I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home. Keeping God’s law was a big thing, especially the Ten Commandments. So when I hear Christians today talk about how all these undocumented immigrants are law breakers who must be deported, I know where they’re coming from.
For many Christians, especially white Christians, it doesn’t seem to matter that being in this country without documentation is a civil infraction, not a crime. To them, it’s criminal, deserving of the harshest punishment. It doesn’t matter that parents are taken from children, or that asylum seekers find themselves in prisons in another country.
Neither are many religious people bothered that most immigrants, including families, are here for one reason: poverty, war or threats to their safety in their country of origin.
They should have come in the right way, they say. Yet, within our broken immigration system, we know there is no right way. And now we see that even those here legally, such as those under temporary protected status (TPS), are ordered to leave the country. These include immigrants from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.
Even those with green cards, authorizing them as permanent residents, are being singled out and deported.
Yet not all Christians support President Trump’s orders and policies. And there is increasing evidence that many who voted for Trump are now recoiling from his cruelty.
Meanwhile, others are calling for a return to the commandment of Jesus in the New Testament: “A new command I give you: Love one another.” Sometimes called Matthew 25 Christians, they turn to the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Last Judgement to stand up against Trump’s cruel policies.
Whatever happened to “I was hungry and you fed me. I was a stranger and you welcomed me”? they ask. What about, “In as much as you have done it unto one of the least of my brethren, you have done it unto me”?
They are joining those from other religions or none to demand a stop to the indiscriminate deportation of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. They are insisting on safe homes and communities for millions threatened by arrest and detention.
And they are a calling for a new law, such as one filed last week by Representative Sylvia Garcia of Texas. Co-sponsored by 201 members of Congress, the Dream and Promise Act would provide a pathway to US citizenship for most DACA recipients, other Dreamers, and those on Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Enforced Departure. In short, it would allow millions of our friends and neighbors to continue living, working and going to school in our country.
In a democracy, it is the duty of all to obey the laws. Yet, when a law is unjust, when it goes against our most deeply held beliefs and convictions, it is the duty of citizens to create a better law. For too many years, that has not happened. Now is the time to stop mass deportations. Now is the time to craft new immigration laws. Now, even in the midst of the storm.
This is a story about Charles Cephas, a Black man who came to our town after the Civil War. On his gravestone in the soldiers’ lot at Lindenwood Cemetery, you’ll see he served in the U. S. Navy.
Charles was born in 1844 in Norfolk, Virginia. He may have been enslaved. One year after the Emancipation Proclamation, he joined the Union Navy and was inducted aboard the USS Ohio in Boston. He was then assigned to the USS Sacramento, which served to blockade Confederate ships off South Carolina and in Europe.
Discharged after the war, Cephas settled in Stoneham, Massachusetts. On August 13, 1867, as reported in the Stoneham Independent, he appeared before Silas Dean, justice of the peace, with his bride. Her name was Sarah Cecelia Hill, and she was from Brooklyn. He was 23, she was 18. In Stoneham they would raise five children, three sons and two daughters.
I don’t know what Charles Cephas looked like, but he must have been a man of considerable strength. I say that because he was a mason, a well digger, an earth mover. An ad in the Stoneham Independent reads: “The services of Charles Cephas stone mason can now be had. He tends to laying pipes, sinking wells, digging cesspools and blasting. ‘He thoroughly understands his business.’”
That same year the newspaper reported that “Charles Cephas is digging and stoning a well in Montvale, which he thinks will be the deepest in Woburn. It is 35 feet deep.”
In the 1870 federal census, Charles and Sarah are two of only 27 “non-whites” listed in a town of 3,444. Yet, from what I can find, they did all right, and by 1876 purchased their own home. In the Independent, we read: “Wm. Howell sold a house on Hancock Street to Charles Cephas, and the latter had had it successfully moved to Albion Ave in the north westerly part of the town. Ellis of Malden did the moving.”
