On the Road to Freedom: The Contracts of the Fisk Jubilee Singers

By Sandra Graham

"It will be necessary for you to leave next week in order to make a few stops and still reach Boston in time for the World's Peace Jubilee. Do you see what I mean, Caleb? That's why I say your life is becoming complicated. You can't do as you like now, even when the thing you plan is good." Caleb smiled helplessly, "I thought I was free, Professor Spence." That seemed to amuse the principal too. "Not entirely," he meditated. "Not entirely and not for long. We all give up a part of our freedom when we give ourselves to a thing we believe in. From now on you belong to the Jubilee Singers, Caleb—and to Fisk University." Arna Bontemps, Chariot in the Sky

The words spoken by Adam Spence in Arna Bontemps's novel may have been fiction, but they contained an essential truth.1 Indeed, his last sentence could well have been extended: The Jubilee Singers belonged not only to Fisk University but to the American Missionary Association (AMA), which founded Fisk University in 1866; to the recently freed slaves, for whom the Jubilee Singers represented a future of possibilities; and to their white patrons in North America and Europe, whose abolitionist and religious convictions had been vindicated by the Jubilees' success.