In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

42 2 Saline Sacraments, Water Ritual, and the Spirits of the Deep CHRISTIAN CONVERSION IN KONGO AND ALONG THE SEA ISLANDS OF THE DEEP SOUTH Sarah was a slave; and a dutiful one at that. When Sarah spoke, she comported herself with all of the deference demanded by the master class: “‘Your servant, massa; your servant missus.’ Then a pause, and the hands meekly folded before her.” She was well liked and highly regarded by members of the master class: Sarah was not, and from the circumstances could not have been, a romantic or sentimental creature, full of fancies and vagaries, and artfully seeking to impose her visions and dreams upon more simple and credulous people. Such a physiological embodiment as hers never developed much fancy, and such a life-history of toils and hardening processes would have effectually eliminated any tendencies to cultivate the romantic, had her nature been by any possibility receptive. Her face was altogether honest, with its deeply marked lines of suffering; and her whole expression clearly evinced those plain, practical, sensible qualities which had gained her so good a reputation. Still, Sarah’s Christian faith was peppered with occasional paroxysms, which she termed “mazes.” During one incident, Sarah rose from her quarters during the midnight hour and, in a fit of screams and shrieks, entered the “Big House” and burst into the bedroom of the plantation’s owner, minister Charles Raymond. He recalled Sarah’s screams as the most “agonizing groans ever vented by tortured humanity.” Sarah stood dazed, with her eyes glassy, her hands extended before her, and her visage shrouded with a lifeless hue. In a moment she collapsed prone on the floor and said, “O Lord, I’m damned! O master, I’m in hell! O Jesus, do save me.” So she continued for thirty minutes, “bathed in a cold sweat, and with pulse scarcely perceptible, until at last her agony ceased from utter prostration.” Morning arrived, and once again fully in control of her faculties, Sarah reported, without suspense or apology, that she had simply had one of her “mazes.” 43 Given Sarah’s usual disposition, Raymond could scarcely make sense of the outburst: “So quiet! So sensible! So undemonstrative! How had good old Sarah ever been the subject of such a vagary?” When the second maze hit Sarah in broad daylight, Raymond was forced to concede that the fits were “no somnambulistic feat, growing out of disordered digestion or incipient dyspepsia. The physical theorists upon the subject were nonplussed.” If the theorists were confused, the same may not be said of Sarah, who knew that the mazes were directly related to the unconverted condition of her soul. When Sarah’s mistress attempted to educate her in the manner of proper Christian conversion, to assure her that “mazes” played no part in the path of religious redemption, Sarah responded curtly that white folks were different from “colored” persons. Only after Sarah’s third maze did she finally came through jubilantly with the certainty that, having seen hell, she had been taken to Jesus to have her sins forgiven: “Sins all gone, bress de Lord! Leff um down dere under dat tree. Amen! Bress de Lord! Took ’emself right out’n ’emself.” So was Sarah converted, and her bouts with the mazes ceased. Recounting her own experience, Elizabeth Roberts, a former slave of the Georgia coastal islands, reported that it was the water that washed the sins away, and so, she said, baptism must be performed when the tide is going out. Roberts recalled that as converts congregated along the river bank for the ritual, they did not direct their prayers to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; rather, the preacher prayed to the river, asking that all sins be taken away, noting that the water washed all sins away. This chapter focuses on the complexities and subtleties that often attend ritual belief and practice. It does not posit conversion as a clear and discrete movement from a precessional realm of belief to a successional one. Indeed, conversion rarely entails the complete abandonment of former belief systems, nor does it imply a total embrace of new spiritual theologies . The notion of conversion as discrete movement wrongly suggests that older beliefs are too rigid to negotiate a changing spiritual environment and presumes that new belief systems are impregnable, unaffected by older notions. Instead, the “new” belief system is understood largely through the context of the “old.” That is, the precessional belief system does...

Share