“I hadn’t joined church yet, and I wasn’t scared of anybody”: Violence and Homosociality in Early Black Men’s Christian Narratives

This essay examines how spiritual autobiographies by nineteenth-century black preachers, John Jea and William J. Brown, challenge the stereotype of the black brute specifically by reifying Scripture-based male domination over women. This examination enables analysis of the intersection of military service with Christian piety and interrogates the correspondence between military service and national identity, patriotism, and self-discipline.

They (the whites) know well, if we are men. . . . [T]hey know, I say, if we are men, and see them treating us in the manner they do, that there can be nothing in our hearts but death alone, for them. . . . [W]hen we see them murdering our dear mothers and wives, because we cannot help ourselves[,] . . . [t]hey are afraid that we, being men, and not brutes, will retaliate, and woe will be to them.

—David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World

Transformative strategies of black liberation linked to a liberatory vision of black manhood and masculinity reflect a critically oppositional view of black men’s racial oppression and the power we possess to oppress women precisely because we are men.

—Gary L. Lemons, “To Be Black, Male, and ‘Feminist’: Making Womanist Space for Black Men”

Written by one of the most influential men of nineteenth-century black America, David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World is best known for its jeremiadic arguments against chattel slavery.¹ This text advocates armed resistance to forced bondage by free(d) and enslaved blacks, and escatalogically warns whites that the Christian God they worship will punish them unless they end slavery immediately. The Appeal so forcefully calls black men in particular to fight against slavery that it legendarily (if not factually) inspired Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, and Nat Turner to mayhem, revolt, and murder across the South.² Now a canonical text, Walker’s Appeal was one of the earliest and most powerful African American condemnations of white supremacy in the United States, in large part because the Appeal arouses black male homosocial desire by defining black masculinity both as armed force and armed protection of black women and children. Here I use homosociality as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick does, who locates it on a continuum of “male friendships, mentorships, entitlement, and rivalry,” as the conscious cultivation of “social bonds between persons of the same sex” (1). With its repeated rhetorical question, “Are we MEN?!,” Walker’s Appeal promotes a black masculine collective subjectivity of embodied dominance, separate gender spheres, and Christian heteronormativity. Significantly, the Appeal rhetorically equates blackness and maleness from the first words of Article I; addressing “My beloved brethren,” Walker furiously observes that “all the inhabitants of the earth (except however, the sons of Africa) are called men, and of course, are, and ought to be free. But we, (coloured people) and our children are brutes!!” (9). The Appeal remained popular along the eastern seaboard for most of the antebellum era. Not surprisingly, it garnered new attention with the 1970’s Black Power and Black Arts movements, for its black masculinist values were directly in line with the masculinist nationalism of that period. So, Walker’s place in the canon of African American heroes has been secure since the institutionalization of Black Studies.

However, because Walker’s galvanizing and pious Appeal as manifesto for (black) masculinity theologizes heteronormativity, it warrants scholarly reconsideration. Because of the Appeal’s influence on later black men’s writings, we should also reread the spiritual autobiographies of nineteenth-century black men who, knowingly or not, endorse Walker’s gynophobic Christianized heteronormativity. This essay examines the intersection of religious devotion, heterosexuality, and embodied discipline portrayed in the life writings of John Jea, William J. Brown, and the Civil War veterans interviewed by Fisk University graduate student Andrew P. Watson. The gender codes of these texts assert that men and women should occupy separate social spaces—literally and figuratively speaking—and that men are naturally more intelligent than women. Such thinking forms the basis...