But life for the Cephas family had its rough parts. And here the story gets complicated. It’s complicated, because if we are to know the tenor of Charles Cephas’s life, we must acknowledge the persistent prejudice African Americans faced, not only in the South, but in booming factory towns like Stoneham. His story raises questions that make us uneasy.
Most of what we know about Cephas comes from the Stoneham Independent. There are also census reports and vital records. We also have notices of court actions, arrests and fines. Sometimes, we have to read between the lines.
I don’t know if Charles was enslaved in Virginia. He may have been. Certainly, his desire for freedom, his enlistment in the Union Navy, and his insistence that he be respected as a free man played out in his daily life. He didn’t always get respect.
Cabinet card portraits of African Americans from the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography. Left: Man with Pipe, circa 1887. Right: Woman in Silk Dress, circa 1888. William L. Clements Library
Disturbing the Peace
Although Charles Cephas found Stoneham a good place to start a business, a place where hard work was rewarded, he was also learning that even in the North men who looked like him could become targets of abuse.
In 1878, as reported in the Independent, five men, aged 16-25, attacked and beat Cephas and Thomas Shanks, another Black man. Arraigned in court for assault and battery, the men were fined and released.
There were other times, however, when Cephas was the one being charged. For example, in 1891 at the P Cogan & Sons shoe factory on Main Street, where he was arrested for disturbing the peace.
According to the Independent, Charles Cephas was walking beside the Cogan plant when, from an upstairs window, someone dumped a bucket of whitewash onto him. Furious, he rushed into the mill in search of the culprits. Not surprisingly, no one admitted the racist prank. Cephas was “pretty well worked up,” wrote the reporter, “and may have talked pretty loud, for Officer Newton appeared on the scene.”
Rather than find the perpetrator, however, the officer “arrested Charles and started for the ‘lock-up.’” When Cephas resisted, the policeman enlisted “one or two outsiders for aid” and hauled him off to jail.
Another time, according to the papers, Cephas threatened to blow up the Stoneham police force. The Boston Globe, which picked up the story, told it like this:
Early this morning an officer saw a young man chasing a girl along a street. The latter was shouting for assistance. The officer hailed the man, who stopped and was informed that he was under arrest. The man, who proved to be Charles Cephas, refused to be taken into custody and opened a handbag he carried, and told the officer the contents were dynamite, and if he was molested he would explode the same.
The Independent gave more detail, alleging that Cephas, uttering profanity, had chased a “Miss Kelly” to the home of Officer Green, where she sought protection. Green and another officer confronted Cephas, who was standing in the street, and told him to go home or be arrested. Cephas started, but then stopped, warning the officers that he had dynamite in his bags and would blow “the whole —- police force up” if they came near.
On Monday Cephas showed up in court and paid a fine of $10 for disturbing the peace. He told the judge that he couldn’t remember threatening “to blow up the police force,” but if he did, “he was sorry.” No mention was made of the altercation between Cephas and the young woman.
Looking back at Charles Cephas, we see a puzzle with many pieces missing. We will never get a full picture. Still, what we have suggests the complexity of his life in our town. We also learn a little about his family, about their losses and achievements.
In 1869 the Independent listed the death of a son, age 1. Infant deaths were also recorded in 1874 and 1883. In the notes section of an 1885 edition, we read: “Mr. Charles Cephas has had the misfortune to lose one of his youngest children lately.”
In October of 1884 Sarah (also known as Cecilia or Celia) posted a card thanking family friends in Woburn, Wakefield and Stoneham “for their many kindnesses and sympathy in her late bereavement.”
But there were also good times, such as the wedding of their son, George, to Carrie H. Yancey. It was “a very pretty home wedding” reported the Independent, “performed in the presence of a large company of friends.”
In another story we learn about an ice-hockey game on Spot Pond in which the Stoneham team beat Salem 1-0. The ice was rough, the paper reported, due to the many ice yachts that had been racing on the pond. Playing with the Stoneham team was Ernest Cephas, George’s brother.
There is evidence that the Cephas boys learned shoemaking trades. Ernest, however, seems to have something else in mind.
