Katie's Canon

Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community, Revised and Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition

Katie Geneva Cannon

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506471297
• eBook ISBN: 9781506471303
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Katie's Canon is a selection of essays written for a variety of occasions throughout Cannon's celebrated career. This new edition contains three additional essays and a new foreword by Emilee Townes. The volume weaves together the particularities of Cannon's own history and the oral tradition of African American women, African American women's literary traditions, and sociocultural and ethical analysis. The result is a classic. Cannon addresses racism and economics, analyses of Zora Neale Hurston as a resource for a constructive ethic, the importance of race and gender in the development of a Black liberation ethic, womanist preaching in the Black church, and slave ideology and biblical interpretation.

Part One

Womanism as Unapologetic Moral Agency of Black Women Grounded in Consciousness, Critique, and Creativity

Katie’s Canon is a landmark text in the field of Christian ethics and a central starting point for womanist liberation ethics. Beginning with slave narratives, Cannon marks the moral situation of African American life historically by brutal exploitation of chattel slavery that sought to dehumanize, deny, and degrade by reducing Black people to prisoner, property, profit, and product. Au contraire, the countercultural inheritance of Black people through folklore, music, and spiritual practices illuminates a righteous resistance and enduring quest for freedom and justice against death-dealing odds in a white supremacist world. For Cannon, Black women are the oppressed of the oppressed, representing “the most vulnerable and the most exploited members of the American society” caught in the crossways of an ongoing struggle for human dignity, struggle against white hypocrisy, struggle for justice, and struggle to survive. Cannon adopts Alice Walker’s four-part definition of womanist as a critical, intersectional, methodological framework to confront inherited traditions and hegemonic ideologies that ordain Black women’s oppression while simultaneously redeeming their experiences and cultures and approaches employed to resist and rebel. Cannon takes up Black women’s literary tradition as a re/source to engage the “living space” of Black women’s complex and dynamic moral agency amid tripartite oppression at the intersections of race, gender, and class. By analyzing the life and literature of Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most preeminent thinkers of the twentieth century, Cannon introduces a womanist virtue methodology illuminating Black women’s moral wisdom that maintains a fervor for life even in the face of unrelenting oppression. Part One presents the earliest writings of Katie Cannon’s catalog introducing womanism as a critical approach to the academic study of religion and a prophetic social movement that values the moral agency of Black women grounded in consciousness, critique, and creativity.

1

Surviving the Blight

And when we (to use Alice Walker’s lovely phrase) go in search of our mothers’ gardens, it’s not really to learn who trampled on them or how or even why—we usually know that already. Rather, it’s to learn what our mothers planted there, what they thought as they sowed, and how they survived the blighting of so many fruits.

—Sherley Anne Williams1

I am most aware of the rich lore I inherited from my mother’s garden in Kannapolis, North Carolina. I recall particularly the stories shared during devastating thunderstorms. Whenever there were gusty winds and heavy rain accompanied by lightning and thunder, the Cannon household became—and still becomes—a folklore sanctuary. We turn off all the lights, unplug electrical appliances, and leave the supper dishes sitting in the kitchen sink. When the whole family is seated strategically around the kerosene lantern, my mother, Corine Lytle Cannon, moves into her role as creative storyteller.2

My mother’s style is to reminisce around a stock of historical images, themes, and cultural expressions that tell the story of the origin of Black people in America. Much of what she recounts is based on testimony shared across generations that her father, Emmanuel Clayton Lytle, born August 21, 1865, was the only free child in his family. My grandfather’s parents, siblings, and all others who preceded him were born into slavery. One of our favorite family legends centers on his mother, my maternal great-grandmother, Mary Nance Lytle, born in 1832. When freedom finally came, Grandma Mary walked hundreds of miles, from plantation to plantation, looking for the children who had been taken from her and sold as slaves. With only instinct to guide her, Grandma Mary persisted until she found all her children and brought the family back together.

As direct descendants of African American slaves, my family understands such tales as the indispensable source of Black people’s historical confidence and spiritual persistence despite all oppression. My mother’s keen memory and her extraordinary artistic sense enable her to pass on eyewitness accounts from freed relatives to succeeding generations. These narratives are the soil where my inheritance from my mother’s garden grew.

Historical Context

As a student of slave narratives, seeking the interior garden of Afro-American culture, I discovered unmistakable evidence that racial slavery in the United States was the cruelest of institutions. The unmitigated severity of slavery was based on the assumed principle of human chattelhood. As early as 1660, it was decreed that henceforth all Africans—and only Africans and their descendants—entering the colonies would be subjected to an entire institutional framework that required them to be treated as objects, as possessions, rather than as human beings. The principle of chattelhood enabled the inner dynamics of racial slavery to expand until it penetrated the basic institutional and ideological underpinnings of the entire normative order of society.

