Life & Wisdom Quote by Jupiter Hammon

Heaven is doing a particular kind of political work here: not an escape hatch, but a courtroom with the lights turned all the way up. When Jupiter Hammon imagines arriving in Heaven and finding "nobody to reproach us for being black, or for being slaves", he’s naming the daily machinery of shame in 18th-century America - the way Blackness and bondage were treated not just as conditions, but as supposed moral failures. The line is devastating because it frames racism as accusation. To be "reproached" is to be scolded as if you deserve your station; Hammon exposes how slavery depended on a constant narrative of Black culpability.

As a poet and an enslaved Christian writer in colonial New York, Hammon had to speak in codes legible to white audiences who claimed religious authority. Heaven lets him leverage the dominant theology without directly threatening the social order in the language of revolt. The subtext is sharper than the surface: if Heaven contains no one who condemns Blackness or slavery, then the condemners are not merely cruel; they are un-Godly. He relocates judgment away from enslaved people and back onto the society that polices them.

The conditional phrasing - "If we should ever get" - carries its own ache. It acknowledges how precarious salvation felt in a world that treated enslaved lives as disposable. Hammon offers consolation, but it’s also an indictment disguised as faith: a reminder that the only place free of racial reproach is the one beyond the reach of American power.