In 1887 we find out that Ernest has gone to sea. Like his father, he enlisted in the Navy. Home on leave in 1896, wearing his sailor’s uniform, he was returning from Woburn late one night when he was accosted by several toughs, who berated him with racial slurs.
Getting off the trolley at the last stop, Ernest stepped up to the gang leader “and lit into him like a cyclone,” giving him “such a pummeling as he probably never had in all his life.”
Although Ernest was later charged in court, the Independent clearly took his side. The headline ran: “He Deserved It!—Ernest Cephas Teaches a Haverhill Tough a Wholesome Lesson.”
Two years later, during the Spanish-American War, Ernest was serving aboard the Navy cruiser USS Brooklyn. In a letter published by the newspaper, he described in dramatic detail a victorious battle between American and Spanish warships.
Of the Cephas’ third son, Louis, born in 1876, we know very little. His name does appear, however, in a news report of the 1904 trolley car disaster in Melrose. Lewis was riding in the car when dynamite carried by workmen exploded. Nine passengers were killed and 30 wounded. Blown into the street, Louis survived with cuts and bruises from flying glass and debris.
Of the two surviving daughters, Eva, born in 1883, and Sarah, born in 1887, there is also little information. Records show that Sarah married John Addison in Boston in 1912, and that Eva married a man with the last name of Carter in 1913.
Coming Home
Charles and Sarah Cephas were not the only African Americans to settle in Stoneham after the Civil War. There were also the Yanceys, Freemans, Reeds and others. In the Independent, we find mention of “a Mr. Curtis and a Mr. Turner, [who] owned adjoining lots on Albion St. in 1874.” Also noted was the Lewis family, “that married into the Yancey family.”
For the Black families, Stoneham was a good place to put down roots. But the soil could also be rocky, in more ways than one. For Charles Cephas, getting along in an overwhelmingly white community inevitably involved conflict.
On at least one occasion, reported in the press, he was assaulted. Other times, he was charged with disturbing the peace, including the time workers at a shoe mill dumped whitewash on him.
His marriage was another story. We can never know the complexities of any marital relationship. But the stresses of his life must have crossed over to his marriage. In the Independent on March 9, 1895, we learn that Sarah Celia Cephas, after 28 years, has petitioned the Middlesex Court for divorce and that “a decree of divorce was given.”
Sometime after this, Cephas moved out of Stoneham. In 1899 we find him living in Chelsea and working at the Charlestown Navy Yard, where he continued for another nine years. Until June 10, 1908.
What happened on that date is unclear. It was not reported on, as far as I can tell, by any Boston papers. Nor, does it seem, were the police involved. It was, however, reported on by the Independent. Here is what the Stoneham newspaper said on Saturday, June 20:
Charles Cephas, colored, passed away Wednesday evening of last week, at the Chelsea Marine hospital, as the result of injuries received by being assaulted as he was coming out of the Charlestown Navy Yard, where he has been employed as a stone mason. He was about 65 years of age.
The paper then speculated that “the object of the assault was robbery, his assailants evidently being after Mr. Cephas’ pension money.”
After listing the five names of his surviving children, the Independent continued:
The deceased was a Civil War veteran, having served four years in the Navy. Until about 15 years ago he was a resident of this town for thirty years. He was born in Virginia in ante-bellum days.
Funeral Services for Cephas were held in Chelsea. But for burial he was brought back to Stoneham, interned in the Civil War memorial lot at Lindenwood cemetery. Was there an honor guard present, as there often is for veterans? No mention is made.
Looking back at the demise of Charles Cephas, we are left with questions. Why did his brutal murder in Charlestown receive so little attention? Was there no police report? Was there no attempt to apprehend and prosecute his killers?
I was able to find the Chelsea coroner’s report, filed a week after his death. The cause of death was listed as “acute fibrinous pneumonia consequent on hemorrhage and laceration of the brain sustained under circumstances unknown, probably those of an accidental fall.” Accidental fall? Really?
