Born Owned, Bought Free

“So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” — John 8:36 (ESV)

Amanda Berry was born in Maryland in 1837, and she was born owned. In the country of her birth a Black child could be bought and sold like a horse or a sack of grain, handed over as part of a bride’s dowry, worked for a whole lifetime and never paid a cent. That was the law, and law is a cold word for something that broke families apart on purpose. Amanda was too young to remember the worst of it. But she never forgot that her freedom had a price, and that someone paid it.

Her father, Samuel Berry, paid it. He belonged to a woman who let him earn money on the side, so he did the math on his own life and got to work. He finished his day’s labor for her, then made brooms and husk mats by candlelight to sell at market. In harvest season he worked her fields all day, walked three or four miles after dark to work other fields until one or two in the morning, slept an hour, and did it again. First he bought himself. Then he started buying his wife and children — thirteen children in all — because a man could only save so fast.

Money alone was not going to be enough, though. The family Amanda’s mother belonged to did not want to sell. What changed things was a death and a stubborn old woman’s prayers. Amanda’s grandmother had prayed for years that her grandchildren would be free, and she meant it — she used to slip into the bushes to, as they said, “tell Jesus” about it. Meanwhile a young mistress named Celie was converted at a camp meeting, to her family’s disgust, and then fell sick with typhoid fever. Dying, she gathered her family and asked one thing: that they let Samuel buy Amanda’s mother and the children. Three days running she asked it, until they promised. Amanda later said she had “been bought twice, and set free twice,” and figured that gave her a good right to shout.

Here is what you should not miss in that story. The evil in it was legal. Respectable, church-going people owned human beings and slept fine. One of the men in the area who hunted down runaways for the reward money was a class leader in his church. So do not assume that because something is normal, or lawful, or done by decent-seeming people, it is therefore right. Whole societies can agree on a lie and build courts and customs to protect it.

Amanda’s father did not wait for the country to come to its senses. He worked in the dark for years to buy back what should never have been for sale, and her grandmother prayed as if God actually intended to answer. You will meet injustice that is bigger than you — rules you cannot repeal, wrongs you cannot undo by yourself. That is exactly the situation the Berrys were in, and they did two things anyway: they told the truth about it, and they kept working and praying toward freedom instead of shrugging and calling it fate. Freedom that costs someone that much is worth taking seriously in your own life, too.

One thing to do: find out the real cost of something you have always just had. Ask a parent or grandparent what they, or people before them, gave up so your life could be what it is — the move, the job, the sacrifice, the prayers. Write down one thing you learn. You cannot honor a gift you never bothered to understand.