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Alice, a Leper, and Charles Darwin
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| 2/15/2009 |
In the year 1686, or thereabouts, a woman that history barely and only remembers as Alice, was born a slave to two slaves who arrived from Barbados on the first slave ship to dock in Philadelphia. She became known as Alice of Dunks Ferry, because her master moved her there—up the river some seven miles to Buck’s County--where she collected the tolls for the ferry road that crossed the Delaware River near Bristol. Alice lived to the year 1802, yes, 1802. She died at the age of 116 years old, reputedly.
With such tenure, Alice witnessed a century of revolution. As toll collector in this strategic spot, she watched presidents, armies, revolutionaries, congressmen, and the other players on the stage of the 18th century come and go. She remembered William Penn, and had even lit his pipe, she claimed. When the first historians, like John Watson and Isaiah Thomas, tried to reconstruct the early years of Philadelphia in the 1800’s, much information came from stories that people had heard from Alice, whom they met at the crossing.
Alice was the oral historian of the most significant century in American history, but today she is barely a footnote. She was the internet, Garrison Keillor, Twitter, blogs and texting all rolled into one. Alice could easily be forgotten; a few keep her fading memory alive. W.E.B. DuBois speaks of her in The Philadelphia Negro. Noted Philadelphia historian Gary Nash documents her importance in understanding how black slaves helped forge freedom in the 18th century, and she is page one of the encyclopedic reference book, Notable Black American Women.
Alice was a member, as much as a black slave could be, of Christ Church. She attended as a child, and probably was baptized here. One of her frequent stories, told after the present magnificent pile of brick was completed in the 1750’s, was that she remembered the first Christ Church building—a small wooden structure with a ceiling so low she could put her hands flat on the ceiling and walk the center aisle. Historians don’t know if she got this quite right. She might be remembering the cramped gallery she and other slaves had had to sit in the first church. She remembered, correctly, that there was a lone bell, hung out in the branch of a tree, that would call her to worship. The bell still exists.
Of the few stories of hers remembered, many involved Christ Church; she called this place her beloved church, and would visit when in Philadelphia. At the age of 95, she galloped on horseback to services here (and I might add, she wasn’t late). At 96, she lost her eyesight, and rowing by herself, she could still out fish her master out on the river. Like a biblical character, her eyesight miraculously returned, partially when she was past 100 years old.
Of all the memory that we keep, I think Christ Church has to keep her memory alive.
We tell a lot of history here. We are a living shrine to American freedom with seven signers of the Declaration of Independence and five signers of the Constitution buried in our hallowed ground. “No church played a more important role in the founding of our nation,” states historian David McCullough. For the founding mothers and fathers who gathered in Philadelphia during those fateful days, regardless of their faith or understanding of God, Christ Church was their church, helping impart the vision, faith and courage for their sacred cause.
But we can’t just tell the popular history, but also the history that collective memory wants to render invisible. That is why we tell Alice’s history, as scant as it is.
The Christian gospel, this good news that transforms our life and turns the world upside down, is a history of the marginal, the forgotten and the invisible. “Exhibit A” is the story of the leper we have before us in Mark 1:40ff this morning. A leper approaches Jesus; he has no name--the world revolves on the nameless. He dares Jesus to declare him clean. As always, don’t think of the leprosy as a specific disease in some modern way. Here, leprosy is a stigma. It is something projected onto you by the society that then makes it possible for the society to exclude you. We can fairly read leprosy as complexion, gender or sexual orientation. The story hints that this leper has already taken the official route to be restored to wholeness and returned to the religious assembly, but the priests cannot, or, more likely, will not declare him clean, probably because he doesn’t have the money.
The scripture says that Jesus is moved with pity, but just as an accurate rendering would be that Jesus was moved with anger--angered at a religious and economic system that excludes a human person for possessing a trait that cannot be changed. That trait declares him unclean. But Jesus says, “I do choose. Be made clean.”
