The Pilgrim's Progress in African-American Literature
A Guest Post by Jack Heller: Reading and Writing toward Freedom
This week we have another guest essay by friend of The Priory, Jack Heller. Jack retired in 2023 after 21 years as an English professor at Huntington University in Huntington, Indiana. He specialized in English literature up to 1800, Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, and African American literature. He authored one book on the English dramatist Thomas Middleton, Penitent Brothellers, and a few articles on Shakespeare, including one on Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing and one on the sacraments in Julius Caesar (not online). Heller has also done an online video interview with Jessica Hooten Wilson about Ernest Gaines and his novel A Lesson before Dying. If you would like a copy of the Caesar essay or otherwise want to contact Heller, you may reach him at jack.heller62@gmail.com.
In literature, any allusion to another text is a transformation of that text. At the beginning of this series, Karen notes a number of texts that engage directly with Pilgrim’s Progress. In African American literature, we can find allusions to Pilgrim’s Progress in William and Ellen Craft’s slavery escape narrative Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom and in James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain.[1] The Crafts structure the story of their escape from slavery as a pilgrimage to freedom and salvation; writing later, Baldwin alludes to Pilgrim’s Progress to critique the Black Pentecostal theology of his upbringing.
In their escape narrative, the Crafts focus on how their escape itself exposes the racist and gendered assumptions of the South’s White slaveholding population. The motivation they give for escaping slavery is their love for each other; although they are faithfully monogamous in their relationship, Georgia law in the late 1840s gave them no right to marry each other, no right to their ownership of their own bodies, no right to an education, and no right to raise any children they could have in freedom and in a way they saw fit. Ellen Craft could pass for White because her father and master had claimed sexual ownership of her mother.
The Crafts’ plan for escaping slavery was complicated and ingenious: Because Ellen could pass for White, she could pretend to be William’s slave master/owner. However, because White women would not have traveled alone with their slaves, especially to the North, the Crafts disguised Ellen as a young, wealthy, but invalid White man, using the story that s/he was traveling to get medical treatment from an uncle. They wrapped a handkerchief around Ellen’s face to hide that she had never needed to shave. She wore a top hat to hide her hair and to enhance the ruse of their wealth. She wore a sling to give a reason not to sign a name, since at the time, neither of the Crafts could read or write. As it was the Christmas season in 1848, enslaved people could sometimes get passes to go visit a nearby relative for a day or two, so both William and Ellen got passes, which gave them a day or two to be gone without arousing suspicion. Finally, the Crafts planned to use money William saved from his side work in carpentry to buy tickets on trains, steamships, and coaches. The Crafts did not take the Underground Railroad from Macon, Georgia to Philadelphia; they took the train.[2]
The allusions in Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom to Pilgrim’s Progress begin as the Crafts embark on their journey:
We both saw the many mountainous difficulties that rose one after the other before our view, and know far too well what our sad fate would have been, were we caught and forced back into our slavish den. . . . [H]ad I [William] known them at that time, I would have repeated the following encouraging lines, which may not be out of place here—
“The hill, though high, I covet to ascend,
The difficulty will not me offend;
For I perceive the way to life lies here.” [34]
William’s allusions here are to Bunyan’s Hill of Difficulty, identifying their literal journey for freedom as a spiritual challenge.
Late in their journey, the Crafts are prevented from traveling on from Baltimore to Philadelphia because “William Johnson,” the man Ellen performed, could not prove “his” ownership of William Craft. Ellen exclaimed, “Good Heavens! William, is it possible that we are, after all, doomed to hopeless bondage?” I could say nothing, my heart was too full to speak, for at first I did not know what to do. However we knew it would never do to turn back to the “City of Destruction,” like Bunyan’s Mistrust and Timorous, because they saw lions in the narrow way after ascending the hill Difficulty; but press on like noble Christian and Hopeful, to the great city in which dwelt a few “shining ones.” [56]
At the time of their escape in 1848, the Crafts had not yet read Pilgrim’s Progress; they learned to read later while they lived for about a decade in Great Britain. In later writing Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, published in 1860, the Crafts narrate their journey using the framing of Pilgrim’s Progress, using the allegory to offer a Christian justification for their escape and to counter supposedly Christian arguments in support of their enslavement.
While much of the text of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is a narrative of the journey, the journey does not begin until almost halfway into the text. For the parts of the text that deal with the sufferings, injustices, and contradictions of slavery, the Crafts collaborated with the African American novelist William Wells Brown.[3] Brown probably added to the text a brief anecdote of a White Virginia woman, Margaret Douglass, who was tried and convicted for the “crime” of teaching Black people to read. Relevant to the references to Pilgrim’s Progress, the passage gives the prosecutor and the judge allegorical names, Victor Vagabond and Judge Scalawag. (Their actual names were Davis and Baker.) The Crafts do not give allegorical names to the people they encounter on their journey, but they treat those people satirically for being duped by their ruse. Several White men confide to “William Johnson” (the disguised Ellen) about how “he” should maintain his absolute control over “his slave,” never realizing that “his slave” is her beloved. The White characters in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom are representations of White perspectives rather than fully developed characters, just as Bunyan’s characters symbolize certain human traits or qualities.
