Piety and Dissent: Race, Gender, and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography

Chapter 3: John Marrant, John Smith, Jesus: Borders, Tangles, and Knots in Marrant’s 1785 Narrative

38 3 JOHN MARRANT, JOHN SMITH, JESUS Borders, Tangles, and Knots in Marrant’s 1785 Narrative  He crosses the fence, which marked the boundary between the wilderness and the cultivated country. William Aldridge, on John Marrant John Marrant’s 1785 autobiographical Narrative was one of the most popular eighteenth-century Indian captivity narratives—the best-selling early American genre that held readers captive for over a century, serving up an irresistible blend of adventure, religious instruction , autobiography, ethnography, and horror. Frequently categorized as a captivity narrative, Marrant’s autobiography fits into other genre classifications as well. The captivity narrative as a genre that overlaps or coincides with the authorial concerns and readerly appeal of the spiritual autobiography is particularly important not only to this discussion of Marrant but also to the subject matter of this book as a whole. Captivity narratives provided Anglo-American readers with an interpretive paradigm for making sense of the harrowing experiences of life in settlement culture, specifically modeling straightforward and surely comforting ways of understanding complex, distressing experiences: hardship and suffering, including actual and threatened violence, and contact with racial and cultural others. The captivity narrative form was especially important for early American readers, and recent studies of the genre have expanded critical understanding of the writers, their audiences, and the era that shaped their work. Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr, along with Richard VanDerBeets, document the popularity of Marrant’s text in particular, classifying it as one of the three most Borders, Tangles, and Knots in Marrant’s 1785 Narrative 39 widely read captivity narratives in early America; Rafia Zafar discusses the work in this context as well.1 Popular in its own moment for historically meaningful reasons, A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black is equally compelling in the early twenty-first century because of its persistent connections to contemporary concerns of both popular and more scholarly readers. Central to Marrant’s story are the multiple selves and subjectivities he experienced as he lived the metaphor of crossing and recrossing boundaries, defining and redefining himself in religious, cultural, linguistic, and racial terms. Forging his multiple identities as an outsider in a biblically inscribed world allowed him to construct a theory or, in his own contextual terms, a theology informed by his experience of the biblical texts he found meaningful; furthermore, Marrant’s theology both reinforced and interrogated the traditional Christianity to which he and his readers gave assent. The experiential theology that his Narrative argues addresses the larger forces that shaped his life, including both his isolation from and his identification with the Anglo-American culture of his religion. Ultimately, Marrant presents a surprising theological vision which may seem paradoxical at best to contemporary readers but which was unusually expansive in the context of his immediate tradition of eighteenth-century Methodism. His Narrative implicitly argues that true religious conversion cannot occur in the context of violent cultural eradication, which he identifies as the context for much of the missionary activity of his religious peers. The complex dynamic of Marrant’s autobiography anticipates an argumentative stance and rhetorical authority similar to those of writers identified with border theory, who insist on the multiplicities of voice and experience shaped by the literal and figurative boundaries they live in and on, who appropriate the border metaphor to express their own cultural circumstances and identity. Marrant’s identity emerges in his Narrative as a puzzle for those he encounters in the text, and perhaps for readers as well. His refusal to resolve or simplify the self he presents anticipates the voice, for instance, of Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera, insisting that “[she] will have [her own] voice: Indian, Spanish, white . . . [whose] serpent’s tongue . . . will overcome the tradition of silence.” Anzaldúa and other border writers such as Cherrie Moraga and Richard Saénz engage in autobiographical, reflective writing that explores complex ethnic and cultural selfhood. In the context of a boom in life-writing and, as a corollary, increased 40 John Marrant, John Smith, Jesus awareness concerning the complexity of ethnic and racial identities in the United States, these writers insist on retaining what appear to be conflicting identities in the face of cultural and linguistic erasure. Emerging in Chicano literature and from the geography shared by the United States and Mexico, the “borderland” constitutes both physical and psychic realities. According to Anzaldúa’s preface...