he was never to enter:
And to shut up this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deuteronomy 30 [not the King James version], “Beloved, there is now set before us life and good, death and evil, in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep His commandments and His ordinance and His laws, and the articles of our covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it.”15
As the doyen of Puritan studies in early America, Perry Miller, writes, “ ‘God sifted a whole nation to bring choice grain into the wilderness,’ said the Puritan historian.”16 But the Exodus story in fact stands behind a wide variety of pronouncements in the New World: Thomas Morton, an antiPuritan, who was indeed punished by the Puritans for “bacchanalias” and corruption, could still call his book about America The New English Canaan.17 And later Mary Antin called her book about immigration The Promised Land.18
But nothing about claiming that land was held to be easy. As a preacher put it in New Haven in 1777, “How soon does our faith fail us, and we begin to murmur against Moses and Aaron and wish ourselves back again in Egypt.”19 Yet often the wish was secretly to be delivered from history: from divine guidance to Messianism is but a short step, and Canaan begins to look a lot like Eden.
To say one has God on one’s side can justify almost anything; it is an eminently American claim to make. As James Dana put it in a sermon of 1779, “the manifest interposition of the Almighty in humbling tyrants for their sakes” is used by all sides to justify what they are doing.20 In the fight for American independence from Great Britain, it was all too easy to see Pharaoh in the English crown, Moses in the colonies; tyranny versus freedom. Indeed, the American Declaration of Independence owes a great deal to this underlying myth: “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”21
This was all very well for colonists to say, but they were forgetting the existence of an even greater evil in their midst. As Phillis Wheatley, a slave in Boston, put it in a letter to Samson Occam, an Indian minister raising funds for what would turn out to be Dartmouth College:
By the leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle [Love of Freedom] lives in us. God grant Deliverance in his own Way and Time, and get him honour upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree,—I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.22
The “free” in “Freemason” was a kind of labor not confined within a guild. But the concept of freedom was very much in fashion: in Kant, it was freedom from natural law; in Locke, it was freedom from inherited privilege; and in political self-justification of all sorts, it was freedom from tyranny and oppression. The French word for Freemason, franc-maçon, is a direct translation of the English, but rather than refer to liberty, it somehow brings up the Franks, the Germanic tribes that conquered France. It is no accident that the Barbarians who put an end to the Roman Empire should sound similar to what opposed the church of Rome, condemned by the Protestant Reformation as a return to idolatry.
Freemasonry was born at the same time as—and through the same forces as—the Enlightenment. It was the intellectuals’ answer to Catholicism, the religion of the unenlightened European masses. Freemasonry was anticlerical, even unbelieving, and in Catholic countries an alternative to the Church. Like good French revolutionaries, Masons believed in a Supreme Being and brotherly love. It was the Enlightenment idea of equality that provided the language of the Declaration of Independence and has been the bad conscience of institutions of inequality in the United States ever since. Freemasonry enshrined reason in place of God, but it satisfied the craving for the unexplainable by grounding itself in initiation rites and secrets.
At the time of the Revolutionary War, several blacks were initiated as Masons by an English lodge attached to a military regiment, but, after black men initially fought and died for independence from England, soldiers were eventually segregated into separate regiments by color. Rebuffed by the racism of white lodges, African Lodge #1, under the mastership of Prince Hall, applied to the most worshipful master of Brotherly Love Lodge #55,23 London, for a charter from the British Mother Lodge and in 1784 became African Lodge #459. England was thus both the opponent of the consent of the governed and the authority to which one turned for it.
Through African Lodge #459, there grew up the Prince Hall Lodges of the United States, the United Supreme Councils Northern Jurisdiction, and the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite.24 Even the name “Prince Hall” has come to mean “black mason.” Manumitted by William Hall, his owner, in 1770, the individual named Prince Hall (if he existed) was able to display his “free” status that made him eligible to become a Mason. Never had the “free” in “Freemason” had so much significance.
Although the ideology of Freemasonry was supposed to be color-blind, the realities were quite different. But whereas the claims of freedom were simultaneous with, and contradicted by, slavery, the segregated lodges grew in importance within their segregated communities. The pillars of those communities often belonged to the Brotherhood, and it was Masonic scruples that kept them exemplary. While Frederick Douglass and many others complained that Freemasonry had “swallow[ed] up the best energies of many of our best men, contenting them with the glittering follies of artificial display,”25 this apparent fondness for fancy dress and elaborate initiations, the signs of an institution of pure prestige, constituted perhaps the price of functioning as responsible members of the community.
Once one has granted that Egyptian culture is African, the door is open for everything else that belongs to African culture to saturate the text. When Zora Neale Hurston rewrites the story of Moses, his ability to converse with animals and his magic powers make him the consummate conjure-man. As Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, writes to an annoying cousin:
P.S. Yes, my son Moses is the finest hoodoo man in the world and my wife says that stopping you from eating somebody else’s groceries is his greatest piece of work. But she may be wrong.
Have you ever seen his sendings of snakes and lice?26
The religiously embarrassing presence in the Bible of God’s magic tricks has always called for some explanation. But Hurston revels in them and celebrates Moses’ “MIGHTY HAND.” And yet even she is not always sure what she wants Moses’ identity to be. When he kills the Egyptian overseer, he feels an unprecedented sympathy for the oppressed: it is not because of identification with the downtrodden that he kills their overseer; it is only after he performs this murder that he identifies with those who struggle under the lash. At times, Hurston makes him sound like a white liberal:
The [Hebrew] foreman approached Moses respectfully and shook his head sadly as he explained, “Some of them want to knock off early to hold a protest meeting, and the others agree with me that it just wouldn’t do. It would look bad to my over-boss that just as soon as a Hebrew got to be foreman, the men left work whenever they got ready to hold meetings.”
“Your foreman is right,” Moses agreed, speaking to the men. “This sort of thing is what I’m working for.”27
In spite of Hurston’s constant mention of the role of linguistic styles, no character can be identified with the consistency of his language.
In each of the retellings