The Crafts’ allusions to Pilgrim’s Progress end when they reach Philadelphia. Earlier in their text, Philadelphia might have seemed to be their Celestial City, “the great city in which dwelt a few ‘shining ones.’” However, upon their arrival in Philadelphia, William sees the city as the place of salvation:
The sight of those lights and that announcement [of Philadelphia] made me feel almost as happy as Bunyan’s Christian must have felt when he first caught sight of the cross. I, like him, felt that the straps that bound the heavy burden to my back began to pop, and the load to roll off. I also looked and looked again, for it appeared very wonderful to me how the mere sight of our first city of refuge should have all at once made my hitherto sad and heavy heart become so light and happy. As the train speeded on, I rejoiced and thanked God with all my heart and soul for his great kindness and tender mercy, in watching over us, and bringing us safely through. [62]
This switch of Philadelphia symbolizing a “Celestial City” to symbolizing, rather, the site of their salvation is apt because the Crafts are saved from slavery after they arrive in the city and are free to worship as they like.
Applying Pilgrim’s Progress to their journey, the Crafts challenge the social, legal, and religious limitations they faced from their antebellum society. Yet Pilgrim’s Progress itself can present its own problems that might be challenged. First, Bunyan does not present any way to work out how Christians should love their enemies. We see correction and firmness from Christian and Faithful, but it is hard to imagine that they love Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Talkative, and Mistrust. Second, Bunyan’s portrayal of the Flatterer treats his blackness as the evidence of his villainy. Across Bunyan’s works, not all villains are black, but all black characters are villains.[4] Third, as Bunyan writes his allegory as the pilgrim’s progress rather than a pilgrim’s progress, it is too definitive about the nature of the Christian life.
The twentieth-century African American novelist James Baldwin confronts all three problems with Pilgrim’s Progress itself with his first autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain.[5]
Go Tell It on the Mountain tells of fourteen-year-old John Grimes struggling with what he thinks is his destiny to become a preacher while his teachers are affirming that he has other talents. Early in the novel, John’s mother Elizabeth assigns him the chore of cleaning their apartment’s front room. It is an exercise of futility: he is supposed to sweep a carpet with a broom and dustpan, but the carpet is so dusty, the chore cannot be done. For readers of Pilgrim’s Progress, this should call to mind Christian’s second vision in the Interpreter’s house, when a man and a woman are supposed to sweep its parlor; the interpretation is that mere sweeping, Law, cannot get the parlor clean, but Grace, sprinkling the floor with water, gets it clean of the dust of sin. Earlier in Pilgrim’s Progress, at the beginning of Christian’s journey, he cries out, “What shall I do to be saved?” (11). John Grimes’s crisis is more existential: he thinks of the myth of Sisyphus (condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for all of eternity) and he cries out, “What shall I do? What shall I do?” (24).
After doing the best he can with the front room, John is released for his birthday to wander around Central Park and New York. He encounters a number of figures and persons that could remind a reader of Pilgrim’s Progress, such as the pair of lions that guard the New York Public Library and the “old white man with a white beard, who was walking very slowly and leaning on his cane” (28) coming down the hill in Central Park. In Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian’s parallel encounter is with Adam the First, the old sinful Adam of Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. In contrast to his stepfather Gabriel’s mistrust of all White people, John Grimes believes there are trustworthy White people, especially his teachers, and with his “Adam the First,” “It was as though he and the old man had between them a great secret” (28).
While John journeys through his Vanity Fair of New York, Baldwin uses flashbacks to show Gabriel’s spiritual journey. Gabriel has the conversion that parallels Christian’s in Pilgrim’s Progress. He envisions carrying a burden of his sin, ascending a hill atop of which is a tree (a stand-in for a cross), calling upon Christ’s mercy, and sensing the lifting away of his burden. Yet this conversion produces no discernible improvement in Gabriel’s character. John’s Aunt Florence, Gabriel’s sister, later tells Gabriel, “You’s the man who ought to be hoping the Bible’s all a lie—‘cause if that trumpet ever sounds, you going to spend eternity talking” (218). Baldwin’s Christian becomes Bunyan’s Talkative.
Bunyan concludes Pilgrim’s Progress by using the sacramental image of baptism as a symbolic death and resurrection in Christ when Christian crosses the river to the Celestial City. At the conclusion of Go Tell It on the Mountain, drawing from his Pentecostal heritage, Baldwin contextualizes John’s vision of crossing the river as similar to the baptism of the Holy Ghost, but what John becomes filled with is love. He resists the racialized and generalized hatred, including self-hatred, that his stepfather has demonstrated. In his “Down at the Cross” essay in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin asks, “What was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love towards others, no matter how they behaved toward me?” (40).
