TONGUES 6 страница

Back to the early nineteenth century, however, and to an encounter between a white man and Pompey, a black Methodist preacher in Mississippi. Why, asked the white man, did the enslaved man sing hymns all day? “It makes my soul so happy,” Pompey responded. “You simpleton,” replied the white man. “A negro has no soul.” New evangelical denominations have always drawn converts from the poor and the excluded—as in early twenty-first-century Brazil, for instance—because emotional conversion experiences and informal participatory services treat disempowered people as if they have souls equal in value to those of the powerful. Yet one of the fracture lines along which evangelical Protestant denominations have split has been the question of whether believers like Pompey should challenge structures of worldly power.

The “perfectionist” evangelicals who began to create and support moral reform movements in the North after 1830, including the new abolitionism, insisted that Jesus’s instruction—“Feed my sheep”—required believers to improve their society and protect the weak from the sins of the strong. In the slave society, however, official theology’s social prescription was slowly bent to a different frame. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, as conversion experiences and churchgoing became the expected thing for proper white citizens, most Christianized enslavers abandoned the claim that African Americans had no souls to be saved. Thus, they had to “consider the dreadful responsibility,” as a Methodist minister told Natchez whites, that they “would incur if [they] prevented the Negroes from hearing the message sent by our gracious Creator to the whole family of the human race.” From 1800 to the 1820s, mixed black-and-white frontier congregations emerged, and they welcomed new African-American members. When “Adam[,] a black brother,” joined Louisville Baptist Church in Mississippi, all the members—white and black—greeted him with “the right hand of fellowship.” As churches multiplied, more enslaved people could avoid worshipping with their masters on the Sabbath.⁵⁵

“However sable their hue and degraded their condition in life,” a group of Mississippi Baptist preachers reminded their fellow enslavers, enslaved African Americans “possess rational and immortal souls.” Yet the pull of slavery distorted white evangelicals’ theology, and by the 1820s whites in biracial churches were deleting rituals that recognized recently joined African Americans as “brother” and “sister.” After the Missouri crisis, touchy enslavers claimed that a “Christian,” paternalistic slavery would counter criticism of the South. Along with neutralizing the bad odor of the whipping-machine, ministers writing in new denominational magazines insisted that conversion to white-authenticated Christianity would not infect enslaved people with the idea that Jesus came to set the captives free. Instead, they generated a tame theology that was in many ways the Calvinist opposite of the early slave-frontier revivals, with their emphasis on a believer’s decision to ask for forgiveness and faith. Even as famous northern evangelical Charles Finney told tens of thousands of converts in 1820s Erie Canal boomtowns that they could choose to turn to God for salvation, Mississippi Baptists were trying to ensure that the enslaved believed that nothing important in heaven or on earth was up to their choosing. God himself, the Baptists’ state convention announced, had established their bondage: “However dark, mysterious, and unpleasant these dispensations may appear to you we have no doubt they are founded in wisdom and goodness.” “The great God above has made you for the benefit of the Whiteman, who is your law maker and law giver,” a Kentucky captor preached to his human property, whom he had gathered in his yard for his Sunday morning sermon.⁵⁶

Enslaved people, however, believed otherwise. In 1821, one Georgia slave wrote a letter to a white preacher. “If I understand the white people,” he wrote, “they are praying for more religion in the world.” Well then, “If god sent you to preach to sinners did he direct you to keep your face to the white people constantly or is it because they give you money?” “ We are carried to market and sold to the highest bidder,” and whites “never once inquire whither you are sold, to a heathen or a Christian?” Ye t enslaved people continued to flock to churches, even if ministers turned their backs on them, and to hold their own religious meetings as well. For in the story of Jesus, believers found kinship and a promise. Jesus was a god made mortal, a wrongly captured man who endured torture and violent death. Forced migrants already knew what it was like to journey into a grave. But the story told them that Jesus had risen from his tomb and returned to tell the captives of a new kingdom whose gate he had opened.⁵⁷

