Life & Wisdom Quote by Jupiter Hammon

A warning against “profaneness” sounds mild until you place it in Jupiter Hammon’s world: an enslaved Black poet, publishing devotional verse in colonial America, speaking in the language his captors recognized as moral authority. The line is less about policing swear words than about staking out survival through rhetorical restraint. “The next thing I would mention” has the calm, almost pastoral cadence of a sermon, but it also signals calculation: Hammon is arranging his counsel in safe, incremental steps, choosing a vice that white Christian readers already agreed was “forbidden by God.”

That appeal to shared rules is the subtext’s engine. “This you know” is a pointed phrase. It presumes common knowledge and common accountability, quietly refusing the plantation’s usual moral asymmetry, where enslaved people were lectured while enslavers excused themselves. Hammon’s move is strategic: he claims the Bible as a public constitution that binds everyone, not just the powerless. In a society that weaponized Christianity to demand obedience, he flips the script by using Christian prohibitions as a mirror.

There’s also a politics of respectability here, centuries before the term. Hammon is building an argument that spiritual discipline can’t be separated from social perception. Profaneness becomes a proxy for “unruliness,” the quality the dominant culture feared and punished. By cautioning against it, he’s not endorsing oppression so much as coaching his community on how to avoid giving authorities pretexts.

The genius is how the sentence operates on two channels at once: devotionally sincere and socially shrewd, a moral warning that doubles as a guide to navigating life under surveillance.