Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic

8 “In consideration for his raising her in the Christian faith”

8 / “In consideration for his raising her in the Christian faith” In several long-term indentures of African and mulatto children in midseventeenth -century Bermuda, the contracts specified that the master had use of a person’s labor “in consideration for” raising that person “in the Christian faith,” and perhaps teaching her or him a trade. Long-term indentured servitude with terms of thirty years for Bermudians of color persisted into the late seventeenth century and sometimes included an apprenticeship in a particular trade; in the healthier Bermudian environment these were not the life indentures that ninety-nine-year terms were. One of these bills even specified the type of Christianity in which the child was to be brought up. Before Francis Jennings left on a ship voyage in 1648, he gave the then unborn child of “Sarah, a Negro woman” to Thomas Hooper for his use. The condition of this grant was “upon consideration that the said Mr. Hooper do bring up and nurture up the same in the faith of Christ and in the principles of the true protestant religion.”1 In Massachusetts, instruction in Christianity was used to justify the mass indentures of Native children after King Philip’s War in 1675–76 led the English to try to contain what they increasingly identified as an unstable, dangerous element.2 The conjunction of bonded labor and religious instruction highlights the multiple connotations of faithful bodies, as sometimes obedient servants performing labor and as filled with faith, whether drawing from Christianity, African, Algonquian, indigenous Caribbean religions, a mixture of all, or perhaps none. Although it also points to the argument over whether faith-full Christian Africans and Indians could even exist, in consideration for his raising her / 193 or whether something inherent in their physical bodies barred them from the capacity to become Christian, that is not the focus here. Indentures are significant not only for what they have to say about the fight over baptism and its meaning in the context of slavery, but as potential glimpses of the religious performances of the children named in the indentures, and of those who claimed their labor. The stock phrases of indenture contracts were mere suggestions for the actions that followed when they referred to the performance of faith and an enforced requirement in reference to the labor required of the subject of the contract, but some individuals so bound found their own uses for Christianity beyond officials’ and sometimes their masters’ hope that they would absorb English ways of eating, dressing, farming, governing themselves, and structuring family and gender roles, in addition to any religious principles.3 Bermudians of color made use of Christian practice in ways that influenced white Bermudians in the development of an understanding of the body of Christ distinct from those emerging in New England. In the island colony, white Bermudians were more likely than their counterparts in New England to assume that those they enslaved were Christian, although that assumption did not translate into open entry into the body politic. Atlantic currents and the rootedness of local existence were both in effect, as intimacies of daily interaction in a particular location gave these indentures contours of negotiated power, even as people and ideas circulated from place to place in ways that smoothed away some of the specificities of geography. “That shee may learne to know & fear the Lord her Master & mistress[’s] God” While Indian, mulatto, and African children clearly had a different status than English children as English children could not be sold or bequeathed before they were born, the requirement of religious instruction was more than an empty formula. In the cultural context of a strong puritan ethos, language requiring religious instruction in indentures outlined an ideal. The work on Native-language religious publications and other educational efforts continued slowly, but did not stop after King Philip’s War and John Eliot’s death. In addition to Englishfunded efforts that operated through institutions such as Harvard College , Wampanoags and other literate Native Christians developed their own outreach.4 Even individuals who occupied an inferior servile position without the ability to make basic decisions about work and family required religious instruction so that they could be ready to experience 194 / performing salvation through God’s grace. Such religious education clauses in indentures pinpointed the delicate balance in puritan belief between God’s action and an individual’s ability to participate in...