So now one understands how that teenaged girl, the one interviewed as an old woman, had come to be in a Tennessee prayer meeting. She was agonizing over her future, specifically, over her inability to protect her first child, who had just been born, from violence, hunger, and separation. And one understands why, when the girl heard a voice no one else could hear and rose up from her knees in wonder, her own mother rushed to her side to guide her to the edge. “Pray on, daughter,” she remembered the older woman telling her, “for if the Master has started to working with you, he will not stop until he has freed your soul.” The mother had already traveled this road, and she pushed her fearful daughter against all the impending crucifixions she’d have to survive. “It wasn’t long,” the daughter remembered, before, collapsing to the ground, “I died.”⁵⁸

She fell into an abyss. But as the young woman plunged, a different voice, a new one, breathed in her ear. It told her that the thefts in her own life, and her own transcendence of them, mattered. Both, it told her, were part of the greatest drama in creation. And it told her not to hide from the pain and the fear, but to plunge into her own desolated emotions and powerless complicity, for the voice specifically said, “You must die and go to hell,” or she could not live again. She twitched, and was fully in the dream.

She found herself walking down the slave trail. People who survived the southwestern daylight fields called the acres of cotton “Hell without fires” for the sad zombies and evil demons that stalked in them, but in the perpetual night on each side of this road, she could see the fires clearly. Flames raged unceasing in the cotton and logs and stumps. Beside her staggered stolen people, people lost in their chains. People who did not know their own names. She saw babies left on the ground by mothers. She heard mothers whose screams sounded like wounded animals.⁵⁹

The coffle she was in came to the forks in the road. A little man stood there. He beckoned her to follow him up a narrow path. Because this was a dream, a vision, somehow she had come unlinked from the coffle, so follow him she did. She gasped for breath, lagging as she struggled up the path’s dizzying switchbacks. So the man called down “a great multitude” of angels, and told them to sing to her as she climbed. “Mama, Mama, you must help carry the world,” they chanted. What would become of her baby, what would become of her, she could not know. Somehow she had to care for, instruct, defend her child against forces too heavy to fight. She had a whole world to carry.

Then the angels began to sing her name. They sang her weary legs to the top of the stairs, where the last step emptied upon a high courtyard. There she stood, and somehow she knew she stood before God. A disembodied voice rang out. “How did she come?” Ranks of spirits flickered into sight, and they echoed the question in song. In her waking life, not even her mother knew how hard her path had been. But a second voice did know. It said what she couldn’t: “She came through hard trials with the hell-hounds on her trail.” She realized that voice had breathed in her ear all along. Mary and Martha, Jesus’s helpers, came forward, clothed her with a new robe, and the first voice said: “You are born of God. My son delivered your soul from hell and you must go and help carry the world.”

She awoke. She was alive. She believed that the most powerful forces in the universe could name the pains and fears that even she could not. These forces recognized her. From them, she was not stolen. All she had to do in return for this gift was to carry the whole world.⁶⁰

The experience of spiritual death and rebirth reassured converted slaves that they had a value and a responsibility that went far beyond the number of dollars one could sell for, of pounds one could pick, or of babies one could bear for the market. They spoke of their own transformed spirits as being set free from the fear that their enslavers were, in the end, their final judges. “I heard a voice speak to me,” said William Webb. “From that time I lost all fear of men on this earth.”⁶¹

No matter how vigorously white preachers argued that conversion made slaves more docile, enslavers worried that freedom from fear might launch other quests for change. True, in the New Testament, as nineteenth-century Christians often heard it, the Spirit gave redemption from sin and commanded forgiveness. Many Christian slaves believed that God had commanded them to put violent vengeance aside, if only for their own souls’ sake. But following the command to forgive one’s enemies was a difficult task—“a lifetime job,” said one ex-slave: “I don’t care how long God lets me live, it will still be a hard job.” And forgiveness did not mean that enslaved people believed that the thieving powers of this world would never bow, that the lowest would not one day be the highest, or that their kidnappers would never face judgment. “Him claiming to be a Christian! Well I reckon he’s found out something about slave driving by now,” mused ex-slave Robert Falls about his now-dead former owner, whom he believed was toiling on Satan’s labor camp. “The good Lord has to get his work in some time.”⁶²

