This was all very well for colonists to say, but they were forgetting the existence of an even greater evil in their midst. As Phillis Wheatley, a slave in Boston, put it in a letter to Samson Occam, an Indian minister raising funds for what would turn out to be Dartmouth College:
By the leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle [Love of Freedom] lives in us. God grant Deliverance in his own Way and Time, and get him honour upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree,—I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.22
The “free” in “Freemason” was a kind of labor not confined within a guild. But the concept of freedom was very much in fashion: in Kant, it was freedom from natural law; in Locke, it was freedom from inherited privilege; and in political self-justification of all sorts, it was freedom from tyranny and oppression. The French word for Freemason, franc-maçon, is a direct translation of the English, but rather than refer to liberty, it somehow brings up the Franks, the Germanic tribes that conquered France. It is no accident that the Barbarians who put an end to the Roman Empire should sound similar to what opposed the church of Rome, condemned by the Protestant Reformation as a return to idolatry.
Freemasonry was born at the same time as—and through the same forces as—the Enlightenment. It was the intellectuals’ answer to Catholicism, the religion of the unenlightened European masses. Freemasonry was anticlerical, even unbelieving, and in Catholic countries an alternative to the Church. Like good French revolutionaries, Masons believed in a Supreme Being and brotherly love. It was the Enlightenment idea of equality that provided the language of the Declaration of Independence and has been the bad conscience of institutions of inequality in the United States ever since. Freemasonry enshrined reason in place of God, but it satisfied the craving for the unexplainable by grounding itself in initiation rites and secrets.
At the time of the Revolutionary War, several blacks were initiated as Masons by an English lodge attached to a military regiment, but, after black men initially fought and died for independence from England, soldiers were eventually segregated into separate regiments by color. Rebuffed by the racism of white lodges, African Lodge #1, under the mastership of Prince Hall, applied to the most worshipful master of Brotherly Love Lodge #55,23 London, for a charter from the British Mother Lodge and in 1784 became African Lodge #459. England was thus both the opponent of the consent of the governed and the authority to which one turned for it.
Through African Lodge #459, there grew up the Prince Hall Lodges of the United States, the United Supreme Councils Northern Jurisdiction, and the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite.24 Even the name “Prince Hall” has come to mean “black mason.” Manumitted by William Hall, his owner, in 1770, the individual named Prince Hall (if he existed) was able to display his “free” status that made him eligible to become a Mason. Never had the “free” in “Freemason” had so much significance.
Although the ideology of Freemasonry was supposed to be color-blind, the realities were quite different. But whereas the claims of freedom were simultaneous with, and contradicted by, slavery, the segregated lodges grew in importance within their segregated communities. The pillars of those communities often belonged to the Brotherhood, and it was Masonic scruples that kept them exemplary. While Frederick Douglass and many others complained that Freemasonry had “swallow[ed] up the best energies of many of our best men, contenting them with the glittering follies of artificial display,”25 this apparent fondness for fancy dress and elaborate initiations, the signs of an institution of pure prestige, constituted perhaps the price of functioning as responsible members of the community.
Once one has granted that Egyptian culture is African, the door is open for everything else that belongs to African culture to saturate the text. When Zora Neale Hurston rewrites the story of Moses, his ability to converse with animals and his magic powers make him the consummate conjure-man. As Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, writes to an annoying cousin:
P.S. Yes, my son Moses is the finest hoodoo man in the world and my wife says that stopping you from eating somebody else’s groceries is his greatest piece of work. But she may be wrong.
Have you ever seen his sendings of snakes and lice?26
The religiously embarrassing presence in the Bible of God’s magic tricks has always called for some explanation. But Hurston revels in them and celebrates Moses’ “MIGHTY HAND.” And yet even she is not always sure what she wants Moses’ identity to be. When he kills the Egyptian overseer, he feels an unprecedented sympathy for the oppressed: it is not because of identification with the downtrodden that he kills their overseer; it is only after he performs this murder that he identifies with those who struggle under the lash. At times, Hurston makes him sound like a white liberal:
The [Hebrew] foreman approached Moses respectfully and shook his head sadly as he explained, “Some of them want to knock off early to hold a protest meeting, and the others agree with me that it just wouldn’t do. It would look bad to my over-boss that just as soon as a Hebrew got to be foreman, the men left work whenever they got ready to hold meetings.”
“Your foreman is right,” Moses agreed, speaking to the men. “This sort of thing is what I’m working for.”27
In spite of Hurston’s constant mention of the role of linguistic styles, no character can be identified with the consistency of his language.
In each of the retellings of the Moses story, quite different things are emphasized, but even in the biblical version there are imperfectly integrated or unexplained elements that cannot be easily made into a coherent story (When did Moses marry the Ethiopian princess? Why did Zipporah abruptly circumcise his sons?). What I hope to do in this book, then, is to acquaint readers with the truly bizarre aspects of even the versions of the Moses story they know well, and introduce them to some reimaginings they might not be aware of yet.
Because of Freud’s title, Moses has been seen as more mono-, more interested in oneness, than he in fact is. It is my hope to be able to account in this book both for the appeal of the mono- and for the ineradicable presence of the diverse in the story that purports to tell the origins of nationalism.
CHAPTER ONE
The Biblical Moses
And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.
Exodus 3:4
This chapter is devoted to reading the original story of Moses and noting the many odd things that come up in it. The story stretches over the Books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, but barely a tenth of that length is devoted to familiar plot elements: the baby in the bulrushes, the killing of the overseer, the burning bush, the liberation from Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, the rock that gives water, the march through the wilderness to reach the Promised Land, the tables of the law, the Golden Calf. Many chapters are not narrative at all but quote God giving to Moses additional laws, instructions about building the holy Tabernacle, and descriptions of what Levite priests should wear. A smaller number narrate episodes such as Korah’s rebellion or the encounter with Balak and Balaam. Why do we read the Bible so selectively? What is the function of all God’s instructions we tend to leave out? And what about episodes deemed inexplicable?
One of the most puzzling cruxes occurs on the way from Midian to Egypt, where Moses has been commanded by God to lead the Israelites to freedom. One night, God seeks to kill Moses, whereupon Zipporah, Moses’ Midianite wife, who has accompanied him, picks up a sharp rock, cuts off the foreskin of their son (who also accompanies them), throws the cut-off mass at his (whose?) feet, and declares,