And Jesus touches him--that’s the revolutionary act. By placing his hand on him, Jesus is saying, “If you are a leper, than I am a leper, too.” Most powerfully, what Jesus says, “If you are excluded, I will be excluded, too.”
And from the excluded, the slaves, the lost, the ones who live in the darkness found on the edge of town where Jesus lived, he built a kingdom not on power and might, but on the memory of leper that history would rather forget, but a leper whom we remember this morning.
So, I think we are to remember Alice, as we remember the leper who allows us to know that there is no “leprosy” the world can impose upon us that will separate us from the love of God and truth that we all stand worthy before God.
Our nation, reluctantly and hesitantly, but with some progress, is slowly working to repair the breach cleaved by slavery. The reality of that breach has a history, and the institutions that keep that history, like Christ Church, can no longer keep the secret that slavery really happened. If we use history to only celebrate the glory, but deny the violent ugliness of the past, we don’t serve the future. Simply put, it is time—no, it is past time—for Christ Church, and the institutions like us, to give a full and honest account of our involvement with slavery without being asked.
Last Thursday night, our public radio and television station, WHYY, hosted what they call a “member event” and invited Christ Church, as a part of WHYY’s Black History Month program, to offer our presentation, Sarah’s Story, which recounts the history of slavery in colonial Philadelphia through telling the several of the stories of slaves who are a part of Christ Church’s history. The story of Alice plays a prominent role in the drama. Some 150 people were there.
At the end, WHYY’s ubiquitous Ed Cunningham led the discussion, and he started with this observation: He had grown up in Philadelphia, and was educated in the schools here, but he never knew that there was any slavery in Philadelphia. He always believed that slavery was just in the south. When asked if others had that same experience, many said yes. That’s reason enough for us to remember Alice of Dunk’s ferry.
Last Thursday, being February 12, was also the 200th birthday of the two great emancipators, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. We know of Abraham Lincoln’s history with slavery, but few appreciate the abolitionist role that Charles Darwin played with the development of evolutionary theory. Documented powerfully in the new book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, two respected biographers of Charles Darwin. Darwin came from an abolitionist family, and while on his journey on the Beagle, witnessed the vicious injustice of slavery. Later, Darwin would write:
I thank God that I shall never again visit a slave-country… Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves… I was present when a kind-hearted man was on the point of separating forever the men, women, and little children of a large number of families who had long lived together… Those who look tenderly at the slave-owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter… And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty…
From a distance, Darwin watched the southern states in America solidify the practice of slavery on a scientific argument: that the slave descended from a lower, or lesser species of human. Because the slave was a lesser species, the argument went, he could not succeed at the same level of the European, who descended from the higher species. Therefore, slavery was not only necessary, it was humane. If there was an inhumane aspect, especially in the American south, then the practice of slavery needed to be improved, but not abolished.
Slavery may have been in the south, but the science that perpetuated the argument for the necessity of slavery was fueled in the north, much of it by an Episcopalian in Philadelphia, Dr. Samuel Morton, of the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Medical College. Darwin made it his life work to undermine the scientific props of slavery. He committed himself to the science that all human beings were of one species, descendant from one ancestral tree. With all of the religious fervor over Darwin’s theory, he proved a scientific Adam and Eve, common parents for us all. With that conclusion, the science of benign slavery collapsed.
I diverge, except to make the point that what Darwin proved with evolution, Jesus proved by laying hands on the leper--that we are all one people, each to the other, and not to be separated from each other by whatever name we give to leprosy at the moment--be it skin color, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, and the rest.
By remembering the slave Alice of Dunks Ferry, we remember not only the history of slavery in our midst some centuries ago, but that the Gospel is about Alice, as it is about the leper we remember today. When we remember her, we remember our own redemption in Christ Jesus our Lord. For there is something leprous in us all, I bet, and to so much we are enslaved from which we must be set free.
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