Time & Perspective Quote by Jupiter Hammon

Hammon’s plea lands with the urgency of a man rationing minutes in a world designed to steal them. “Those of you who can read” is a gentle opening that doubles as a brutal social audit: literacy is scarce, and for an enslaved Black community it is also policed, sometimes criminalized. He’s speaking to a fragile, hard-won power. Reading isn’t framed as leisure or self-improvement; it’s a lifeline.

The repeated “beg” and “whenever you can get time” sketches the lived reality underneath the piety. Time here is not neutral. It belongs to someone else. When Hammon urges people to “spare some of your time from sleep,” he’s acknowledging the crushing economics of bondage and labor. The spiritual instruction carries the texture of exhaustion. He is not imagining a quiet desk and a lamp; he’s imagining stolen moments after work, eyes burning, a body asking for rest.

The intent is devotional, but the subtext is political in the most survivable way available to an enslaved poet: use the Bible as an instrument of interior sovereignty. “Learn what the mind and will of God is” quietly shifts authority away from masters, preachers, and plantation theology. If God’s will can be read, it can be interpreted; if it can be interpreted, it can be argued with. In an era when scripture was routinely weaponized to justify slavery, Hammon’s insistence on study reads like a countermeasure: not rebellion by slogan, but by literacy, patience, and the slow, radical claim to meaning.