But there was another text available. In some books of the Old Testament, the Spirit kindled not forgiveness but the uncompromising fire of holy warriors like Sampson or Saul, commanding them to slay all the Lord’s enemies down to the last man, woman, and child. And many enslaved migrants dreamed of that. “The idea of a revolution in the conditions of the whites and the blacks is the corner­stone of the religion of the latter,” recalled Charles Ball of conversations among other captives of Wade Hampton. “Heaven will be no heaven” to the average slave, Ball said, “if he is not to be avenged of his enemies.”⁶³

Perhaps God demanded that his followers start to “get his work in,” even if avengers lost their lives in the process. That impulse found fertile soil in Southampton County, Virginia, an old tobacco county where the accelerating growth of slavery carved deep scars in the 1820s. John Brown, born there around 1818—the year Francis Rives took his first coffle from Southampton to Alabama— belonged to an old white woman. She “used to call us children up to the big house every morning, and give us a dose of garlic and rue to keep us ‘wholesome,’ as she said, and make us ‘grow likely for market.’” Then she “would make us run round a great sycamore tree in the yard, and if we did not run fast enough to please her, she used to make us nimbler by laying about us with a cow-hide.”⁶⁴

Throughout the 1820s, the new national slave market drained people like Brown from Southampton. Forty-eight of them, for instance, passed through the hands of New Orleans slave traders between late 1829 and early 1831. In Southampton, the enslaved despaired over the increasing destabilization of their temporal lives, and whites tried to extend their control over African Americans’ spiritual lives. In 1826, an enslaved Southampton lay preacher named Nat Turner had told a white man named Ethelred Brantley of his religious visions. Brantley believed that Turner’s touch cured him of a skin disorder. The two decided they wanted Turner to baptize Brantley at a local Methodist church, but the white church hierarchy would not let Turner perform the ritual. So Turner and Brantley went down to the river, where Turner baptized him. A crowd of whites gathered, and “reviled us.” So the preacher later put it.⁶⁵

By 1828, Nat Turner had stopped believing that he should leave vengeance in God’s hands. Instead, he saw visions that he thought demanded violence: white people and black people fighting in the sky, blood condensing like dew on the corn, a voice like thunder telling him, “Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bear it.” Turner retreated into his wilderness. He later said, speaking to a local Southampton lawyer named Thomas R. Gray, who recorded Turner’s words and published them as The Confessions of Nat Turner, “I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.” With his orders clear, Turner gathered a small group of angry, broken men into his confidence and waited for another sign. Then, in early 1831, a total eclipse blocked out the sun.⁶⁶

THE FIRST HEADLINES DID not reach New Orleans until September 1831. But from there the news spread quickly up the river-veins of the slave frontier’s network of steamboats and cotton landings. In Southampton County, on August 22, insurgent slaves had begun killing whites. Almost sixty had been slaughtered in a two-day rampage across Southampton. They included a baby in a crib and ten children in a log-cabin school. Then masses of white troops descended on Southampton and crushed the revolt. They executed, through shootings, beheadings, and torture, about fifty African Americans, many of whom had not participated in the rebellion. Turner himself was captured two months later, then tried, convicted, and hanged—but not before dictating his confessions to Gray.⁶⁷

Southwestern whites suddenly realized that their system had inhaled tens of thousands of people who had been stolen from Southampton and similar counties that had been devastated by the professional slave trade over the past decade. Alabama’s governor activated the state militia. Newspapers in New Orleans suppressed reporting of the rebellion until authorities could collect enough weapons to defeat copycat attacks, but word still got out. In Louisiana’s West Feliciana Parish, a white widow heard a rumor that the slaves on a nearby labor camp “had armed themselves and claimed their liberty.” “She instantly started screaming and crying as loud as she could,” a calmer neighbor recorded in her diary. The widow demanded that a male neighbor go find out what was happening, but instead, he called out the members of the local militia, who assembled and marched to the alleged epicenter. There they “found the overseer and the Negroes very busy at gathering the crops,” picking cotton “as peaceable as lambs.”⁶⁸

