Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (Religion in America)

304 Pages·1994·18.28 MB·English

by  Theophus H. Smith

CONJURING CULTURE
RELIGION IN AMERICA SERIES
Harry S. Stout, General Editor
A PERFECT BABEL OF CONFUSION EPISCOPAL WOMEN
Dutch Religion and English Culture Gender, Spirituality, and Commitment
in the Middle Colonies in an American Mainline
Randall Balmer Denomination
THE PRESBYTERIAN CONTROVERSY Edited by Catherine Prelinger
Fundamentalists, Modernists, SUBMITTING TO FREEDOM
and Moderates The Religious Vision of Willilam James
Bradley J. Longfield
Bennett Ramsey
MORMONS AND THE BIBLE OLD SHIP OF ZION
The Place of the Latter-day Saints in The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the
American Religion African Diaspora
Philip L. Barlow Walter F. Pitts
THE RUDE HAND OF INNOVATION AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM
Religion and Social Order in Albany, AND ASIAN RELIGIONS
New York 1652-1836 Arthur Versluis
David G. Hackett
CHURCH PEOPLE IN THE
SEASONS OF GRACE STRUGGLE
Colonial New England's Revival The National Council of Churches and
Tradition in Its British Context the Black Freedom Movement,
Michael J. Crawford 1950-1970
THE MUSLIMS OF AMERICA James F. Findlay
Edited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad EVANGELICALISM
THE PRISM OF PIETY Comparative Studies of Popular
Catholick Congregational Clergy at the Protestantism in North America, the
Beginning of the Enlightenment British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1990
John Corrigan Edited by Mark A. Noll, David W.
Bebbington and George A. Rawlyk
FEMALE PIETY IN PURITAN
NEW ENGLAND RELIGIOUS MELANCHOLY AND
The Emergence of Religious Humanism PROTESTANT EXPERIENCE IN
Amanda Porterfield AMERICA
Julius H. Rubin
THE SECULARIZATION
OF THE ACADEMY CONJURING CULTURE
Edited by George M. Marsden and Biblical Formations of Black America
Bradley J. Longfield Theophus H. Smith
CONJURING
CULTURE
BIBLICAL FORMATIONS
OF BLACK AMERICA
Theophus H. Smith
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi
Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne
Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore
Taipei Tokyo Toronto
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1994 by Theophus H. Smith
First published in 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1995.
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Theophus Harold.
Conjuring culture : biblical formations of black america /
Theophus H. Smith.
p. cm. — (Religion in America series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 0-19-506740-1
ISBN: 0-19-510281-9 (pbk.)
1. Afro-Americans—Religion. 2. Religion and culture—United States.
3. Bible—Influence—Western civilization.
4. Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc.—United States—History.
5. Typology (Theology)—History of doctrines.
6. Magic—Religious aspects—Christianity—History of doctrines. I. Title.
II. Series: Religion in America series (Oxford University Press)
BR563.N4S574 1994 277.3'08'08990673—dc20 93-8152
2468 10 97531
Printed in the United States of America
in memonam
Ereina Christin Smith
March 2, 1978 - February 25, 1987
For [Christ] is our peace, who has made us both one,
and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility.
EPHESIANS 2.14
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Preface
/ could not conjure my God in this place, and it seemed His failure.
Surprise... overwhelmed me.
Lorene Cary, Black Ice1
Like the author quoted above I spent a few years during my adolescence
as a black student in a New England prep school. We were among the
sixties and seventies generation of the "young, gifted, and black"—to recall
the popular refrain of one of Aretha Franklin's songs of that period. It
was a period when the African American presence in northern boarding
schools felt more like a daring social experiment than something tradi-
tional. But there was a tradition, as Lorene Cary herself realized: "when
I stopped thinking of my prep-school experience as an aberration from
the common run of black life in America," and when she discovered a
decades-long, ongoing "conversation" among black Americans about our
pilgrimage through white academic institutions.2 Of course, Aretha's cel-
ebratory song was not intended to represent the pathos of black Americans'
more abysmal experiences. Some experiences require instead the ironic
expressions articulated in the spirituals and the blues, to complement the
jubilant highs of our American existence as expressed in sixties' soul music
or its gospel music parallels. All those genres are needed, at any rate, to
encompass my own preparatory school experience.3
The tradition of black Americans attending the nations' prestigious
institutions of learning began in the nineteenth century, by my reckoning.
I mark its inception with the matriculation of the renowned black scholar,
W.E.B. Du Bois, at Harvard College in the autumn of 1888, following
his graduation from the southern black institution, Fisk University. I mark
it further with his subsequent studies in Germany, at the Friedrich Wilhelm
University in Berlin in the early 1890s, and with his publication in 1896
viii Preface
of Harvard's first African American doctoral thesis. Moreover, I locate in
Du Bois's Harvard and German era the inaugural period for the emergence
of the character type signified by Lorene Cary's trope, "black ice." It is a
trope that aptly captures the now legendary persona of a man whose
acquired character armor enabled him to endure the indignities visited
upon a black scholar of that day. Despite those indignities (both black-
white and black-on-black), and despite his own sometimes glacial response