My first realization that Baldwin revises Pilgrim’s Progress occurred because in two different graduate school courses, I read Pilgrim’s Progress and Go Tell It on the Mountain about two weeks apart. I regard this as one of the defining moments in my reading experiences. I had been mildly interested in reading Black authors, but reading Baldwin taught me to see some things about Bunyan I might have otherwise missed. And I have kept going with reading Black authors; I had afterwards found the Crafts (whose story could make a great movie). I close with a book recommendation: The Reverend
is both a theologian and a literature scholar; his Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just (Brazos, 2022) has a fine chapter going deeper into Go Tell it on the Mountain and great insights into the works of Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. If you haven’t read these writers, I hope you will read along with Atcho’s book.
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Here is the schedule for Part 2 of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Let’s plan to start with installment 1 on June 24.
From the beginning to Of Grim the Giant and of his backing the Lions
From Of Grim the Giant and of his backing the Lions to Mathew and Mercie are Married
From Mathew and Mercie are Married to One Valiant-for-truth beset with Thieves
One Valiant-for-truth beset with Thieves to the end
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[1] Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is available in an inexpensive Dover edition paperback (which I am using), annotated in the Library of America edition of Slave Narratives, and online at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/585. It is also available at the University of North Carolina’s Documenting the American South website: https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/craft/craft.html. For references to Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time, I am using the page numbers of the Kindle versions of the Vintage Books editions. For Pilgrim’s Progress, I am using W. R.Owens’s edition published by Oxford.
[2] Writer Ilyon Woo has published a detailed historical account of the lives of William and Ellen Craft in Master Slave Husband Wife (Simon and Schuster 2023). Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom focuses primarily on their escape from Georgia; Woo has researched their entire lives, and the Crafts’ full story is worth knowing. I do think that Woo understates the importance of their faith to the Crafts’ lives.
[3] William Wells Brown’s novel is titled Clotel, or the President’s Daughter (1853). Within his novel, he gives a fictionalized account of the Crafts.
[4] For this claim, I am drawing on the research of Margaret Sönser Breen, “Race, Dissent, and Literary Imagination in John Bunyan and James Baldwin,” Bunyan Studies (2017) 21: 9-32.
[5] Breen finds Baldwin critiquing these problems in his long nonfiction The Fire Next Time. In that work, the problem is framed as asking how to live with/in the City of Destruction.
 | A guest post by
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Karen has said that she'd like to start writing a short series on literature that she can't recommend, by which I think she means literature that she has learned from or enjoyed, but that she knows that many of her followers might not appreciate. Well, here I go briefly.
I really enjoyed poet Kaveh Akbar's 2024 debut novel Martyr, and I mention it here because I kept being reminding of Baldwin, whose second novel, Giovanni's Room, I had recently read. (There's a theme here). Akbar is an American citizen with Iranian and Islamic heritage, and I think he ponders his relationship to Islam (riffing on what being a martyr would mean) in much the same way as I think Baldwin does with Christianity. His stand-in character (these novels seem always to be autobiographical) is also on a pilgrimage of sorts (though with no allusions to Bunyan's work). Why can't I recommend it? Well, I can, but a reader will find some crude references to sex and crude language, enough that would offend readers who would likely be more okay with Baldwin.
In this article, I have focused on the two texts that I think have the most use of Pilgrim's Progress. However, references and allusions to Pilgrim's Progress or Bunyan appear elsewhere in African and African American literature.
One is in James Gronniosaw's slave narrative which has one of those long 18th Century titles I never get right. He writes about learning to read and encountering Bunyan's The Holy War. There is some scholarly inquiry on whether it was really The Holy War or Grace Abounding that Gronniosaw was reading because he rejects Bunyan as being as wicked as he is and therefore not worth reading, and the research I read suggests the response is more appropriate to Grace Abounding.
Pilgrim's Progress gets one mention in James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Novel, but it is a significant mention. The narrator notes that he has a library, that Pilgrim's Progress is in it, and that he has therefore successfully (ironies are intended) passed for white. There's a lot more that could be discussed about Johnson himself, his changing politics from relatively conservative to more independent and activist, his point of view about the value and shortcomings of respectability, and his literary taste.
I have not read this yet, but the recently-deceased Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote a memoir about his education with the title of In the House of the Interpreter. From my reading about this memoir, I know that he refers directly to Bunyan and Pilgrim's Progress several times. On my tbr list.
I would welcome notices of other references and allusions to Bunyan and Pilgrim's Progress as you find them within African American, colonial, and post-colonial literature. I'll bet it's somewhere in the literature of India or other countries of South Asia.