The three artworks gathered here were created relatively close in time, at a turning point in the representation of Black people in European life and culture. In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries a Black person could appear as a Christian warrior (St Maurice) or as one of the three kings. If these representations, various as they are, are inflected with certain exoticizing attitudes and assumptions, nonetheless (as with the figure under Mary’s cloak) they presented the Black person as a significant figure within the story of salvation.

But as elements within Western ethnocentrism hardened into the speciously ‘scientific’ racism which would finally fully emerge in the nineteenth century, the Black person in art would more often appear as an accoutrement in the portraits of refined courtiers and rich merchants than as saint or king. For such they had become: possessions to augment the lives of their owners. The relatively brief popularity of the image of the eunuch at his baptism in the early seventeenth century (as seen in the painted glass from Oxford) was—at least for a time—something of a last flourish for the representation of the Black person as called to the service of Jesus Christ.

We may imagine that the book of Isaiah held a special place for the eunuch, seemingly an Ethiopian adherent of Judaism—enough for him to be reading it (surely somewhat uncomfortably), as his chariot trundled away from Jerusalem through the desert. Whereas Deuteronomy 23:1 excludes the eunuch from the covenant (‘He whose testicles are crushed and whose male member is cut off shall not enter the assembly of the Lord’), Isaiah (56:3) seems to abrogate that exclusion. And to eunuchs and to foreigners (the Ethiopian is both), is made the great promise: ‘my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples’ (56:7).

But if the eunuch may have been drawn to the book of Isaiah by its taking one side in an argument between exclusion and inclusion, this wounded man—this man who had been cut off—may also have been especially engaged by the mysterious passage he is reading aloud when Philip hears him. It is part of one of the so-called songs of the suffering servant, and refers to this servant’s ‘humiliation’. Eunuchs were often especially privileged officials, as was the Ethiopian—and yet their privileged place was itself founded on their degradation in the eyes of the world.

‘Of whom does the prophet speak?’, asks the eunuch. Philip interprets the passage as speaking of Jesus Christ. But of course, if the eunuch identified with the suffering servant he was not mistaken—for to be baptized into Christ was to be baptized into his death, and especially so (as it would turn out) for the Ethiopian’s fellow African and their descendants. If one of their number is found beneath the protecting mantle of the sixteenth-century Spanish Madonna of Mercy, his place at the very edge of the cloak would come to seem prophetic.

For James H. Cone (1938–2018), one of the first and distinctive voices in Black theology, it is the problem of suffering which is the problem of Black theology. ‘What is to prevent my being baptized?’ the eunuch asks. ‘The suffering of my people at the hands of Christian nations’, his descendants might well have answered. But for Cone, as African Americans struggled to ‘affirm humanity despite the dehumanizing conditions of slavery and segregation’ (Cone 1975:169), they accepted their vocation to be God’s suffering servants with and alongside Jesus Christ, for the establishment of God’s justice and kingdom—just as Magdalena Ventura seems to have accepted her suffering, and not been overcome by it.

The lively narrative of Abraham van Linge’s window gives us three instalments in the eunuch’s story, but as our eye moves around and around its lancets seeking the narrative’s logic, we are surely left to wonder, as the bystanders may be wondering, ‘what next?’ He ‘went on his way rejoicing’ Luke tells us (v.39), but over the rest of his history a veil is drawn. As we remove the veil from that sorry history, we may discover a miracle, not of nature, but of grace—the story of a people who, as the American novelist and essayist James Baldwin (1924–87) puts it, ‘in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity’ (Baldwin 1963: 18). Such was Mother Pollard (c.1882/1885–before 1963) the church elder who after many weeks of walking during a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, replied to the suggestion that she should take a bus for the sake of her health with the words: ‘My feets is tired but my soul is rested’ (King 1963: 517).

References

Baldwin, James. 1990 [1963]. The Fire Next Time (London: Penguin Classics)

Cone, James. 1975. God of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury Press)

Luther King Jr, Martin. 1986 [1963]. ‘The Strength to Love’, in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches, ed. J. M. Washington (New York: Harper Collins), pp. 491–517