“The proper officers of the state should take measures to prevent the importation of slaves” from “the infected section of the country,” wrote the New Orleans Bee. The editor had stopped trusting certificate laws to filter the old states’ most rebellious enslaved people from the stream of the slave trade. Despite opposition from ambitious cotton and sugar entrepreneurs, an emergency session of the state legislature banned the slave trade. (Reading the writing on the wall, traders rushed in 774 more slaves before the special session ended.) The Alabama legislature also raced into session and prohibited the trade. The next spring, Mississippi held a constitutional convention. There were so many enslaved migrants around booming Natchez, said planter-banker Stephen Duncan, that “we will one day have our throats cut in this country.” Elitist representatives from the Natchez area and delegates from the poor-white “piney woods” formed an unusual alliance and incorporated a slave-trade prohibition in the new constitution.⁶⁹

Of course, buyers and sellers immediately began to poke loopholes in the slave-trade prohibitions. Buyers traveled to the Chesapeake. Traders filled out declarations swearing that the slaves they were transporting were for their own use only. Legislators from the newer cotton counties in Mississippi, who still wanted slaves, blocked implementation of that state’s constitutional ban, so the biggest traders moved their headquarters from New Orleans to the “Forks in the Road” market just north of Natchez. But back East, Virginia—the site of the rebellion and still the home of the South’s largest slave population—had called a state constitutional convention to consider emancipation. In the course of the deliberations, Thomas Jefferson’s grandson Thomas Randolph proposed a statewide referendum of white voters on whether Virginia should initiate gradual emancipation.⁷⁰

Randolph’s plan would have made all slaves born after July 4, 1840, into state property upon adulthood. Virginia would then hire out these slaves, saving the wages to pay, ultimately, for the expenses involved in exiling them “beyond the limits of the United States.” Under this plan, many Afro-Virginians would have still been enslaved in the early twentieth century, although Randolph assumed that before then, most enslavers would cash out by selling them south. Randolph was proposing to revive his grandfather’s dream: the exile of Virginia’s slave population and the creation of an all-white Old Dominion. Many, such as fellow delegate Thomas Marshall, son of John Marshall, the chief justice of the US Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835, supported Randolph’s proposal, believing that slavery was “ruinous to whites.” The “industrious population” of non-slaveholding whites was emigrating in order to flee a state whose biggest business was raising people for the southwestern market. And if they continued, Marshall predicted—invoking the fate of Saint-Domingue whites—“the whole country [of Virginia] will be inundated by one black wave... with a few white faces here and there floating on the surface.”⁷¹

Yet other delegates warned that the state’s entire economy depended on the price point of a single commodity: that of hands at New Orleans. If the Randolph plan passed, Virginia enslavers would rush to sell their human property south at one time and the price would plummet. Slave owners were vested in the slave market, and most of them wanted the government to defend and expand their right to nearly unfettered use of their property—not to limit it. The Virginia convention rejected Randolph and approved the status quo, though it added new limits on slave literacy and on free black life. Over the next three years, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Maryland imposed similar restrictions. Enslavers had already imposed the like in the southwestern states.⁷²

Limits on literacy and on contact with free blacks aimed to restrict access to ideas about freedom. Proslavery politicians blamed the first appearance of Garrison’s Liberator in January 1831 for Nat Turner’s decision later that year to bathe Southampton County in white folks’ blood. The Georgia legislature even offered a $5,000 reward for Garrison’s apprehension. But enslavers also feared that African-American Christianity itself might generate danger from within. Governor John Floyd of Virginia wrote that “every black preacher... east of the Blue Ridge” had known about Turner’s plot. Misguided white piety had permitted “large assemblages of negroes” at which black preachers had allegedly read out the “incendiary publications of Walker [and] Garrison.” An Alabama newspaper warned of “shrewd, cunning” slave preachers. Should revolt break out in the southwestern region, “Some crispy-haired prophet, some pretender to inspiration, will be the ring-leader as well as the inspiration of that plot. By feigning communication from heaven, he will rouse the fanaticism of his brethren, and they will be prepared for any work, no matter how desolating and murderous.”⁷³

