Faith & Spirit Quote by Jupiter Hammon

A line like this lands today as pious absolutism, but in Jupiter Hammon's world it was also a survival strategy disguised as doctrine. Enslaved for most of his life, Hammon wrote from inside a regime that treated literacy as both dangerous and desirable: dangerous because reading could sharpen resistance, desirable because Christianity was one of the few sanctioned languages Black people were allowed to speak in public without immediate punishment. By insisting that reading is worthless without the Bible, Hammon narrows literacy to the one text slaveholding society publicly claimed to revere. It is a tactical move: defend the act of reading by yoking it to the masters' own moral brand.

The intent is devotional, but the subtext is permission. He isn't merely elevating scripture; he's making literacy legible as obedience, a kind of rhetorical safe conduct. "No matter whether you could read or not" sounds like resignation, yet it also smuggles in a demand: if reading is about salvation, then who gets to withhold it? The sentence stages a hierarchy of knowledge that looks conservative on the surface while quietly prying open a door.

Context matters because Hammon was among the first published Black poets in America, writing to audiences who often wanted Black faith more than Black freedom. The Bible becomes both cage and key: a text used to justify bondage, and the only widely tolerated platform from which an enslaved writer could argue for moral agency, inner life, and ultimately a claim to personhood.