Acquisition of Slaves

The “Middle Passage,” the transoceanic travel of captive and enslaved Africans, has been described as the most traumatizing mass human migration in modern history. Over a period of nearly four centuries, somewhere between nine million and fifty million people from central and western areas of Africa were seized, loaded on ships, and transported to the Americas. Each year slavers systematically hunted tens of thousands of African women, men, and children; chained them in coffles; and packed them in barracoons. People of different tribes, languages, and cultures were driven along in caravans, placed in the dungeons of slave castles or corral-like stock pens, and branded with the slave company’s mark. Then they were shackled and crammed into the poorly ventilated holds of small ships, with their faces pressed against the backs of those lying in front of them. The treatment was so harsh that one out of every eight Africans died en route. So much wretchedness was never condensed in so little room as in the slave ships.

Status of Slaves

The status of chattel—mere property—was permanent, hereditary, and strictly racial. African and African American women, men, and children were reduced to the condition of livestock, and their value was calculated in real estate terms. Of all Western slaveholding areas, it was in the United States that slaves were defined most completely as sources of capital accumulation and commodities. All Afro-Americans (Blacks) were presumed to be slaves unless they could establish that they had been legally freed. The legalization of chattel slavery meant that the overwhelming majority of Blacks lived permanently in subhuman status. No objective circumstance—education, skill, dress, or bearing—could modify this fundamentally racist arrangement. This mode of racial domination meant that as chattel slaves, none of my ancestors were human beings legally, culturally, socially, or politically. They had no socially recognized personhood. Their status in US society was literally as things. The institution of slavery and its corollaries, white supremacy and racial bigotry, excluded Black people from every normal human consideration.

Afro-Americans faced many assaults, both cultural and physical. Like domestic animals, they were literally called “stock.” Their children were anticipated as “increase.” My Black foremothers were referred to as “brood sows and breeders.” My Black forefathers, when sold, were described, as were horses, as either “sound or unsound.” At slave auctions, Black people were stripped naked, exposed to public view, and dehumanized with pokes, probes, and crude physical examinations. Often traders made slaves run, leap, and perform acts of agility to demonstrate their “value” as chattel.

Contemporary assessments of racial slavery cannot afford to ignore this history of the virtually unlimited power of white slaveholders. The submission required of slaves was unbounded. Armed with absolute dominion over the slave, the master’s power extended to every dimension, including life and death. Slaveholders had the power to kill slaves with impunity. If a slave was injured or killed by someone else, the master could claim compensation comparable to damages due when an animal was harmed. A slave suffering from such a wrong was not considered the injured party. The slaveholder was considered to be the sufferer, damaged because of the loss of the slave’s labor. The death of a slave required neither official investigation nor report, any more than did the death of cattle. Non-Blacks on the American scene portrayed Black slaves to be dumb, stupid, or contented; capable of doglike devotion; wanting in basic human qualities. They used such caricatures to convince themselves that the human beings whom they violated, degraded, and humiliated or whose well-being they did not protect were unworthy of anything better.

Conditions of Slavery

Classified as pieces of movable property, devoid of the minimum human rights society conferred on others, my great-grandparents could neither own property nor make contracts. As slaves, they were not permitted to buy or sell anything at all except as their masters’ agents. They could not give or receive gifts. They could not travel without a pass. Afro-Americans had no security and no protection against insults and deliberate injuries inflicted on them. There was no one to hear their complaints of ill treatment, no power of appeal, no redress whatever. In essence, Black women, men, and children were denied all the conventionalized prerogatives of the human condition defined by the American culture.

Forced into the precise and irrevocable category of perpetual servitude durante vita, for all generations, Black people could not be legally married. Without the legal status of marriage, the union of a female slave and a male slave was considered as “cohabitation,” which was tolerated but might be terminated at will by slaveholders. White people differentiated between the basic rights and patterns of the family life they claimed for themselves as a “democratic” nation and those they deemed just treatment for their human merchandise. One former slave recalled, “My pa b’longin’ to one man and my mammy b’longin’ to another, four or five miles apart, caused some confusion, mix-up, and heartaches. My pa have to git a pass to come to see my mammy. He come sometimes without de pass. Patrollers catch him way up de chimney hidin’ one night; they stripped him right befo’ mammy and give him thirty-nine lashes, wid her cryin’ and a hollerin’ louder than he did.”3

Slaves were constantly being robbed of familiar social ties so that slaveholders could maximize their profits. All of the slave’s relationships existed under the shadowy but imminent threat of permanent separation. Black people lived in constant fear and regularly had to endure the reality of having their husbands, wives, and children sold away from them under conditions that made it unlikely that they would ever see one another again. Relationships between both blood kin and friends were broken up by the interstate migration of slave labor. Slaveholders were at liberty to give, sell, or bequeath African Americans to other persons: “A slave owner who broke up a family was not heartless by his lights. The kindliest of masters saw nothing wrong in giving a slave child to his son or daughter when they married. An economically pressed planter might regret that husbands and wives would be separated if he moved to the Southwest, but what could he do? Sometimes debts mounted and slaves were seized by the sheriff or owners died and estates were divided.”4 Countless slave families were forcibly disrupted.

