The Souls of Womenfolk

The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781469663609, 9781469663593
• eBook ISBN: 9781469663616
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Beginning on the shores of West Africa in the sixteenth century and ending in the U.S. Lower South on the eve of the Civil War, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh traces a bold history of the interior lives of bondwomen as they carved out an existence for themselves and their families amid the horrors of American slavery. With particular attention to maternity, sex, and other gendered aspects of women’s lives, she documents how bondwomen crafted female-centered cultures that shaped the religious consciousness and practices of entire enslaved communities. Indeed, gender as well as race co-constituted the Black religious subject, she argues—requiring a shift away from understandings of “slave religion” as a gender-amorphous category.

Women responded on many levels—ethically, ritually, and communally—to southern slavery. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how they remembered, reconfigured, and innovated beliefs and practices circulating between Africa and the Americas. In this way, she redresses the exclusion of enslaved women from the American religious narrative. Challenging conventional institutional histories, this book opens a rare window onto the spiritual strivings of one of the most remarkable and elusive groups in the American experience.

CHAPTER ONE

Georgia Genesis

The Birth of the Enslaved Female Soul

In an early twentieth-century interview, Sapelo Island resident Julia Governor reconstructed a memory of the transatlantic slave trade through a narration of her grandmother’s capture and subsequent transfer to the Americas:

My gran, she Hannah. Uncle Calina my gran too; they both Ibos. Yes’m, I remember my gran Hannah. She marry Calina and have twenty-one children. Yes’m, she tell us how she brung here. Hannah, she with her aunt who was digging peanuts in the field, with a baby strapped on her back. Out of the brush two white mens come and spit in her aunt’s eye. She blinded and when she wipe her eye, the white mens loose the baby from her back and took Hannah too. They led them into the woods, where there was other children they done snatched and tied up in sacks. The baby and Hannah was tied up in sacks like the others and Hannah never saw her aunt again and never saw the baby again. When she was let out of the sack, she was on boat and never saw Africa again.¹

As evidenced by Governor’s recollection of her grandmother’s journey, narratives of capture and transatlantic transport circulated between African-born enslaved people and their country-born counterparts and subsequently became an essential constituent of their collective memory. The stories represented an attempt to reconcile the cognitive dissonance inaugurated by American enslavement and to explain the ominous geographical distance between West and West Central Africa and the lower southern colonies of anglophone North America. They were responses to the fundamental existential questions, Who are we? and Why are we here? In short, they were genesis narratives.

Yet rather than offer a universalized account of human beginnings, narratives such as Hannah’s chronicled the origins of enslaved, African-descended humanity in the Americas—humanity forged amid struggle. Stakeholders around the Atlantic conspired to innovate, institutionalize, and impose racialized, gendered concepts of enslaved West and West Central African existence. And in response to these impositions, captive Africans and their American-born descendants pieced together and created anew their identities. Their identities were born of memories of their ancestral homelands and creative exchanges among themselves. As Julia Governor’s recollection of her grandmother’s arrival on American shores conveys, Africans and their descendants re-membered and remembered their humanity and cultures amid the dismembering experiences of enslavement. Dismemberment and re/membrance formed the context and response for enslaved people’s negotiations and assertions of their humanity—and other aspects of their interiority—in slavery. Together, they defined the expressions, performances, and orientations that constituted religion among most enslaved people—enslaved women, in particular.

For Governor’s grandmother Hannah, dismemberment was the brutal finality of never seeing her child, kin, and homeland again, as well as the multigenerational effects evidenced by her granddaughter’s retelling. The term conceptualizes the historical and individual ruptures that bondpeople sought to redress through their religious performances and innovations, as well as the effects of those ruptures on individual and communal consciousness. Though similar to fragmentation, the concept’s more violent, active connotation better describes captives’ experiences of bondage and implicates the people and processes that precipitated their conditions. Confronted with the trauma of dismemberment, Hannah was forced to identify new cultural and existential anchors through which to re-create her identity. Those anchors, in turn, became the cornerstones of a culture shared by her granddaughter and millions of other persons of African descent carrying the “slave” designation in the Americas. Dismemberment encompasses the ongoing dialogue between individual and collective experience, the past and the present, Africa and the Americas, which grounded enslaved peoples’ cultures. Individuals experienced various forms and moments of dismemberment within their particular contexts. Yet some experiences threaded through enslaved communities and bound them together, regardless of their individual circumstances. The uprooting of Africans from their homelands and relocation to foreign soil; commodification of African-descended people’s lives in the development of trans- and inter-Atlantic economies; estrangement of the body from the power to govern its labor and (re)productions; constant specter of familial and communal disruption; and resignification of the womb as a capital asset were a few of the many critical experiences of rupture that shaped the cultures of enslaved Africans in the South and throughout the Atlantic.

