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...first voyage Africa undertaken by the American Colonization Society (ACS). When the ceremony ended, the attendees joined thousands of spectators outside of the church in escorting the emigrants and ACS agents to the wharf where their ship the Elizabeth was anchored in the icy North River (Ashmun 241-42). While the passengers waited for their journey to begin, Rev. Daniel Coker, one of the emigrants, began writing in the journal that he would keep throughout their transatlantic voyage and early settlement in Africa. In the first entry in The Journal of Daniel Coker, a Descendant of Africa, From the Time of Leaving New York, in the Ship Elizabeth, Capt. Sebor, on a Voyage for Sherbro, In Africa, in Company with Three Agents, and About Ninety Persons of Colour, With an Appendix (1820) that he recorded on Friday, February 4, 1820, Coker notes, "This evening Mr. Bacon, read Duet. [sic] c. 11, and made some very appropriate and feeling words on the same; and I feel that his remarks were felt by most present" (2). Bacon, a Harvard-educated lawyer and Episcopal priest, read the portion of scripture in which Moses reminded the Israelites of their miraculous deliverance from bondage and the protection they experienced during 40 years of wilderness wandering. Similarly, as the emigrants prepared to leave the United States, Bacon encouraged them to go forward fearlessly, obey God's commandments, and teach His laws and the story of their Exodus experience to their children. Bacon thus posits Africa as free blacks' new Promised Land, and inadvertently characterizes the US as Egypt. His appropriation of the Exodus narrative to justify the ACS's removal of free blacks from the US ensured the survival of an unreconstructed white promised land supported by slave labor.
The black emigrants who embarked on this transatlantic journey also hoped that the trip would lead to an African promised land. The competing Exodus narratives that emerged during their voyage and early settlement in Africa reflected the mixed motivations of individuals whose divergent dreams for an African Canaan could not be reconciled. Unlike Europeans who had traveled to the New World and transformed it into their promised land, African American Israelites secured passage on a ship sponsored by an organization that affiliated itself with the Egypt they hoped to leave behind. As Coker and the emigrants struggled to escape the oppressive conditions in their native land, race complicated their attempts to merge sacred and secular worlds and thereby create a new space in which they could experience the Canaan promised by Exodus.
Coker had resisted the ACS's recruitment efforts, but an unexpected turn of events led him to embrace emigration. At the 1816 meeting that he and Rev. Richard Allen called to organize the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, delegates elected him as the first bishop, but he resigned in favor of Allen for reasons that remain unclear. At the first AME Conference in Baltimore later that year, Allen rebuked Coker for publicly criticizing his preaching style. In 1818, church leaders found Coker guilty of undisclosed charges and dismissed him from the Connection; Coker also filed for bankruptcy that year (Phillips 138). (1) During the AME Conference in 1819, church officials accepted Coker's petition for readmission to fellowship, but restricted his access to the pulpit, allowing him to preach only at the invitation of a local elder. This decision severely hampered Coker's efforts to unify the AME churches in Baltimore. He continued teaching at a school for black children but was not able to support his family (Corey 177-78). (2) In 1820, Coker sought new opportunities by accepting passage on the ACS's first voyage to Africa. He chronicled his journey in his Journal and later recorded in an unpublished journal (Daniel Coker, Diary, April 21, 1821-September 21, 1821) the difficulties the voyagers faced in establishing the West African colony.
This essay argues that in his journals, Coker creates a new vision of Africa by narrating his transatlantic journey from black America's Egypt to the border of the promised land of Africa in the language of Exodus. By constructing himself as a leader who mediates differences between the emigrants and agents, and participates in planning sessions with the agents for the colony, Coker positions himself as a Moses who can ensure that agents meet the emigrants' needs. In so doing, Coker disrupts the conventional secular-sacred binary by situating the journey within a complex biblical framework in which he struggles with white agents and black emigrants to control the purpose and establish the goals of the expedition. Through his manipulations of competing Exodus narratives, Coker demonstrates the challenges of performing as Moses, positing Africa as promised land, and presenting race as a presence in his biblical reinterpretations of the journey to Africa.
Coker, the Exodus Story, and the African American Literary Tradition
Scholars such as Allen Dwight Callahan, Eddie Glaude, Jr., David W. Kling, Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Albert Raboteau, and Renita Weems have noted the importance of the Exodus narrative in African American culture. (3) African Americans appropriated the Exodus story to challenge one of white Americans' most prominent "official stories," the national narratives that identified whites as God's people and African Americans as slaves or inferior freedmen. Exodus evolved into "a big story," according to Michael Walzer in Exodus and Revolution (1986), "one that became part of the cultural consciousness of the West--so that a range of political events ... have been located and understood within the narrative frame that it provides. This story made it possible to tell other stories" (7). In Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995), Priscilla Wald argues that such stories "surface in the rhetoric of nationalistic movements and initiatives--legal, political, and literary.... Neither static nor monolithic, they change in response to competing narratives of the nation that must be engaged, absorbed and retold: the fashioning and endless refashioning of 'a people'" (3). The Puritans first appropriated the Exodus story to justify their flight from religious persecution in England. During the Revolutionary War, colonial writers further refashioned their Exodus narratives by equating their desire for independence from England with the enslaved Israelites' cry for deliverance from Egyptian overseers. Colonists characterized themselves as "slaves" liberated from tyrannical England, rendering invisible enslaved blacks who were toiling in their communities. (4) Members of the black community viewed the Exodus story as a narrative that depicted God's love for oppressed people and His willingness to intervene on their behalf, however, and they appropriated fragments of the story to augment their personal narratives. In Liberation Historiography, African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 (2004), John Ernest asserts that black writers' "mode of reading history ... respects the authority...
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