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CHAPTER THREE. Sampling the Scriptures: Maria W. Stewart and the Genre of Prayer
- University of Georgia Press
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As the subtitle of historian Marilyn Richardson’s 1987 edition of Maria W. Stewart’s essays and speeches suggests, Stewart entered the historical and literary canon as “America’s First Black Woman Political Writer.” Accordingly, Richardson includes only one of Stewart’s religious meditations in the appendix to that edition. More recent treatments of Stewart have retrieved Stewart’s religious writings and reconnected them to her canon. Spiritual Narratives—the 1988 volume of the Schomburg Library, edited by Susan Houchins—includes the full text of Stewart’s 1835 Productions with the religious material intact. Consequently , more recent studies, like Carla Peterson’s “Doers of the Word” and Joycelyn Moody’s Sentimental Confessions, include readings of the religious Meditations, which accounts for a significant portion of Stewart’s writings. Cedric May’s recent book reads Stewart’s writings in the context of evangelism and black resistance.1 Following Peterson and Moody, I regard Stewart primarily as a religious writer. Moreover, by placing her Meditations at the center of her discourse, rather than at the margins, I locate her unique style in the context of African American oral and performative culture. As cultural performance, Stewart uses the Bible both as “a source of self-empowerment, an authorization to act in the world” (Peterson 56), and as a part of the “black jeremiad” that views spirituality through the lens of social justice (Moody 29). Stewart, indeed, “fashioned for herself a public identity as a prophet” (May 117), and her use of the Bible as a primary source for her writings is part of her prophetic persona and cultural performance. This type of writing/reading, which I will call “literary sampling,” is deeply embedded in African American culture, particularly musical performance . By extension, the intertextual dimension of “sampling” informs African American religious culture—sermons, spirituals, hymns, and so forth—and the genre of performative prayer. By “performative prayer” I mean especially those prayers “composed” for public performance in African American worship and/ c h a p T e r T h r e e sampling the scriptures m a r i a W. s T e Wa rT a n d T h e g e n r e o f p r ay e r 52 c h a p T e r T h r e e or written for publication, and that are thus connected to a different ethos of community, ownership, and language than privatized utterance. Language as communal property informs call and response, spirituals, blues, and African American oral culture. In Race Music, Guthrie Ramsey describes the rhetorical power of black gospel music as a fundamental hybridity based on “stylistic juxtapositionings” (191). Thus, literary sampling resembles signifying, pastiche, and other types of intertextual tropes. Yet in addition to the deliberate playing against the grain of the original that is signifying, literary sampling utilizes the original text as a vehicle for the expression of private and communal emotions. In other words, literary sampling may look backward to the original and/or forward, emphasizing instead the new creative product. In “Interpreting Biblical Scholarship for the Black Church Traditions,” Thomas Hoyt Jr. defines “proof-texting” as “taking a text completely out of context in order to validate one’s own subjective views (pretexts) or one’s understanding of doctrine, tradition and the like” (19–21). This is close to what I referred to as “private interpretation” in chapter two; however, private interpretation is more strategic in its aim to oppress and exclude. Unlike proof-texting, where ignorance of context is elided, sampling scripture showcases the virtuosity of the sampler as s/he composes a “new song.” Stewart’s use of biblical material does not simply use biblical texts to “prove” a prior assumption, but rather constitutes the creative use of a presumably creative Word. Born free in 1803 in Hartford, Connecticut, Maria Miller married James Stewart on August 10, 1826, in a ceremony performed in Boston’s First African American Baptist Church by the pastor R. Thomas Paul. James Stewart died on December 17, 1829, forcing Maria to sue for his long overdue pension from service in the War of 1812. She lost the case. Influenced by, among others, the fiery black abolitionist and early black nationalist David Walker, who died a suspicious death in 1830 after the publication of the third edition of his inflammatory Appeal, Stewart launched out on a public speaking career in Boston that lasted three years. This move into the previously forbidden space of the lecture platform...