Southwestern enslaver-politicians decided to put an end to independent black Christianity. Mobile, Alabama, banned gatherings—including religious ones—of more than three slaves. The punishment for violation was “twenty stripes” on the back. The local newspaper wrote, “The managers of the Mobile Sunday School [have decided] that hereafter no colored person will be received for instruction who does not bring written permission to that effect from the owner.” The Mississippi state legislature made it illegal for any “slave, free negro, or mulatto... to exercise the function of a Minister of the Gospel.” All religious practice, aside from individual prayer, would now be kept under the eyes of enslavers and their henchmen—which is what evangelical ministers now volunteered to be. White ministers eagerly promised that they would henceforth work harder than ever to make Christianity into a tool that would help enslavers govern their society.⁷⁴

With independent black preaching now illegal in most places, white Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians offered two legal religious options to the enslaved. The first one was to affiliate with white churches. There, African Americans could look forward to unequal status and discipline. In bigger churches, they’d sit in the upstairs galleries. In the log church that Annie Stanton attended in the Alabama woods, she actually had to sit outside the door with her fellow slaves on benches. After the white preacher’s sermon was done, a black preacher would come out and talk to them, while whites supervised.⁷⁵

The second strategy was the creation of “slave missions”: white preachers, funded and regulated by white denominations, would be sent to preach to black congregations. The proslavery sermons that slave missions delivered were the South’s interior version of the arguments that were to be, beginning in the 1830s, increasingly projected at the region’s exterior critics. Ministers developed a theological argument that claimed that Christianity justified slavery. They leaned on the apostle Paul, with his admonitions to servants to obey their masters. Increasingly they also argued that a holistic view of the Bible showed that slavery was not sinful. In fact, they said, God had ordained that the Israelites, and white people in general, could enslave allegedly inferior “Hamitic” peoples (supposedly descended from Ham, one of Noah’s sons), such as Africans, so long as they treated the latter with paternalistic goodness.

In this view, slavery’s critics were willfully refusing to read the Bible closely enough to recognize that slavery was God-ordained; abolition doctrines were merely attempts to supplant the word of God with individual will. And this went for potential southern critics as well as northern ones. James Smylie, a prominent Presbyterian minister from Mississippi, and (by 1840) the captor of thirty men, women, and children, argued in 1836 that a slaveholder “whose conscience is guided, not by the word of God, but by the doctrines of men”—i.e., by the anxiety that antislavery Christians might have a point—“is often suffering the lashes of a guilty conscience.” But he should not suffer. God had created some people unfit for freedom. Slavery was God’s will. To worry about slavery was to doubt God. To oppose it was heresy.⁷⁶

BY 1835, ISRAEL CAMPBELL, who had been transported from Kentucky to the cotton “system” of Mississippi, had become a “first-rate hand” and more. He drove a work gang on a slave labor camp near the little crossroads town of Mount Vernon. Campbell had been granted as much status as any white Mississippian was willing to give him. Yet one night, when someone pounding on his cabin door jolted him out of sleep, he woke up to discover how little protection he had. Stumbling out of bed, he unlatched the door and tumbled backward as two white men shoved their way in. One grabbed Campbell by the collar and pulled his throat toward the point of a bowie knife. “What do you know about Dr. Cotton’s scrape?” the man growled.

“Nothing at all, sir,” stammered Campbell. That was true. But he did know who Dr. Cotton was. And that had him shaking. Cotton was a white man who had come from up north to practice as a “steam-doctor”—a “Thompsonian” physician, who claimed he could treat many illnesses and complaints by having the patients inhale large quantities of steam and small quantities of medicine. Though Thompsonian homeopathy was less likely to kill the patient than the massive chemical doses prescribed in those days by traditional physicians, steam-doctors were thought of as itinerants from society’s fringe. And somehow Cotton had given the impression that he was overly friendly with local African Americans. Emphasizing their questioning with a blade pressed against Campbell’s throat, these men told him that “Dr. Cotton and some mean white men and a great many of the negroes were laying plans to rise and kill off the white people and free the negroes.” Then they said that they knew Campbell had recently attended a secret, illegal prayer session in the woods led by “Harris’ old Dave, the negro preacher.” Clearly, they suspected that Campbell was also involved in the alleged plot. How long had he stayed? Did he know if slaves had talked “about getting free and killing the white people?”

