Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women

Mia E. Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Barbara D. Savage, Mia E. Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Barbara D. Savage

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781469620916
• eBook ISBN: 9781469620923
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite recent advances in the study of black thought, black women intellectuals remain often neglected. This collection of essays by fifteen scholars of history and literature establishes black women’s places in intellectual history by engaging the work of writers, educators, activists, religious leaders, and social reformers in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. Dedicated to recovering the contributions of thinkers marginalized by both their race and their gender, these essays uncover the work of unconventional intellectuals, both formally educated and self-taught, and explore the broad community of ideas in which their work participated. The end result is a field-defining and innovative volume that addresses topics ranging from religion and slavery to the politicized and gendered reappraisal of the black female body in contemporary culture.

Contributors are Mia E. Bay, Judith Byfield, Alexandra Cornelius, Thadious Davis, Corinne T. Field, Arlette Frund, Kaiama L. Glover, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Natasha Lightfoot, Sherie Randolph, Barbara D. Savage, Jon Sensbach, Maboula Soumahoro, and Cheryl Wall.

Part I: Diasporic Beginnings

Born on the Sea from Guinea

Women’s Spiritual Middle Passages in the Early Black Atlantic

JON SENSBACH

Geboren auf der See von Guinea. Born on the sea from Guinea. This German phrase is jotted in an eighteenth-century baptismal register of enslaved black parishioners in the Caribbean colony of St. Thomas. In flowing script, Moravian missionaries on the island recorded the origin or ethnic identity of new congregants: African designations such as Loango, Mandinga, and Amina, along with Creoles born in the West Indies. Name after name, page after page, year after year, the list is a rare composite biography of an emerging community of black Christians in America. But one man on the list, Simon, baptized in 1741, had neither African nor American birthplace. “Geboren auf der See von Guinea,” a missionary wrote beside his name. Simon was born on a slave ship.¹

Who could survive such a birth? What infant could live amid the filth in the ship’s hold, where chained captives languished for weeks on end in vomit and excrement? All around the newborn, people would have lain dying of disease, malnutrition, or depression; others would have tried to starve themselves, cut their own throats, or jump overboard, believing their souls would return to Africa. For the living, there were compulsory “dances” on deck, beatings, daily humiliations, the uncertainty of what would happen at the end of the trip. Yet somehow, amid the cruelty and death, an unidentified African woman brought a child into the world, nurtured it, kept it as clean as she could, and carried it to shore alive in the New World.²

How and why she did so, we can never know for certain. Perhaps there was simply no choice in her mind, though of course we know that in America some mothers practiced abortion and infanticide rather than raise a child in slavery. She must have had some conviction of life transcending the awfulness around her, of hope that something better lay ahead for her infant, of survival as an act of defiance against calamity. Perhaps she was aided in this determination by a growing shipboard community of fellow captives around her, whether from her own village or strangers from a different region, bonded by common misfortune as “shipmates,” spiritual kin whose ties of emotion were as strong as, or stronger than, bonds of blood. Since West Africans commonly believed that the living were bound together in the spirit world with ancestors and the gods, moreover, to bring a life into being and protect it was a sacred act, all the more poignantly insistent in so desecrated a place as a slave ship. Thus, though we know virtually nothing else about the mother of the child who would one day be christened Simon, the single glimpse of her that survives in the historical record constitutes a form of spiritual narrative of dislocation and affirmation in the passage from Africa to America.³

That narrative, in turn, becomes an allegorical origin story for the communities of African descent that emerged from the Middle Passage and took root in America under slavery. Bonds of kinship and community forged by shipmates “already announced the birth of new societies based on new kinds of principles.” African resistance to the violent discipline enforced by the slave ship’s crew, Marcus Rediker observes, constituted a “process of culture stripping from above and an oppositional process of culture creation from below.” In this way, writes Kamau Brathwaite, the hold of the slave ship became a “creative space” that gave rise to “the apparently miraculous transformation of imprisoned self in the New World.” Spirits and religious communities that were uprooted and sent into exile across the Atlantic remade themselves forever in the frenetic motion of the slave trade. African America was born on the sea from Guinea.⁴

