There’s no hiding place down here,
There’s no hiding place down here,
Oh I ran to the rock to hide my face
The rock cried out, “No hiding place”
No hiding place down there.
As a Kiwi girl in the 1960s, I remember singing along to this African-American spiritual at school and now here I was singing it again in a small church in Northland. Spirituals had catchy tunes and rhythms, in contrast to our rather turgid hymns. They also had “an edge”; the song seemed to be a warning that a surveillance system was in place and a vengeful Almighty Above could see all the wicked things I did. Indeed, the song is said to have been based on a verse from Revelations that tells of the futility of human attempts to hide from the wrath of God in mountains and rocks.
But let’s jump back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when such work songs sung on the plantations of the United States reflected a profound and horrific reality, the reality of enslaved Africans in the face of utter voiceless despair that meant access to stories of hope in the white man’s Bible became a source of spirituals.
People are familiar with stories of the Underground Railroad during the 1800s, which allowed black slaves in the Antebellum South to escape to “free” states in the north.
The Underground Railroad was not primarily landbound as popular culture depicts it, as many more fugitives escaped slavery by sea. Enslaved labourers worked in the maritime industries along coastal waterways and estuaries, and it follows that some black sailors boarded whaling ships bound for New Zealand and ended up on our shores in the 1800s.
There’s Henry Washington Elkins, assumed to be a slave from Maryland, who got on a whaling boat, came ashore in Wellington and owned one of the first hotels on the Kāpiti Coast. He married in 1864 and moved to Moutoa, near Foxton, where he ran two pubs. He and his Pākehā wife had two daughters, one of whom had 14 children. Elkins’ great-great-grandson Murray Walden had known nothing of “Black Henry”, because of a family reluctance to admit to “dark blood”.
The link between black sailors and whaling ships is what led to me singing No Hiding Place Down There in the exquisite, tiny St Andrew’s Church in Mangōnui, in an event organised by the Butler Point Whaling Museum.
Leading it was Vienna Carroll, a black singer, storyteller and playwright from Harlem, New York. Carroll, in a white T-shirt with the words “Black Lives Matter” in large print, tells us black people are at the centre of their freedom stories and spirituals are songs of self-emancipation and personal comfort. Though history books tell of white Quakers who helped the enslaved escape, black people helped others reach free states via the Underground Railroad.
While on holiday in Mangōnui in 2018, Carroll found a grave marker for a “slave from Virginia”. This led her to discover a very new freedom story: the self-emancipation of a man named Edmund Moody. He lived to the age of 24, a slave who escaped in 1862 and made his way to Rhode Island, where he boarded a whaling boat. He worked as a whaler for two years, was given shore leave of £2.50 and jumped ship on June 5, 1864. But freedom was shortlived. He died just a few months later, drowned with two others in the beautiful Mangōnui Harbour.
Flowers celebrating his life were laid on the spot where he is buried, on the hill overlooking the harbour. You could say he found a hiding place, a place of freedom, under a gravestone that bears his name.
Kaye Cederman is a writer and psychotherapist living in Hihi, across the bay from Mangōnui.