Back in 1891, when Cephas was still living in Stoneham, the Independent reported that “People on the outskirts of town complain of dry wells. Will it ever rain in earnest?”
In that same issue was the news of Charles Cephas digging a 35-feet-deep well, “the deepest in Woburn.”
When I think of Charles Cephas, I like to think of this.
Charles Cephas came to Stoneham looking for a place he and his family could call home, and in doing so, he helped build our town. Although his story is complicated by factors we can only partially understand, it challenges us to look honestly at history and ourselves.
His story is part of our history. It is our story as well.
Gravestone of Charles Cephas in Lindenwood Cemetery
Thanks to Joan Quigley, historian and archivist at the Stoneham Historical Society & Museum, and Dee Morris, Medford historian, for their help in researching the Cephas family.
Ben Jacques is the author of In Graves Unmarked: Slavery & Abolition in Stoneham, Massachusetts, and If the Shoe Fits: Stories of Stoneham Then & Now. Both are available at the Book Oasis on Main Street. He also writes essays, poems and articles, many of them found on his blog at benjacquesstories.com.
As the German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote: “Only the person who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.”
What does this mean to us today, almost a century after the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany? Here’s my take.
If you don’t cry out against those who are taking food from the hungry, taking medicine from the sick, or shelter from the stranger—you have no moral right to sing your hymns or pray your prayers.
If you are not horrified by the cruelty of Donald Trump and his administration, the cutting off of aid to the poor and sick, the “chainsaw” firing of workers, the slamming of the door to refugees, and the deportation of those whose only crime is seeking a place of safety, I urge you to reexamine the principles you live by. I urge you to reacquaint yourself with the words of the One you claim to follow.
As Pastor Bonhoeffer said: “Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christian should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.”
Woodie Guthrie wrote the lyrics. Martin Hoffman set them to music. Since then, it’s been sung by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie.
It’s a ballad called “Deportees” and it tells of an airplane crash in California’s Los Gatos Canyon. On board were 28 migrant farm workers from Mexico.
The lyrics are as searing now as in 1848 when Guthrie wrote them:
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon, A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills, Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? The radio says, “They are just deportees.”
Guthrie wrote the ballad one night after news reports listed the names of the pilots, attendant and immigration guard lost in the crash, but referred to the farm workers only as “deportees.” After the braceros’ bodies were recovered, they were buried in a mass grave without names, marked “Mexican Nationals.”
The roundup of the Los Gatos laborers was just one episode in several government campaigns to remove Mexicans and those with Mexican ancestry. Mass deportation began in 1930 and continued through the Great Depression. Then in 1954, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) brought out “Operation Wetback.” Under this federal program, officials used strong-arm tactics to arrest tens of thousands of immigrants across the country. Caught up in the raids were farm and factory workers, including American citizens.
In July of 1955, several thousand deportees were found wandering the streets of Mexicali, a desert town bordering California. Yanked from their jobs and families, they had simply been dumped across the border. According to one account, 88 died of heat exposure in the 112 degree heat.
In Texas, thousands of deportees were crammed onto boats bound for Mexican ports. Testimony before a Congressional committee described conditions akin to those on slave ships. Other immigrants were packed into trucks. By the end of Operation Wetback, the INS claimed it had “repatriated” 1.3 million Mexicans.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita, Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria; You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane, All they will call you will be “deportees.”
Accompanying the mass deportations were media depictions of Mexicans as dirty, disease-bearing and lazy. News coverage focused on border and immigration officials conducting raids.
Only in time did most Americans come to see this as something shameful. In a 2012 ceremony in Los Angeles, Governor Jerry Brown and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa formally apologized for California’s role in the deportations.
On Labor Day in 2013, United Farm Worker President Arturo Rodriguez joined hundreds gathered at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, California, to memorialize the 28 farm workers killed in Los Gatos Canyon. They were 25 men and three women. This time, inscribed in the headstone, was each person’s name.
