Faith & Spirit Quote by Jupiter Hammon

A Black man calling himself a slave and still speaking in the language of privilege is the kind of rhetorical tightrope that only makes sense inside an 18th-century plantation world. Jupiter Hammon’s line performs deference while quietly establishing authority. He opens with “I suppose,” a modesty valve that softens what is actually a pointed claim: he has received “advantages and privileges” exceeding not only those of enslaved listeners but even “many white people.” In a society built to deny Black interiority, that’s a daring recalibration of who gets to speak as an “improved” person.

The apparent piety is doing double duty. “I desire to bless God” is orthodox Christian phrasing, but it also functions as protective cover: gratitude to Providence is safer than gratitude that would implicate enslavers directly. The final clause, “those who have given them to me,” is exquisitely ambivalent. Read one way, it’s the expected nod to benevolent masters and missionaries who allowed literacy, religious instruction, perhaps limited autonomy. Read another, it exposes how arbitrary and rationed those “privileges” are: gifts parceled out by people who simultaneously hold others in chains.

Context matters: Hammon, one of the earliest published African American poets, wrote within the constraints of a world where Black speech was surveilled. The intent isn’t to flatter power so much as to carve out moral leverage. By modeling gratitude and Christian restraint, he claims credibility with white audiences while speaking to enslaved people in a coded register: even within bondage, education and faith can be forms of agency, and the comparison to “many white people” quietly punctures the mythology of white superiority.