These moments of rupture were born within specific chronological periods and of particular experiences yet not wedded to them. Thus, the beginnings of women’s consciousness as dislocated, enslaved Africans in the South—the experiences that birthed a distinctive religiosity—cannot be marked neatly within a linear historical narrative. Rather, they follow a more organic pattern. As communicated in bondpeople’s genesis myths, experiences of dismemberment spanned multiple continents and generations but functioned aggregately in collective memory. The agony of the auction block following transatlantic transport in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries paralleled and conversed with the traumas of the slave coffles in the nineteenth century, regardless of whether they were experienced individually. In this way, the concept bridges the individual and collective experiences of Africans throughout the Americas—theorizing the cultural and ontological meanings of inhabiting colonial spaces as an African/Negro/Black person, while leaving space for the disparities between different contexts and embodiments.

Inasmuch as dismemberment describes the context and condition out of which enslaved people’s religiosity emerged, re/membrance defines the orienting logic of the religious cultures they created. Referencing both the remembered West African practices and cosmologies on which African Americans constructed their religious ideas, as well as the adaptive and innovative religiosity birthed in response to dismemberment, re/membrance captures the simultaneous acts of remembering and re-membering central to enslaved people’s religious practices and productions. As a response to dismemberment, re/membrance was not solely a spiritual and psychological endeavor but rather directed toward immediate needs and concerns: the birth and death of children, separation from loved ones, physical pain, violence, and other pernicious occurrences rendered normative in slavery. Slaveholders’ intrusive and destructive presences required enslaved people to re-member and remember minute and consequential aspects of their lives, such as the names of their grandparents and their genesis stories, cough remedies, and death rites. Mundane and corporeal, these acts helped people survive and improve their quality of life amid the dismembering processes of enslavement. Their function rendered them religious, while their performance—specifically the circumstances under which they emerged, the experiences to which they responded, and how they were enacted—gendered them.

In her pioneering work, womanist theologian Delores Williams argued that biblical and southern bondwomen’s experiences engendered different registers of religious thought—namely a prioritization of survival and quality of life over material liberation. Even though Williams’s thesis was primarily theological, the implications of her insights stretch beyond theology. Dismemberment and re/membrance had gendered contours. Dismembering experiences forged religious subjects that were raced and gendered. In turn, enslaved religiosity emerged in and through the thought processes of racialized, gendered subjects. “Religion is not separate from matter,” but rather humans imagine and actualize the religious through material forms and, in many instances, “religion determines how matter is conceived.”² Survival and quality of life emanated from the lived experiences of women but were the material objectives of most enslaved people’s acts of re/membrance. It was the “ultimate concern” of their religiosity.³

Thus, the genesis of enslaved women’s religious consciousness and cultures in the Lower South is intertwined with men’s and children’s beginnings. Yet the gendered nature of their dismemberment generated ways of re/membering that intersected with and diverged from those of their counterparts. The enslaved female soul was born out of this tug and pull between dismemberment and re/membrance, collectivity and particularity, West Africa and the Americas.