Now, deportation planes are again in the sky. Planes to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Planes to India and Rwanda. Planes to Eswatini, a tiny country in southern Africa.
Through October 2025, the Department of Homeland Security operated 1,701 deportation flights to 77 countries. And it recently bought six Boeing 737s, expanding capacity.
Meanwhile, 66,000 men, women and children await deportation in detention centers. Arrested, often with brutal force, they were tracked down in streets, courthouses, parking lots, fields and construction sites.
Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted, Our work contracts out and we have to move on. Six hundred miles to that Mexican border, They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
Compared to programs of the past, Donald Trump’s campaign is Operation Wetback on steroids. The president wants 3,000 arrests a day, or one million by the end of his first year in office. Each day, it seems, he expands his list of targets, Somalis, Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans. What they have in common is their darker shades of skin.
As I listen to Woodie Guthrie’s song, I think of my children and grandchildren. I wonder, what song will they sing in years to come? Who will write the words, and who will remember the names?
Will there be, one day in the future, a public apology, a ceremonial mea culpa for the cruelty, the harm inflicted on so many? If so, what song will we then sing.
A fugitive, he got off the boat in Newport and continued by coach to New Bedford. There, in the whaling seaport founded by Quakers, he found safety. He also found work.
“There was no work too hard—none too dirty,” he would write. “I was ready to saw wood, shovel coal, carry wood, sweep the chimney, or roll oil casks.”
His name was Frederick Douglass and for first time in his life, he was working for himself and his newly married wife, Anna. “It was the first work,” he wrote, “the reward of which was to be entirely my own. There was no Master Hugh standing ready, the moment I earned the money, to rob me of it.”
The year was 1838. Dressed as a sailor and using false papers, the young man (he was just 20) had fled Baltimore. Having found a haven in New Bedford, he was amazed at its wealth and absence of poverty. “I had somehow imbibed the opinion that, in the absence of slaves, there could be no wealth, and very little refinement.”
He continued: “Everything looked clean, new, and beautiful. I saw few or no dilapidated houses, with poverty-stricken inmates; no half-naked children and barefooted women, such as I had been accustomed to see.”
Instead, Douglass found a city bustling with commerce and men and women eagerly engaged in their work. “I saw no whipping of men; but all seemed to go smoothly on. Every man appeared to understand his work, and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness….”
Most surprising was the condition of fellow fugitives and free Blacks. “I found many, who had not been seven years out of their chains, living in finer houses, and evidently enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders in Maryland.”
His friends, Nathan and Polly Johnson, who had taken him and Anna into their home, “lived in a neater house; dined at a better table; took, paid for, and read, more newspapers; better understood the moral, religious, and political character of the nation,—than nine tenths of the slaveholders in Talbot county Maryland. Yet Mr. Johnson was a working man. His hands were hardened by toil, and not his alone, but those also of Mrs. Johnson.”
Even though New Bedford had become a refuge for escaped slaves, there was still racial prejudice. In Baltimore, Douglass had worked as a ship’s caulker, but was refused work with the white caulkers here, work which would have earned him twice his laborer’s wage.
Still, he and his wife made a living and found their own apartment. They attended church and socialized with others in the community. As a boy he had been taught to read by the sympathetic wife of his owner. Now he scoured the pages of The Liberator, published in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison.
Three years later, at an abolitionist meeting on Nantucket, he was asked to tell his own story, and the rest is history. He went on to become perhaps the most eloquent champion of the anti-slavery cause, lecturing, editing, writing and speaking throughout the Northern States, England and Ireland. A friend of all those yearning for freedom, he was an advocate for women’s rights as well.
Remembering Frederick Douglass is fitting as we celebrate Black History Month. But it’s also important given the threats to the human rights of millions of those in our nation today threatened with deportation. Like him, they have sought refuge among us. Like him, they will work at anything to provide for their families. Like him, they have stories to tell.
As the Trump administration carries out raids, as it dehumanizes men, women and children because of their immigration status or gender identity, I can’t help wondering what Frederick Douglass what would have to say.
