs produce increased stock valuations is a common justification for depriving people of the opportunity to make a living, even when laying them off is bad for operations. Consider how a layoff of 11,000 employees by the Meta Corporation in 2013 was followed by a 20% increase in its stock price. ↩︎