Many recognize the significant role that Black women play in current American religious life. They fill the pews, call back to their ministers, and attend to the needs of their communities. These roles have existed for centuries and root in the African experience. But the disruption of African lives through slavery and the slave trade had ruptured that connection. For decades, scholars have debated how permanent that disruption was and have generally skipped over any real explanation of how African practices survived into in the American Black church despite the rending of the body and spirit of enslaved Africans.
Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh has written an ambitious book in that it is breaking new ground to get at the inner lives of enslaved women to make those connections. The Souls of Womenfolk unearths the enslaved woman's lived experience and the way that enslaved African American women re-envisioned the religion of the enslaved. To do that, she reaches into the smallest and most intimate elements of human experience.
The ethereal nature of spiritual life and the meanings behind it have kept scholars from asking probing questions of populations such as enslaved women. Wells-Oghoghomeh overcomes this elusive story by examining the material circumstances of their religious practice and beliefs. In defiance of colonized archives that demean and erase the decisions, beliefs, and worldview of enslaved women, she scoured sources such as plantation records, WPA narratives, and enslaver and traveler diaries to reinterpret and reclaim the snippets about enslaved spiritual life that do exist. The book can then unpack how women reconstituted themselves after their loss of self, body, religion, and community during the slave trade.
Wells-Oghoghomeh herself draws upon venerable ancestors to describe their lives. First, she draws from Toni Morrison's use of dismemberment and remembrance to evocatively explain the dislocation of African women though the slave trade. She begins in the African experience, when enslaved people were wholly constituted and then carries the reader through the horrifying experience of the middle passage and the resulting “dismemberment” from one's culture, body, and soul. The rest of the book topically examines how women were central to “re-membering” the souls of black folk. In addition, the book extends WEB DuBois’ concept of double-consciousness by centering women and asserts that they possess a triple-consciousness.
The book itself begins by reconstituting the largely lost histories of black women in Africa, particularly in the Upper Guinea Coast. She uses elements of Guinea culture to fill in absences throughout the book—not because these practices survive, but because there are “cosmological continuities.” She reminds the reader that slavery existed in the African context, and that served them, but also that the American slave system racialized and dismembered them as they suffered the middle passage, particularly the experience of rape. When they began their new “American experience” in Georgia, where their bodies were monetized and subject to violence, they used their memories of Africa to re/member themselves and their communities.
The core chapters of the book review how the moral and ethical decisions of African women were made to reconstitute their humanity. Wells-Oghoghomeh examines how they understood the ways that sex and motherhood played roles in hierarchical status; but in the American context sex, motherhood, and marriage had nearly no ability to improve status but could in some situations help material circumstances and protect their children. Women therefore had to made difficult ethical decisions, unethical ones to the Christian moral systems, to keep themselves and their families intact.
She also shows how central women were to the gossamer moment of life and death. Women were the central figures in the coming of life as midwives and the primary health attendants for people at their death. Their presence at these moments of spiritual transition gave women great spiritual power in the community. This paired with traditional ideas of female power as witches and hags, to make them primary to the reconstitution of slave religion.
Therefore, when enslavers introduced Christianity to the enslaved community, women reconstituted the gathering of souls in church and other gatherings in innovative ways. This chapter recentered African cosmologies and women into African American religion. Rather than adding African flavor to Christianity, she argues that Christianity was molded atop African religious practices. Christian language helped to serve them to reframe ancient female power. She argues that the South was not particularly Christian but were subject to the religion of slavery. As such the formal churches had to adapt to enslaver demands of ministers to support slavery. The Christian church was a space, she argues, that the enslaved avoided as a space of surveillance. Instead, they sought to gather more secretly, closer to nature, and further from the gaze of their enslavers to move, sing, wail, and preach in the brush arbor. In this practice, women helped develop the novel Christian practices that would become the Black church.
This book deftly and in a sophisticated manner unearths and refashions the religious lives of the enslaved by proving that women and, therefore, gender stood at the center of understanding the development of Black American spirituality. This book should be required for any scholar examining slave religion and enslaved women. There is little to critique for such an ambitious book. However, the depiction of Africa does not really address the role Islam may have played in their African remembrances, and I would have liked to see more historiographical footnotes to recognize other scholarship and contextualize her study in relation. Nonetheless, this is a valuable addition to our understanding of the enslaved experience and religion.