The Dawn of Dismemberment: Slavery in the Upper Guinea Coast

On July 30, 1796, Captain Edward Boss and his crew set out from a port in Rhode Island, the slave-ship-building capital of anglophone North America, in a ship intended for the purchase of enslaved peoples on the West African coast. Ultimately bound for Savannah, Boss sailed first to an unknown port off the Windward coast, where he likely exchanged rum for a percentage of his human cargo, and then, perhaps due to unfavorable trading conditions or an undesirable inventory of bodies, he continued to Cape Mount to complete his purchases.⁴ American captains generally designed their voyages for a quick departure from the coast to reduce the instance of disease and illness among the crew members and captives. But the shifting landscape of powerful polities, rulers, and merchants in the region, along with the desire to secure “likely,” or good quality, captives, rendered Boss’s journey slightly longer than average.⁵ Nevertheless, on August 11, 1797, the Agenoria docked in Savannah.

Upon the disembarkation of the West African captives onto Georgia soil and the commencement of mercantile transactions for their bodies, female captives, along with their male counterparts, began to apprehend the meanings of their “slave” statuses through the monetary valuation of their bodies. Evincing the emergent gender norms surrounding enslaved African female bodies, adult male and female captives both sold for $300 per person during the first week of the sale.⁶ Juveniles sold for varying rates, according to age. While “boys” sold for $200, “man boys” commanded $260. The potential for “girls” to be immediately useful in a variety of domestic roles likely contributed to their higher valuation at $220–$230 per person. As evidenced by the sale of the Agenoria captives, British colonists’ known preference for male captives—in accordance with gender-based western European concepts of labor—did not eventuate a devaluation of captive female labor. On the contrary, through such transactions buyers and sellers of human flesh began to define the legal, social, monetary, and ontological meanings of the enslaved African in Georgia. In the end, the sale of the sixty-seven women, men, and children yielded $13,601.37. For their parts, Savannah importer Robert Watts and ship captain Edward Boss were $9,494.55 and $1,461.30 richer, respectively.⁷

Among the sixty-seven people sold, there were only nineteen “women” and six “girls.”⁸ Yet the low number of captive females relative to males belies the significance of female presences and gendered structures at the dawn of African American religious consciousness. The resignification of captive West and West Central African bodies as racialized human commodities in the transatlantic encounter with western Europeans has long been a focal point in scholars’ analyses of Black being and its relationship to the production of Black religion in the United States. As historian of religion Charles H. Long explains, the European African encounter inaugurated Africans’ “second creation” through Western categories, in which the being of the colonized was constructed via language “about” them, as opposed to knowledge “of” them.⁹ From the moment of encounter forward, the attempt to reconcile the first and second creations occupied the religious consciousness of oppressed African descendants: “The oppressed must deal with both the fictive truth of their status as expressed by the oppressors, that is, their second creation, and the discovery of their own autonomy and truth—their first creation. The locus for this structure is the mythic consciousness which dehistoricizes the relationship for the sake of creating a new form of humanity—a form of humanity that is no longer based on the master-slave dialectic. The utopian and eschatological dimensions of the religions of the oppressed stem from this modality.”¹⁰

Following Long’s lead, James A. Noel asserts that the racialization of African-descended bodies as a part of the machinery of colonialism and slavery fashioned “a new mode of being human in the world” and, in turn, constituted the Black body as a “new mode of materiality.”¹¹ Consistent with the Du Boisian concept of double consciousness, persons from the African continent acquired new ways of understanding themselves: as African and Negro. More than a means of hierarchization, these were modes of being—ontologies that signified the thought, practice, and culture of the people defined as “African” or “Negro”—imagined and prescribed by those who sought to justify their extraction from their homelands and enslavement in foreign parts. This racialized “imagination of matter” was a religious project. That is, religious symbols formed the psychic infrastructure for the new materiality. Ideas about the nature and meaning of captive African femaleness and maleness were pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Of the Faith of the Mothers
• Chapter One. Georgia Genesis: The Birth of the Enslaved Female Soul
• Chapter Two. Womb Re/membrances: The Moral Dimensions of Enslaved Motherhood
• Chapter Three. Sex, Body, and Soul: Sexual Ethics and Social Values among the Enslaved
• Chapter Four. The Birth and Death of Souls: Enslaved Women and Ritual
• Chapter Five. Spirit Bodies and Feminine Souls: Women, Power, and the Sacred Imagination
• Chapter Six. When Souls Gather: Women and Gendered Performance in Religious Spaces
• Conclusion: Gendering the “Religion of the Slave”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index