©2005 Albert J. Raboteau.  Any archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text in any medium requires the consent of the author.

©2005 Albert J. Raboteau.  Any archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text in any medium requires the consent of the author.

©2005 Albert J. Raboteau.  Any archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text in any medium requires the consent of the author.

I note that the subtitle of our session is: New Historiographical and Methodological Perspectives for the Study of Slave Religion New? Allowing for the vagaries of AAR session titles, often pulled out of session organizers at the last minute, I should not hold the panelists responsible. None of them claims innovation, and in fact their topics and methods are tried and true. The analysis of Inquisition records – the modus operandi of Heather White’s interesting analysis of 17 th century Cartagena witch trials is as old as Colin Palmer’s pioneering work in Slaves of the White God (1976) , a study of African slaves in Mexico. Gordon Melton’s close description of African Methodists, as he admits, goes back to the model of denominational study published in the 19 th and early 20 th century – such as Benjamin Arnett and James Handy, and Yolanda Pierce’s close reading of Solomon Bayley’s narrative also has precedents in previous histories, collections, and analyses of the slave narrative genre as autobiography, picaresque tale, abolition tract, and spiritual conversion narrative. One thinks of the early collection and editorial work of Dorothy Porter, the genre analysis of Marion Sterling, the literary reclamation of the narratives by Arna Bontemps, Charles Davis, and Paul Edwards, and their defense as valid historical evidence by John Blassingame. Slave narratives, especially the early ones of Gronniosaw, Marrant, and Equiano, are enjoying a renewed interest, a contemporary literary vogue, in the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Vincent Carretta, Adam Potkay, and others including Yolanda Pierce.

Nonetheless these papers do fit into and exemplify several new trends in the study of slavery:

1. The transatlantic character of slavery and the series of sustained encounters mediated by the Atlantic Ocean that resulted in complicated processes of religious change.
2. The agency of African Americans in the formation of their communal and institutional lives.
3. The both/and rather than either/or character of slave religion in its relationship to African and Euro-American perspectives.

1. Transatlantic Slavery

David Wills and I argued years ago at a New Orleans meeting of the AAR that the proper place to begin the story of African-American Religion is the encounter of Portuguese and Africans on the coast of present day Mauretania in the 1441, the first step in the creation of a transatlantic world – an enduring network of sustained encounters between diverse European, African, and after 1492, Indian peoples by means of the Atlantic Ocean. Institutions, attitudes, relationships established in the Eastern Atlantic by 1500 were projected westward to the American Atlantic in succeeding years. Scholars of American religion, familiar with the story of the Northern trans-Atlantic exchange of ideas, institutions, and people needed to become aware of the South Atlantic traffic of ideas, institutions and people, for the history of African-American religion to be adequately understood.

Like the system of encomeinda and the ritual of requerimiento, the Inquisition, an Iberian, particularly Castilian institution and its raison d’etre: protection of the purity of the Catholic faith was projected to New Spain and New Granada in the 16 th century to protect the colonies of the Spanish from the contagion of Islam or Judaism, and the snake’s nest of heresy, blasphemy, and witchcraft, by European colonists or their African slaves. Heather White’s paper fits nicely into this “transatlantic perspective” not only by demonstrating that the long arm of the Inquisition reached across the Atlantic to trouble the lives of African slaves, but to demonstrate the subtle ways in which the inquisitory process itself taught Spanish witchcraft beliefs and Christian dogma to uninstructed Africans, forming, as it were, a bizarre catechetical occasion for baptized, but uncatechized, claves in Cartagena. (A problem long noted by the Jesuit Pedro Claver and his mentor Alonso de Sandoval as she notes) What a poignant moment when Sebastian Botafogo, recounting his alleged renunciation of the Virgin Mary, confesses that “he didn’t know she was a virgin.” [Footnote 35]. My own favorite moment of such misinterpretation is the moment when Spanish colonists attacked a group of rebellious slaves in Panama shouting, “ Santiago,” and the slave rebels counterattacked, shouting, “ Santiago.” Such moments reveal a social and religious landscape studded with occasions of miscommunication, misunderstanding, and misinterpretation between bozales (first generation Africans) and colonists. These moments of misreading could prove extremely dangerous to enslaved Africans given the asymmetry of power in their relationships with Europeans. That Leonar, a Sape from Senegambia, Guiomar Bran from Senegambia, Polonia Bran from Senegambia, and Maria Linda, a Mandinke were able to use the rhetoric of confession and repentance to insure their own self-preservation is an example of black agency, well short of resistance as Heather argues, but nonetheless an exercise of agency within the narrow limits of being caught between the Devil and the Inquisition.