They couldn’t vote, and they had been told to keep quiet in church.
The year was 1837 and they were women of Stoneham. Passionate about their cause, however, they found a way to make their voices heard. Led by the widow, Sarah Gerry, they wrote a letter.
There were 14 of them—married, single, mothers, grandmothers, wives of prominent men and workers in shoe factories. When they signed their names, addressed to the elders of the Congregational Church, they used their own first names, not their husbands, bucking the current custom. Sarah Buck, Mary Bryant, Abigail Green, Sally Richardson, Nabby Richardson, Mary Newhall and others.
Friends Freedman Association teachers in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1863.
What they were so upset about was slavery, practiced in the South and supported by many in the North. What particularly galled them was the fact that so many Christians supported it.
We are “deeply aggrieved,” they wrote, “that such an utter abomination in the sight of Heaven . . . is now sustained and defended by almost the entire Christian church in the South, with whom we are in fellowship.”
They continued. “By refusing to rebuke and remonstrate,” they wrote, “we do in fact participate in their guilt.”
Silence is complicity, the women were saying, and if we do not speak, we, too, are guilty.
The women closed with an appeal to church leaders: “We entreat you to take such action … that will show plainly that our influence is on the side of justice and humanity.”
For the church and the town, the letter was the start of something. Although it took years of conflict and violence, the abolitionist movement took root and bore fruit in Stoneham.
In 1838 twenty-seven women, again led by Sarah Gerry, formed the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Stoneham. The men formed a chapter a year later.
In 1840, church members passed a resolution calling on their pastor “to bear faithful pulpit testimony against the sin of slavery.”
Then in 1850, after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, the new minister, the Rev. William Whitcomb, gave a fiery sermon calling on parishioners to ignore the federal law mandating the capture and return of fugitive slaves. Instead, Whitman urged, “Hide the outcast or help him on his journey to a safer place, even though you may risk personal security, property and life.”
Recalling the brave men and women of Stoneham is fitting as we celebrate the Tricentennial of our town. It reminds us that those who came before us were faced with daunting challenges to what they believe and how they should act.
As in the decades before the Civil War, Christians today are also divided. Some believe that our President was saved by God to “make America great again.” Others cringe at the threats and actions harming vulnerable people among us. Like Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde in her sermon last week at the National Cathedral, they call for mercy and tolerance and justice—for immigrants, for LGBTQ+, for all those on the margins of our society.
Now it’s our turn. How and where will we make our stand?
Romeo and Juliet used it. So did Ruth, David and Jesus, according to the early Bible translators. So, in the centuries that followed, poets, lovers and preachers have slipped back into this archaic dialect. Even Langston Hughes, who loved the American vernacular, chose it when he wrote to his “Black Beloved.”
I’m talking about the use of “thee and thou.” Although almost no one uses this dialect any more—that is, except some Quakers, and I’ll get to that later. We teach it to our children every time we have them say, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.”
To get a handle on this dialect, let me tell you why we English speakers find it quaint. First of all, it’s because modern English, unlike many other languages, has left us with only one word for “you.” That’s right. English, with its massive vocabulary, is so poor that it now only has one word.
It wasn’t always like that. In the Middle Age and Renaissance, English had more than one word for the second-person pronoun. There were three subject pronouns—the familiar “thou,” the formal “you,” and the plural “ye.”
First, let’s distinguish between singular and plural. In William Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the New Testament, we read: Ye are the salt of the erthe, and ye are the light of the worlde. Here, Jesus uses the plural ye when he is talking to more than one person.
On the other hand, when he is talking with one person, as to the woman at the well, he says, from the King James Bible: If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.
Nice thing, that ability in language to know if the speaker is addressing just one, or many people, by the pronoun he or she uses. Unfortunately, today’s Standard English leaves us stranded. We make up for it, however, with our own vernacular for the plural you. “You guys, y’all, youse,” etc. Not “proper” English, but it gets the job done.