Exploitation of Slave Workers

Be it in the Piedmont section, tidewater Virginia, the rice districts of South Carolina, or the lower Mississippi Valley, stories abound concerning my ancestors’ lot, memories of stripes and torture. Their labor was coerced without wages, extorted by brute force. Slaveholders inflicted on slaves any severity they deemed necessary to make slaves perform required tasks and meted out any sort or degree of punishment for failure to work as expected or for otherwise incurring their displeasure.

Answerable with their bodies for all offenses, slaves were beaten with horsewhips, cow straps, and a variety of blunt weapons. They suffered from scalding, burning, rape, and castration, sometimes dying from such inflictions. The great cruelty exhibited toward slaves resulted in instances of gouged-out eyes, slit tongues, and dismembered limbs. Sometimes slaves were physically marked by brands or tattoos or by wooden yokes or iron collars with long extended spokes. The callous and brutal system of slavery required a considerable number of slaves to wear chains, not only in the field during working hours, but also at night in their living quarters. Eli Coleman, born a slave in 1846, recalled, “Massa whooped a slave if he got stubborn or lazy. He whooped one so hard that the slave said he’d kill him. So Massa done put a chain round his legs, so he jes’ hardly walk, and he has to work in the fields that way. At night he put ’nother chain round his neck and fastened it to a tree.”5

The stark fact is that even while slaves lived under differing degrees of harshness, all slaves served under continuous duress:

A handsome mulatto woman, about 18 or 20 years of age, whose independent spirit could not brook the degradation of slavery, was in the habit of running away; for this offence she had been repeatedly sent by her master and mistress to be whipped by the keeper of the Charleston workhouse. This had been done with such inhuman severity, as to lacerate her back in a most shocking manner; a finger could not be laid between the cuts. But the love of liberty was too strong to be annihilated by torture; and as a last resort, she was whipped at several different times, and kept a close prisoner. A heavy iron collar, with three prongs projecting from it, was placed around her neck, and a strong and sound front tooth was extracted, to serve as a mark to describe her, in case of escape.6

The atrocious mutilation, too often practiced, was deeply rooted in and closely bound up with the whole existing system of chattelhood. The forms of permitted coercion effected a more complete dehumanization of slaves than had other institutional forms of slavery in earlier societies. Never before US chattel slavery was a people so systematically deprived of their human rights and submerged in abject misery. The intent was to crush the spirit and will in order to transform an entire race of people, their lives and their labor, into basic commodities of production and reproduction. White supremacists in the antebellum South believed that such systematic terrorism was absolutely necessary for the continuance of their highly prized way of life and of the economic organization, social relations, and political conditions necessary to it.

Even though the customary methods of enslavement were harsh and even ferocious, Black people worked in every branch of colonial trade and commerce. In addition to the gang labor on cotton, rice, tobacco, and sugar cane plantations, Black women and men worked as cooks, waiters, nurses, carpenters, masons, valets, gardeners, weavers, shoemakers, lumberjacks, and stevedores. Enslaved workers were also forced to work in mines, extracting coal, lead, iron, and gold. They built canals and pulled barges. Slaves dug tunnels, laid rails, and staffed the railroad system. Relegated to the quarries, slaves drilled and tapped explosives, cut and polished stones, and freighted them away. Working under the lash and guarded by overseers, bondswomen regularly performed virtually the same tasks as men.

The rigor of bondage meant that chattel slaves worked alw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
• Foreword to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition by Emilie M. Townes
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Womanism as Unapologetic Moral Agency of Black Women Grounded in Consciousness, Critique, and Creativity
• Part Two: Womanism as Indivisibly Inclusive Approach to Justice Making Essential to Survival and Wholeness of Entire People, Male and Female
• Part Three: Womanism as Defiant Affirmation of Loving Our Own Sources, Stories, and Culture, Regardless
• Part Four: Womanism as Continual Moral Commitment to Participate in Critical and Constructive Movements of the Dance of Redemption in Order to “Remember What We Never Knew”
• Notes