A History of American Literature

196 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865

a morally responsible life. Davis went on to write many more fictions that pursue a

similarly reformist agenda. Waiting for the Verdict (1868), for instance, deals with the

needs of the newly emancipated slaves, while John Andross (1874) investigates political

corruption. None of her later work, however, had the impact or possesses the

imaginative power of her first short story, which made her reputation and marks a

turning point in American writing. In “Life in the Iron Mills” Davis’s hope, as her

narrator intimates, is to look “deeper into the heart of things” in a newly industrializing

America. And her triumph is that she manages to do just that.

Spirituals and folk songs

Davis was, of course, writing about oppression from a position of some privilege.

Among those many writers who spoke, or rather sang, from within their own

oppressed condition were those slaves who handed down spirituals from generation

to generation. First collected into a book by a black church leader in 1801, spirituals

incorporated the secular as well as the divine and were sung not just at times of

worship but throughout the day. They offered those who sang them the possibility of

restitution from a life of pain: the longing to “Lay dis body down” is a constant theme.

But they also offered release from the deathly definitions of their humanity forged by

the slaveholders, and the possibility of resistance to and release from their enslavement.

Many spirituals have call and response patterns, with lead singers setting out a line or

phrase and the group responding by repeating or playing variations on it. So, the

leader might call out, “Swing low, sweet chariot,” and the group singers would

respond, “Comin’ for to carry me home.” But not all do; and there are, in any event,

wide variations of pace and tone. Some spirituals are dirges, lamentations, like “City

Called Heaven,” which begins, “I am a poor pilgrim of sorrow. / I’m in this wide

world alone,” or “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?”:

Were you there, when they crucified my Lord?

Were you there, when they crucified my Lord?

Oh, sometimes, it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.

Were you there, when they crucified my Lord?

Other spirituals are more driving and rapt, like “God’s A-Gonna Trouble the Water,”

which repeats the title phrase seven times in five short stanzas and the phrase “Wade

in the water, children” no less than nine times. And some are jubilant, even ecstatic,

like “That Great Gittin’ Up Morning!,” a vision of Judgment Day that was perhaps

delivered as a ring shout, with the possessed worshippers moving their bodies in

time to its percussive rhythms.

Using such rhythms, repetitions, and imagery that anchor the mysteries of religion

in the mundane realities of slave life, many of these spirituals express the dream of

flying away, leaving the work and worries of the world behind. “I’ve got two wings

for to veil my face / I’ve got two wings for to fly away,” declares one. Some look to

Christ and to heaven for relief and ease. “Soon I will be done with the troubles of the

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