Jesus

In Harper's narrative poems, Jesus moves through scenes of urgent need — a Syrophenician mother kneeling in anguish, a slave mother's shriek rising unanswered, a martyred child dying for his name. He is at once the source of healing and a figure who withholds, whose initial silence before the pleading woman sharpens the drama of faith. His presence anchors the collection's argument that divine justice stands against slavery's cruelty, making him the moral center against which the poems measure a complicit church.