Bought Twice, Set Free Twice

If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. JOHN 8:36

A father’s nights. Amanda Berry was born at Long Green, in Baltimore County, Maryland, on the twenty-third of January, 1837, the eldest daughter of Samuel Berry and his wife Mariam, whose maiden name was Matthews. Both her parents were enslaved, on neighbouring farms. Trusted with his mistress’s business, her father was allowed to buy his own freedom, and he did it by working through the night after his day’s work was done — making brooms and husk mats to sell in Baltimore, and walking miles to labour in other men’s harvest fields until the small hours. Having paid for himself, he set out to buy his wife and children. The way opened, as the family always told it, through the deathbed plea of his wife’s young mistress, who had been converted at a Methodist camp meeting and asked her family to let Samuel have Mariam and the children. Amanda’s grandmother, a woman of great faith, had prayed for years for her grandchildren’s freedom. Amanda was too small to remember slavery, but she never forgot what her freedom had cost. “I have been bought twice, and set free twice,” she liked to say, “and so I feel I have a good right to shout.”

Pennsylvania. Maryland law threatened free Black people who stayed out of the state too long, and when her father overstayed a visit to his brother in the North, the family moved to a farm in Pennsylvania on the Baltimore and York turnpike. Her father read the Bible to the children every Sunday morning. Amanda taught herself to read by cutting large letters out of the newspapers and asking her mother to put them together into words. Her whole formal schooling, walking miles to a white school where the Black children were taught only when the others had finished, came to about three months. At thirteen she went into domestic service, and for most of the next thirty years she earned her bread as a cook, a servant and a washerwoman.

A girl at the back. As a young servant she went forward at a Methodist revival, drawn by a white girl who knelt with her arm around her and prayed. She joined the church, but the class leader would never lead her in turn until all the white members had spoken, and she was scolded at home for coming back late. In the end she had to choose between her class and her place, and she gave up the class. For a time she drifted, and for a season a book of infidel arguments took hold of her.

Marriage and the cellar. In September 1854 she married Calvin Devine. He could talk sensibly about religion, but he drank. They had two children; the first died, and the second, her daughter Mazie, lived to grow up. In 1855 she fell so ill that the doctors gave her up, and in what she described as a vision she saw herself preaching at a great camp meeting. She recovered and resolved to be converted — but quietly, and in her own way. It took months of struggle, and the surrender of her pride, before, on the seventeenth of March, 1856, on her knees in a Quaker family’s cellar where she was in service, she told the Lord she would believe Him, and did. Her husband enlisted in the Civil War and never came home.

Frances. In 1862 she learned that her younger sister Frances, born free in Pennsylvania, had been sold into service in Maryland. Amanda borrowed fifty dollars from her employer, went down into Maryland alone in wartime, and bought her sister out for forty.

James Smith. In Philadelphia she married James Smith, a local preacher and ordained deacon in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She married him partly because he told her he would enter the travelling ministry and she longed to be a minister’s wife in the work. He never meant to. The marriage was unhappy. They moved to New York in 1865, and she took in washing. Three more children were born, and all three died in infancy. James Smith died in November 1869. By her early thirties she had buried two husbands, and four of her five children.

Green Street. For twelve years after her conversion she hungered for what the Methodists called holiness, and no one could tell her how to find it. Then in September 1868 she went, against a string of excuses, to hear John S. Inskip preach at the Green Street Methodist Episcopal Church, and there she received the blessing of entire sanctification, as she believed and as she told it for the rest of her life. That morning, she said, the fear of white people that had always held her went too.

Salem. Not long afterwards she became convinced that God was sending her out, and the word that came was Salem. She went to Salem, New Jersey, a stranger with almost no money, and a revival broke out that spread for miles around. Other towns followed. She was soon in demand at the great holiness camp meetings — Oakington, Sing Sing, Ocean Grove, Knoxville — singing and speaking to crowds of white and Black hearers in her plain Quaker-style dress and poke bonnet. She had no ordination, and wanted none. She had received her ordination, she said, from the One who chose her.

Across the water. In 1878, after a long struggle with her fear of the sea, she sailed alone for England. What was meant as a short visit lasted years. She spoke at the Keswick Convention and at conferences and missions across England and Scotland. In 1879 she went on to India, where she worked for the better part of two years, much of it in Calcutta alongside James Thoburn, who later became a Methodist missionary bishop. In January 1882 she landed at Monrovia, and for about eight years she laboured in Liberia and along the West African coast, often sick with fever, preaching, leading revivals, organising temperance bands, and caring for African children, among them a small boy called Bob, whom she took as her own.

Harvey and Sebring. She came back to America, by way of England, around 1890, worn out in body. Friends urged her to write her story, and in 1893 An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist was published. She settled near Chicago, and in 1899, at Harvey, Illinois, she opened an orphanage and industrial home for Black children, which she carried for years through chronic shortage of money and much trouble. In 1912 she retired to Sebring, Florida, where a friend provided a house. She died there on the twenty-fourth of February, 1915, aged seventy-eight.

Her book ends not with herself but with a hope for younger women: that some who had better opportunities than she ever had would take up the standard when she fell, bearing on it the words, Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord.

The LORD hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad. PSALM 126:3

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Her father worked through the night to buy her freedom. Spend some time this week thanking God, specifically, for what your freedom in Christ cost.

2. She was turned away from class because of her colour and drifted for years. Is there someone at the edge of your church who is quietly being left last? Go and sit with them.

3. She married on a promise that looked like the Lord’s will and was not. Before your next large decision, ask what you would do if the attractive reasons were taken away.

4. She had three months of schooling and taught a bishop. What is the one thing you are waiting to be qualified for before you obey?

5. Read the first chapter of her Autobiography in the Ochorus library, on her birth and her family’s deliverance.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You bought me with a price far greater than any father’s labour, and You have set me free indeed.

Forgive me for how lightly I hold what cost You so much, and teach me to shout, as she did, for my freedom.

You were with her in the kitchen, the cellar and the graveyard, and on the ship and the mission field. Be with me where I am.

And when my course is done, let it be seen that it was Your doing, and not mine. Amen.