to them, Du Bois nonetheless persisted in an unparalleled quest for in-
tellectual excellence and humane service to his people and the nation.
The tradition thereby inaugurated, and which I inherited along with
Cary and numerous others, also constitutes the matrix of this book. It is
a matrix formed by fusions of the North and the South, the white and
the black, and the Euro- and the Afro-American; by the fusion of double
worlds of history and culture, of intellect and spirit. It is a bicultural or
multicultural matrix, therefore, and the implications of such "double con-
sciousness" (Du Bois) will be evident throughout the pages that follow.
But there is a more literal "matrix" of this study of conjurational spirit-
uality: my mother, The Reverend Josephine Jackson-Smith, in her persona
as carrier and mediator of our family's folk religious convictions and sen-
sibilities. It was in prep school that I first discovered, albeit dimly and
with growing misgivings, that my mother's piety and our family's roots
in black folk religion had bequeathed me an imaginative and visionary
sensibility that found little or no validation in the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant,
and Yankee ethos in which I sojourned. Again and again during the course
of the semesters I discovered in myself what I now know to be conjura-
tional aptitudes and impulses in the way I viewed reality and framed
experience. But those inclinations appeared to be superstitious or fanciful
illusions in relation to the sensibilities and behaviors of my white fellow
students and teachers. My persistent and instinctive impulse, for example,
to prepare for an exam by projecting myself as a masterful and triumphant
performer of extraordinary feats (with and even without more mundane
preparation), became cast as sheer folly as I learned to internalize the
pragmatic attitudes of my peers.
A more calamitous casualty was my African American ancestral con-
viction that a provident God ordered my life and presided over that New
England experience as its genius loci; as the "spirit of the place" or the
"local integrity." Under assault was the conviction that my sojourn there
constituted a kind of "ascension ritual"—a rite of passage conveying me
'North to freedom!'—in relation to which the school and its environs
constituted my "ritual ground."4 Such structural supports in my spiritual
universe were continuously under assault by the anti-mystical, deritualized,
and materialist constitution of the place.
I was 'way down yonder by myself
and I couldn't hear nobody pray!5
Preface ix
That refrain from a slave spiritual captures, with generic eloquence, the
abysmal depths of the African American passage into terra incognita—into
white American and European institutions and cultures that grudgingly
permit but typically eschew ritualized intersections between the material
world and our ancestrally mediated worlds of spirit. Years later, attending
seminary in pursuit of theological education, I began a quest for spiritual
reintegration with my folk heritage. This book on the conjurational spir-
ituality of black North Americans is my most systematic effort in that
quest.
As one among other scholars engaged in the nascent field of African
American spirituality, I locate its interest somewhere between the historical
and social science study of religion on the one hand, and the black theology
of liberation movement on the other, spanning literary and aesthetic con-
siderations in between. A convergence of interest in spirituality as a dis-
tinctive category of religious phenomena can be observed, first, from the
religious studies side. Here I refer to the experiential focus found in the
work of established scholars, including Gayraud Wilmore in his edited,
interdisciplinary anthology, African American Religious Studies (Duke,
1989) as well as in his earlier work, Black Religion & Black Radicalism
(Orbis, 1983). I note also the early work of Henry Mitchell, Black Belief:
Folk Beliefs of Blacks in America & West Africa (Harper & Row, 1975).
From the perspective of black theology I note the work of James Cone,
particularly the Spirituals and the Blues (Seabury, 1972). More recent is
the work of younger scholars influenced by Cone, some of whom incor-
porate religious studies within black (liberation) theology: Josiah Young
in Black and African Theologies: Siblings or Distant Cousins? (Orbis, 1986);
James H. Evans, Jr. in We Have Been Believers: An African-American Sys-
tematic Theology (Fortress, 1992); Dwight Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our
Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology (Orbis, 1993); and Dwight
Hopkins, George Cummings, and Will Coleman in Cut Loose Tour Stam-
mering Tongue: Black Theology in the Slave Narratives (Orbis, 1991).
Note also a convergent interest in spirituality from the side of literary
studies, such as Marjorie Pryse's introduction to Conjuring: Black Women,
Fiction & Literary Tradition (Indiana, 1985), James Evan's Spiritual Em-
powerment in Afro-American Literature (Edwin Mellen, 1987), and Michael
Awkward's Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, & Afro-American
Women's Novels (Columbia, 1989). My own contribution to this new
direction in scholarship is evident in the chapter, "The Spirituality of Afro-
American Traditions," in the Crossroad Press encyclopedia of World Spir-
ituality, Volume 18, Christian Spirituality III (1989), and the entry on
"African American Spirituality" in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of African
American Culture & History (Macmillan with Columbia University). In
addition I have taught for several years now, at Emory and at the Harvard
Divinity School, a graduate seminar on the history and phenomenology