But there’s something else going on in Jesus’ use of the “thou,” suggestive of his relationship with the woman.
In Shakespeare’s time, you had the option—as you still have in modern French, Spanish or German—of using “thou” or “you.” Common practice was to use “you” with your superiors, strangers, or in formal situations. But to your peers, your close friends, or with those below your social level, servants included, you would use the familiar “thou.”
In Romeo and Juliet, we first see this distinction in a conversation between Juliet’s nurse and Lady Capulet. Reminiscing on Juliet’s childhood, the nurse addresses Lady Capulet as “you,” showing respect, while Juliet’s mother responds using the familiar “thou.”
“You” was polite and formal. “Thou” was familiar. It was personal. But—and this is important—it was also the language of intimacy, the language of lovers.
Both Romeo and Juliet, when they first meet, without even knowing each other’s names, use the “you” form of address. At their next encounter, however, now love-struck, they slip into the language of intimacy: “O, speak again, bright angel! for thou art as glorious to this night, being o’er my head as is a winged messenger of heaven.”
And Juliet: “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” Why, my love, she is asking, must you have the name of my family’s enemy?
Whether the speaker uses “you” or “thou” is an indicator of their relationship, and this carries through in Shakespeare’s sonnets as well. To his beloved, as he is now an old man, Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 73:
“This perceiv’st thou, which makes thy love more strong/ To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”
It’s still that way in other languages today. When addressing someone in Spanish, you use tu or Usted. In French, tu or Vous. In German, du or Sie. Using the wrong word, however, can get you into trouble. Which it did when I was a teenager in Germany, when I addressed Frau Liebig, the mother of my friend, with the familiar du rather than Sie.
“Do you address your elders like that in America?” she asked. When I explained that in America we spoke to everyone in the same way, she smiled. “But you shouldn’t here,” she said.
I learned that I could use du with my friends and my immediate family. But with other adults, teachers, employers, seniors, strangers—be sure to use the Sie form, she explained, along with its appropriate verb conjugations and the correct objective and possessive pronouns. In all, I would learn, there are seven words in German for “you.”
At the same time, however, when I attended the local Lutheran church, I heard the pastor pray using the familiar form of speech with God. Wow, I thought. I could use du with God! And so I learned: Vater unser, du der bist in Himmel, dein Name werde geheiligt….
So it once was in English. What we think of as church talk, or high talk, was the opposite. Thee and thou was the language of low talk, used with those we were “down with,” with those we love, and, remarkably, with our Father in heaven.
That’s why Quakers, those radical reformers from England, chose to use “thee and thou” even when everyone else had stopped using it. And, in so doing, they were making a statement about the equality of all people.
So here’s to the “Thee and Thou” of the Lord’s Prayer, and to all the funny verbs and pronouns that go along with them, Here’s to our freedom to talk to God as if we are speaking with our closest friend—whether we use archaic or modern English, formal grammar or street dialect. It’s all there in the words we choose.
Art: detail of 1884 painting of Romeo and Juliet by Frank Bernard Dicksee
It was a gray day in Moscow, and a 7-year-old girl was on the way to the train station. Her mother had gone to the hospital to deliver, and the girl was being sent to her aunt. In the streets, she remembers, were soldiers with rifles, and everywhere people in shock, some openly weeping.
Why are they crying,” she asked her father. It was March 5, 1953.
“Stalin has died,” her father said.
A friend and colleague told me this story. She also said that in a little bag her father took with him to work each day he packed a toothbrush, razor and extra underwear, in case he didn’t return.
I could relate. Also having Russian heritage, I knew of the Soviet dictator’s reign of terror. My relatives, German-Russian farmers on the Kuban steppe in Southern Russia, were exiled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. One died in a gulag. Another was shot. My Tanta Anna as a teenager was forced to work in a logging camp.
Meanwhile, my friend grew up under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. In a famous speech, Khrushchev had shocked the party by condemning Stalin’s crimes, coining the phrase, “cult of personality.”
