Life & Wisdom Quote by Jupiter Hammon

A line like this can read as meek moralizing until you remember who’s speaking: Jupiter Hammon, an enslaved Black poet writing in an 18th-century world where Black literacy itself was treated as suspect. The sentence is shaped like a sermon, but it’s also shaped like surveillance. Hammon isn’t just offering advice; he’s negotiating conditions of survival in a system built to interpret any Black misstep as proof of inherent vice.

The surface intent is plain: don’t steal, don’t be “unfaithful” in the enslaver’s business. Yet the phrasing tilts toward an audience beyond the enslaved. “We cannot certainly, have any excuse” reads like preemptive testimony, a rhetorical alibi delivered in advance. Hammon adopts the language of Christian duty and property rights because that’s the dialect power understands. He’s translating Black humanity into terms white readers might grudgingly recognize: trustworthiness, conscience, self-government.

The subtext is double-edged. On one side, it’s respectability as armor: if you can’t be granted freedom, at least deny the master class its favorite justification for brutality. On the other, it exposes the obscene logic of “masters” who claim moral authority while committing the larger theft: ownership of people. Hammon’s careful “without their leave” is especially telling. It acknowledges that even the smallest act of taking is criminalized for the enslaved, while the masters’ taking is legalized by custom.

Context matters: early Black American writing often had to pass through white gatekeepers. Hammon’s restraint isn’t capitulation so much as strategy, a coded insistence that Black ethics exist even when Black rights do not.