2. Black Agency

The transatlantic world of African slaves and their descendants was not only unidirectional. African Americans traveled within the hemisphere as Gordon Melton’s paper illustrates -- and as he and Yolanda Pierce both illustrate -- to Africa as well.

But the heart of their presentations is a second theme of current historiography: black agency. Melton’s paper constitutes a fuller institutional taxonomy of those black Methodists who never left the Methodist Church with Spencer, Allen, or the Zionites of New York City, but created often contested space for themselves within the denomination. What in effect Melton does is two-fold: he makes an important contribution to a long-standing problem within African-American religious historiography: the deficit in institutional history. We still need to know much more about the persons, the networks, and the activities of institutional churches and their leaders around which the structures of black community life were organized. And Melton is right, the AMEs have received the lion’s share of attention, due in part no doubt to the resonance of their archetypal myth of a black Exodus from white Methodist oppression at St. George’s. Melton’s focus on the Black Methodists who stayed highlights a concept most fully explored in our presider, Eddie Glaude’s book Exodus in which he analyses black religious organization as both a response to white discrimination and an expression of black community amid the formation of several publics.

The tendency to view denominational history as passé or unexciting ignores an important historical fact. Denominational identities and politics mattered very much indeed to black religious folk. Our late colleague and friend James Washington captured this point when he coined the term “black denomi nātionalism.”

Melton is surely right to emphasize the fact that African-Americans “were present from the beginning” of American Methodism, a denomination he asserts that was unique for its recruitment of African Americans. (A question lingering outside the scope of his paper is why was it that the strength of African Methodism in the 19 th century yielded to that of the Black Baptists by the 20 th?) Perhaps the major contribution of his paper is his discussion of the split within the Black community itself around denominational identity as the formation of the AME Church in 1816 forced a choice. He carefully enumerates the complex factors involved in the personal decisions of black Methodists to remain in the Sharp Street Church and with the ME Church:

1. A majority of members were slaves with less choice about their religious allegiance or free blacks whose slave relatives were members.
2. Leaving meant breaking long-term relationships and reorienting access to power, a serious step given the importance of patronage relations with Methodist hierarchy “which gave individuals an avenue to amelioration of practical problems,” an important support given the fragility of freedom.
3. The ME Church was a source of anti-slavery sentiment.
4. They thought a birthright was their due as participants in the ME Church’s origins.
5. Their presence constituted a demonstration of black equality.
6. Finally, they valued the ME Church for its development of black leadership.

3. Perspectival Ambiguity

While Melton’s paper deals with black institutional agency and denominational identity, Yolanda Pierce’s paper is about the agency of self-representation enacted with the African-American slave narrative. In that genre, beginning with its emergence in the transatlantic world of the evangelical press in the late 18 th century, the voice of African and African-American slaves, speaks of African humanity, equality, and spirituality in the context of anti-slave trade and abolition debates. The plot line of most of these narratives, including that of Solomon Bayley, constitutes a picaresque journey of incredible incidents, [illustrated by the title A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents], all governed by Divine Providence. These narratives describe a double journey from slavery to freedom, spiritual and physical. Their rhetorical structure frequently oscillates between an interpretive perspective that is (sometimes in the same paragraph) African and European. (See Equiano’s rapid shifts in pronouns from “we” to “they” or his Christian interpretation of Africans and African interpretation of Europeans). Pierce notes in Bayley’s narrative the merging of African and Western belief, which creates a “liminal space” for Bayley “in which he does not have to abandon one to adopt the other” (p. 3). She also points to the ambiguity of language about his wife, whom he consistently portrays in a passive role and the active role in which he portrays his grandmother, a “ Guinea woman” brought to American in 1690 at the age of eleven. His ambivalence is due to Bayley’s struggle to enact the pater familias role promoted by Christianity in a society that effectually prohibited it to slaves.

Similarly in his separate publication the 1832 Brief Account of the Colony of Liberia – an account of his missionary work and emigration to Liberia – Bayley both accepts values of Western civilization and values and the capacities and inherent religious beliefs of the Africans, leading him to embrace the ultimate ambiguity that “his duty as a Christian was to bring religion to the ‘benighted’ regions of Africa, while choosing to emigrate there as a true place of freedom, removed from the hell of American slavery.”

Perhaps the final ambiguity was the situation of the slave narrator, caught in the contradictory position of defending his or her people’s humanity – amidst an inhuman system produced by the very society he addresses.

Well, thanks to the three presenters for their interesting and valuable papers, which may not present “new historiographical and methodological methods for the study of slave religion” (we all stand on the shoulders of giants,) but certainly do offer significant contemporary contributions to the ongoing historical and literary effort to study the religious lives of African American slaves.