(image: Harriet Jacobs; Charlotte Forten Grimké; Francis J. Grimké)
After graduating from Princeton Seminary in 1878, Francis Grimké began his first run as pastor of Fifteenth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. While in D.C., Francis and his wife Charlotte Forten Grimké renewed their friendship with Harriet Jacobs, the famous author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). In 1862, Jacobs had recruited Charlotte to travel to St. Helena’s Island in Beaufort, South Carolina to help newly liberated enslaved people. When Jacobs died in 1897, Francis Grimké delivered the eulogy for her (available on JStor). Among her qualities, Grimké highlighted her generosity: “She was also the very of generosity; she possessed in a remarkable degree, what we sometimes call the milk of human kindness. Especially did her sympathies go out towards the poor, the suffering, the destitute. She never hesitated to share what she had, with others to deny herself for the sake of helping a suffering fellow creature. There are hundreds, who if they had the opportunity, today would rise up and call her blessed, to whom she has been a real sister of charity, a veritable Dorcas…”
On Christmas Day, 1880, Jacobs and Grimké and a few other women (including Mary Chaflin and Julia Wilbur) collaborated to put on a “holiday dinner” for a group of “destitute old freedwomen” (The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, 2: 760). Abolitionist and suffragist Julia Wilbur was present for this dinner and describes the scene in her diary (available online here): “There were 12 women & 12 children there. Dinner set in style in an elegant dining room. Mrs. C.[Chaflin] & niece & one other lady waited on them. It was like a foretaste of Paradise for these poor old ex slaves… Mrs. C. said ‘she believed she was the happiest of them all.’ There is luxury in doing good.”
The whole scene was written up as an article and published in The People’s Advocate as “Our Duty to the Poor–How We Observed it On Christmas” (January 8, 1881). Jean Yellin suggests that it was “perhaps written by Jacobs’s friend Charlotte Forten Grimké” (HJFP, 2:760). The article includes an account of a brief sermon that Francis Grimké delivered to the attendees. The sermon is wonderful meditation on Christ’s care for the lowly and downtrodden, and Grimké highlights how “When he was upon the earth he was the friend of the poor and the suffering.”
Jacobs, Grimké, and friends believed themselves to obeying Jesus’s command in Luke 12: “When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsman, nor thy rich neighbor, but when thou makest a feast call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and thou shalt be blessed. For they cannot recompense thee but thou shalt be recompensed in the resurrection of the just.”
I have transcribed the article here, which includes Francis Grimké’s sermon:
Christmas feasts for the poor were not the only occasion of Jacobs’s kindness. In his eulogy, Grimké later recalled other occasions of her generosity as well:
“She ministered to souls, poor and suffering ones, as God gave her the ability. I remember some years ago, it was on Thanksgiving day, how she gathered into her home a goodly company of old people, who were in destitute circumstances, and made a feast for them. And I remember also how happy it made her to see the old people enjoy themselves. It was a real pleasure to her. How her face lighted up as she looked upon their bright, happy faces. She seemed even happier than the old people themselves, though their hearts were overflowing with joy”
Francis Grimké, “Eulogy for Harriet Jacobs“
Grimké’s eulogy is a profound and moving tribute to a remarkable woman. I highly commend it to you, in addition to his Christmas Sermon, for your holiday reading: “O Death, where is Thy Sting?: Reverend Francis J. Grimke’s Eulogy for Harriet A. Jacobs“
βιβλιοσκώληξ 