Campbell desperately denied hearing anything of the sort. Somehow he convinced the interrogators that he had nothing to do with a conspiracy. The knife moved away from his throat. The men offered him a convivial shot from their stoneware jug. Campbell’s hand shook as he raised the brandy to his lips. It burned going down, like the drinks auctioneers gave men and women on the block, but the men watched with approval as he took their cup. Campbell wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. They warned him that anyone connected with the plot would be shot, and then they clattered off in the night. Campbell watched from the doorway as they rode away. He knew that the excitement and fear he’d seen mingled in their eyes was going to condemn some people to death before the sun rose.⁷⁷

If there was a plot, all Campbell knew about it could probably be inferred from the tales he and his peers had told each other about their own stolen lives. The whites had their own feared storyline, which had been seared into their brains long before Southampton. To stop that one from coming to pass, all around the neighborhood that evening, groups of white men were dragging slaves out of cabins and questioning them. In terror, some charged others with crimes that never existed. When the night was over, when enough victims had been rounded up, the vigilantes—most of whom were local planters—began to hang the condemned in Mount Vernon. For two days, they dropped and strangled black preachers and worshippers from a pole between two high Y-shaped posts. They also strung up a few white men who, like Dr. Cotton, had crossed a racial barrier.⁷⁸

Afterward, the vigilantes came back and got Campbell. This time, they only wanted him to wait tables at a banquet, where the planters of the area praised themselves for saving Mississippi from destruction. Walking home the morning after the party, Campbell saw the heads of hanged black preachers impaled on roadside stakes. And that was almost the last time Campbell saw Old Dave and his brothers. But not quite. He came face to face with them again once that fall. Not long before Campbell’s owner moved his slaves yet again, this time to Tennessee, Campbell went into the little apothecary’s shop that served as Mount Vernon’s pharmacy, and there he saw the grinning skulls of Dave and his apostles displayed on its shelves.

Israel Campbell had been seeking God for a long time, “but in Mississippi there were so many drawbacks” that he could not “make my peace with God,” he later said. Indeed, religious seeking had almost made him one of white Mississippi’s bleached trophies. But Campbell was still drawn to chase the same God who didn’t intervene when white people set the buzzards’ table at Mount Vernon. In Tennessee, Campbell tried again. He and his wife attended every nearby religious meeting. Frenetically, he sneaked off twice a day to a “praying-ground” he had cleared at a secret place deep in the woods. On his knees he battled his fear that he was no more than chalk dust in someone else’s hands. Then, late in the fall, a week of frantic cotton-picking earned the slaves of the devout a short break in the harvest: a few days timed to coincide with a nearby Methodist camp-meeting, where white preachers led and black “exhorters” were restricted to warming up the crowd and praying with individual seekers. Israel Campbell and his wife attended. For three days, they begged on their knees for the kind of ecstatic transformation they saw people having all around them. Finally, on the fourth night, Israel’s wife stood up and began to shout with other new converts.

Campbell had seen others who shouted in ecstasy. He had heard others say they felt God’s breath in their lungs. What was left of some of them gaped at customers in the apothecary’s shop. It was hard to make peace with that. There were also the bleeding wounds that God had permitted wrongdoers to blast in his own life. Despite all his mother’s prayers, something—whether God, or the universe, or fate—had torn Israel from her, strapped a young man who had once been an infant at her breast into the leather of the whipping-machine. Mississippi Baptists claimed that “dark, mysterious... dispensations” excused white Christians’ complicity in slavery’s outrages. But lives that were stolen —this was a crime, not a mystery to be accepted on faith. Perhaps even God was complicit.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-04