Like Simon’s mother, women stood at the creative and spiritual heart of this delivery. They played important roles as priestesses, diviners, healers, and spiritual leaders in West African societies, capabilities they brought across the Atlantic to deploy in similar functions in the Americas. Yet, as with the unknown woman on the slave ship, the religious lives of black Atlantic women during the era of the slave trade have remained largely hidden from view.⁵ Only recently have women begun to receive much attention in studies of early black Atlantic religion.⁶ By contrast, a robust literature has emerged on African American religious women in the antebellum and the postemancipation United States, which recognizes that women have long formed both a numerical majority and the spiritual and organizational heart of black church communities. At the same time, African American religious history, particularly women’s role in it, has not always figured prominently in the broader field of intellectual history, which has traditionally equated knowledge with literacy and dwelled on the lettered discourses of highly educated elites. In the transatlantic African diaspora to the Americas, enslaved people were largely denied access to literacy. And yet, if the fundamental basis of intellectual history is the history of the creation and transmission of ideas, then women’s spiritual epistemology must be placed at the center of any African American religious history, even if their ideas were not always written down.⁷

Documentary evidence about black Atlantic women’s religious sensibilities during this period is hard to come by. In part this lacuna is a long-standing echo of the two-to-one ratio by which men predominated over women in the slave trade itself; there is simply less information about women in the kinds of sources that historians traditionally use to study slavery, such as planters’ journals, court records, tax rolls, baptismal registers, and the like. Such documents are by definition already fragmentary and skewed toward the planters’ perspective, leaving the archival record largely silent on the personal lives of enslaved people.

As well, there are different kinds of documentary silences concerning women of African descent. Some silence reflects enslaved people’s inability to enter the written record, especially the bureaucratic apparatus of the colonial archive, other than as human commodities or as workers to be controlled and disciplined. When, out of rare anthropological curiosity or the desire to note a “heathenish” practice that should be suppressed, the authorities did observe enslaved people’s spirituality, which they usually denigrated as superstition or witchcraft, they misrepresented what they saw for their own purposes. As a result, captives, both men and women, often found it expedient to conceal their spiritual activities for strategic purposes, giving rise to what we might call the “articulate silences” spawned by the ideological war between masters and slaves. The paucity of sources yielded by this half-imposed, half-chosen invisibility amplifies the difficulty of retrieving women’s religious experiences after the Middle Passage.⁸

The disparity in sources supporting the study of men’s spirituality and those contributing to the study of women’s widens when we consider the kinds of first-person narratives by black Atlantic authors that historians have eagerly seized on in recent years as survivors’ testimony of the slave trade and testament of religious striving. A small but important core of Atlantic slave narratives from the eighteenth century has aided scholars immeasurably in retrieving the lost spiritual lives of enslaved Africans and African Americans. Almost all the authors are men—foremost among them the towering figure of Olaudah Equiano, whose charisma and un-matched narrative make him the archetypal survivor of the Middle Passage and witness against the slave trade. Other figures are emerging as part of a canonical corpus of autobiographies from the Anglophone African Atlantic world—James Albert Gronniasaw, Venture Smith, Ottobah Cuguano, and others. These are supplemented by a body of narratives by American-born black Atlantic figures such as John Marrant, Boston King, and David George, describing the intertwined journey to physical liberation and spiritual freedom in Christianity that frames a compelling exodus narrative from revolutionary America to Nova Scotia, Britain, and Sierra Leone.⁹

In the postrevolutionary United States, similarly, strong religious leaders such as Richard Allen and Absalom Jones embody a parallel archetypal “black Founding Fathers” narrative of African American dignity and self-assertion. As powerfully as all these declarations forecast an emancipatory black Atlantic history, scholars tend to rely on the same clutch of male leaders and writers, unintentionally reducing this pivotal epoch in Black Atlantic striving and religious awakening to an age of masculine self-assertion and literary self-discovery.¹⁰

But women disappear in this version of early black Atlantic history. Important spiritual autobiographies by women of African descent begin to date from slightly later, principally from the 1830s onward. The narratives and other writings of the Hart sisters, Jarena Lee, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Maria Stewart, and others represent a testament against slavery and a witness for black women’s spirituality in the early nineteenth-century United States and British Caribbean. These eloquent documents often make an explicit link between gender and religious expression. When Bishop Richard Allen sought to deny Jarena Lee’s right to preach, for example, she protested: “If a man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? Seeing he died for her also. Is he not a whole Saviour, instead of a half one? As those who hold it wrong for a women to preach would seem to make it appear.”¹¹

Still, there is no corresponding body of black women’s narratives from the eighteenth century, when the slave trade was as its height, siphoning as many as 100,000 people a year from Africa, and when women of African descent were striving as mightily as men to assert themselves spiritually in the face of the maelstrom. Phillis Wheatley’s poetry probably comes closest to the writings of the iconic male figures in asserting a religious sensibility, but there is no female Equiano to break free of the colonial archive and from the hegemony of early black Atlantic male authorship. Because of the scarcity of direct testimony from black women, their experiences remain elusive during the period when Africans were most numerous in the colonial population and the impact of African cosmologies on America was greatest.

