Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (review)

Jon F. Sensbach has written an important, engaging work that has wider application than the subject of the book, Rebecca Protter, a black female mystic and preacher in the Danish West Indies, might seemingly warrant. Enlarging our understanding of the Black Atlantic beyond English-language sources, Sensbach's exhaustive, exploration of Protter demonstrates the importance of syncretic religions in the lives of Africans in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Rebecca Protter's life has sufficient twists, turns, and momentous significance to warrant the attraction of filmmakers, should they be so bold.

Sensbach begins his narrative of Protter's life by placing her youth in the context of the slave rebellion that shook St. John Island in 1733. Enslaved blacks of the Danish West Indian company revolted in November 1733, killing a local magistrate, John Reimert Soedman by torturing him, beheading him, gutting his body, and then, as an act of purification, washing their hands in his blood. Danish authorities needed several months to repulse the rebellion. Sensbach uses the revolt to historicize slavery on the Danish island, where enslaved blacks outnumbered whites by over five to one and where violent repression was commonplace.

Into this snarling society arrived on a slave ship in the mid-1720s a six- or seven-year-old, mixed race girl, stolen from her home in Antigua and auctioned in a square on the outskirts of Charlotte Amalfi, the principal town of the colony. Her name was Shelly. Records of her come from the missionary records, ably mined by Sensbach, of a German missionary and historian, Christian Oldendorf, who learned many details directly from her. Sold at auction to the family of Lucas van Beverhout, a Dutch-speaking planter, Shelly became one of many domestics in his household. There she became literate in Dutch, became Christian, and was fortunate to be manumitted. Following her baptism, she became Rebecca, right around the time of the rebellion. Sensbach carefully contextualizes Rebecca's story in the events of the island, so that any biographical angle is part of a social pattern. For Rebecca, as Sensbach sensibly observes, her aggressive inquisitiveness and astute evaluation of her world could only find a creative outlet in religion. Ergo, Rebecca the priestly woman.

Rebecca found succor in the Moravian Church and a young divine named Freidrich Martin. Sensbach notes that women held a central place in the identity of the church (47) and even though the sexes were fully separated, enabling females to become supervisors and teachers in an elaborate hierarchy of faith in the church's mission to observe biblical injunctions in I Corinthians 11:5 that women "teach themselves amongst each other." While island whites were generally bemused by Moravian sacred commerce with blacks, Martin openly criticized local gentry for its ferocious repression and opened his ministry to black conversion and literacy, a skill feared by slaveholders around the Atlantic basin. In this instance, bible study became a "radical vocabulary, if not of insurgency, then of spiritual opposition to oppression" (57). In this supportive environment, Rebecca grew famous among the white Moravians for her self-assurance, quick research, and learning and managerial talents, all of which are displayed in a fascinating letter of her that Sensbach unearthed.

So armed, Rebecca became a preacher on The Path, a roadway that circumvented the tiny island, moving through the eerily tall mountains that cut it in town, across its few plains, then uphill again and down into the tip of the island: a second major route, the King's Highway, cut through the mountains. Enslaved and the few free blacks trudged along The Path on which a small core of black spiritual workers, some called fishermen, trolled for souls. Sensbach identifies several of them beyond Rebecca, noting that they could credibly go where the white Martin could not. Such ad hoc preaching emboldened females of whom Rebecca became the leader, going at night to meetings as teacher and caretaker of their battered, torn bodies and...