In the following years, she excelled at the university, earning a doctorate. and began a career teaching math. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, she, her husband and their parents left Moscow and settled in New England. We taught together in Massachusetts.
As I had tea with her one day between classes, we talked about Stalin and the power he had over people. I recalled a passage in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago describing a Communist party meeting in the 1940s, where, after Stalin had spoken, the audience jumped to its feet to applause. The applause continued. It didn’t stop. Looking around, members were afraid to stop clapping. Would someone notice? Would they be on the slow train to Siberia?
Similar scenes occurred in Nazi Germany. In a 1936 photograph of a rally held at a shipyard, one German worker stands in a crowd with his arms folded. He is the only one not giving the Nazi salute. Once a loyal member of the Party, August Landmesser had fallen in love with a Jewish woman. After his engagement was discovered, he was expelled from the Party, and his marriage application denied. They had a daughter.
In 1937 Landmesser attempted to flee Germany with his family, but was arrested at the border. The Gestapo also arrested his wife, who delivered their second child in prison. Sent to the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre, she was murdered along with 14,000 others.
After three years in a concentration camp, Landmesser was forced into the German Army. He went missing in Croatia.
Many are the lessons we can draw from history. One we cannot ignore, however, is that authoritarian, autocratic governments cause great harm, not only to democratic institutions, but to vulnerable people.
Deportation of Jews from Muenster, Germany, Dec. 13, 1941.
As we begin life under a second Trump administration, millions of our neighbors are threatened with deportation. These include hundreds of thousands of DACA students and millions under temporary protected status (TPS) or awaiting action on their requests for asylum.
In the coming days, how shall we respond. Will we clap? Will we fold our arms? Will we speak what we believe? Will we act to safeguard the lives and liberties of others?
Today President Joseph Biden honored 19 Americans with the highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom. The recipients ranged from human rights workers to basketball stars, philanthropists to actors.
Although critics will snipe that some of the names were political choices, who among us did not cheer when our nation’s highest civilian award went to the José Andrés, World Kitchen chef, or Jane Goodall, animal biologist, or Michael J. Fox, actor and voice for Parkinson’s research.
Who didn’t chuckle when a towering Earvin “Magic” Johnson stooped down so the president could fasten the pendant around his neck? Or cheer when Bono, the U2 rock star who has fought for debt relief for poor nations, got the award.
The ceremony got me to thinking about the word “freedom” itself. What is freedom? Are there more than one? What freedoms are we talking about?
In a State of the Union address given 84 years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.”
He continued: “The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way.”
He defined the third as “freedom from want” and called for “economic understandings that will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants.”
The fourth freedom, Roosevelt stated, was “freedom from fear.” He called for a reduction in global armaments to the degree that that “no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.”
Articulated eleven months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Four Freedoms theme was incorporated into the Atlantic Charter and later became part of the Charter of the United Nations.
Although the three-term president was now defining freedom in global terms, his administration had from the start applied them to domestic policy and public programs.
In 1943 in four Saturday Evening Post covers painted by Normal Rockwell, the Four Freedoms showed us what freedom looks like at home, at the table, in moments of worship, and at a town meeting. You can see the original paintings today at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge.
Thinking about the recent Medal of Freedom ceremony, I realized that each person honored had in some way contributed to expanding one of the Four Freedoms.
And that got me to wondering, if I were to pick individuals in Stoneham who exemplified these freedoms, who would they be?
What my choices would have in common is the desire to realize freedom not only in their own lives, but in the lives of others as well. I would look for people who lift others up. A teacher who teaches compassion as well as calculus. A banker who helps small businesses gain a foothold. A town moderator who keeps democracy on track. An artist who teaches seniors to paint. A tutor who helps immigrants learn English. A food bank or community dinner director. A legislator, coach, librarian, nurse, police or fire fighter, pastor, and more.
Who would you choose? Look around you. In the New Year, we will be challenged to honor and uphold the freedoms we cherish. It’s something each of us, in our own way, can do.
Ben Jacques Stories 