These obstacles confronted me when I stumbled across the little-known story of a religious activist from the eighteenth-century black Atlantic named Rebecca Freundlich Protten. A Dutch-speaking former slave of mixed African and European parentage in the Danish West Indian colony of St. Thomas, the young evangelist helped inspire an enthusiastic embrace of Christianity among enslaved Africans in the 1730s. Documentary fragments suggest she had led a remarkable life, that she had married a white missionary, been tried and jailed for sedition, migrated to Europe, and lived in Germany for twenty years; and that, with her second husband, an African-born missionary, she had lived her final twenty years as a schoolteacher on the Gold Coast of West Africa before her death in 1780. I found a few letters she had written in Dutch and German, but was there enough material for a spiritual biography of a black woman in the age of the slave trade? And if so, could her unusual Atlantic reverse-migration story tell us anything about black women’s religious experiences more broadly?

Against these difficulties was the growing awareness that there was information about Protten, more than I at first suspected. Most of it took the form of brief snippets lurking in German-language mission reports and diaries recorded by Moravian missionaries on St. Thomas, well preserved in church archives in Germany and Pennsylvania. In the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen I discovered a transcript from her trial, as well as documents from her years in Africa. Such diffuse fragments were plentiful enough to provide the outline for nearly every stage of her life, from the West Indies to Europe to Africa, and they demonstrated that she was an essential figure in the rise of eighteenth-century black evangelical Christianity. In St. Thomas, missionaries installed a cadre of black lay exhorters called “fishermen,” after the “fishers of men” in Matthew 4:19; though they did not call her one, Rebecca Protten was a fisher of women, an equivalent in her time and place to her contemporaries George Whitefield and John Wesley. Her own story was a window onto the dramatic spectacle of a mass popular movement of enslaved people defying sadistic masters by the hundreds to claim Christianity as their own religion—an African Caribbean outpost of the Great Awakening.¹²

Beyond the specific contours of her life, Protten’s story illustrates several broader lessons. One is that, despite their limitations, colonial archives are often still the only source bases we have, and their secrets are far from tapped out. Where women of color were found throughout the early modern Atlantic world, we would expect them to leave footprints in the archive ranging from very faint to bold, and so they did, sometimes in outlines discernible enough to reveal traces of their personal lives and religious journeys. And while Protten’s experiences were by no means typical of black women in the eighteenth century, they represent the search by enslaved and free black women for some spiritual reckoning with the effects of the slave trade, especially, as in this instance, through a turn to Christianity.

In 1739, for example, a West African woman named Magdalena, an elder in a congregation of black Christians that emerged on St. Thomas, wrote a letter to the queen of Denmark. The growing popularity of Christianity among enslaved plantation workers on the island had provoked the anger of white planters terrified that religion might inspire a slave revolt. When the planters violently punished worshipers and imprisoned the missionaries who instructed them, including Protten, Magdalena and other black leaders organized a bold response, mobilizing hundreds of congregants to sign petitions to the king and queen of Denmark asking for help. One group of leaders wrote on behalf of more than “six hundred and fifty black scholars of Jesus Christ,” while Magdalena wrote an additional letter in an unidentified African language—probably from the Fon-Ewe linguistic family—that, despite its brevity, is one of the most remarkable documents to emerge from the African diaspora to America. In it, she asks the queen to lift the persecution of Friedrich Martin (“Baas Martinus” in Dutch Creole), the German preacher in charge of the mission whom the planters identified as a troublemaker:

Great Queen! At the time when I lived in Papaa, in Africa, I served the Lord Masu. Now I have come into the land of the Whites, and they will not allow me to serve the Lord Jesus. Previously, I did not have any reason to serve Him, but now I do. I am very sad in my heart that the Negro women on St. Thomas are not allowed to serve the Lord Jesus.

The Whites do not want to obey Him. Let them do as they wish. But when the poor black Brethren and Sisters want to serve the Lord Jesus, they are looked upon as maroons. If the Queen thinks it fitting, please pray to the Lord Jesus for us and let her intercede with the King to allow Baas Martinus to preach the Lord...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women
• PART I: Diasporic Beginnings
• PART II: Race and Gender in the Postemancipation Era
• PART III: Redefining the Subject of Study
• PART IV: Intellectual Activism
• PART V: The Long View
• Contributors
• Index