Without the Lord Eliza Suggs, Religion, and the Good Disabled Subject

Abstract

This article explores how religion appears and disappears within the work of disability history. It focuses on representations of Eliza Suggs, an early-twentieth-century African American preacher and author, and argues that scholarly preference for a particular kind of subject—one often defined in terms of identity and oppositional agency—obscures accounts of the past. The article returns to Suggs’s 1906 memoir Shadow and Sunshine as an incitement to think more carefully about how practices of devotion have shaped experiences of embodied difference and how they might inform and unsettle scholars’ engagements with disabled persons in the past.

Resumen:

Este artículo explora cómo la religión aparece y desaparece dentro del trabajo de la historia de la discapacidad. Se centra en las representaciones de Eliza Suggs, una predicadora y autora afroamericana de principios del siglo XX, y sostiene que la preferencia académica por un tipo particular de tema (a menudo definido en términos de identidad y agencia de oposición) oscurece los relatos del pasado. El artículo regresa a las memorias de Suggs, Shadow and Sunshine, de 1906, como una incitación a pensar más detenidamente sobre cómo las prácticas de devoción han dado forma a las experiencias de diferencia encarnada y cómo podrían informar y perturbar los compromisos de los académicos con las personas discapacitadas en el pasado.

INTRODUCTION

This article is about scholarly practices of remembering disability and some of the risks of that imaginative, which is certainly not to say unreal, work.¹ Inspired by the performance and problems of queer historiography,² I ask here about the kinds of subjects scholars of disability pursue in the past: What do our assumptions, values, and desires enable in our engagements with people in archives and memory? What or whom do they debar from the stories we tell?

More precisely, this is an article about religion. It is about how some religious idioms, practices, and ways of approaching the world tend to disappear in the work of disability history/studies and what those disappearances might teach us. In what follows, I focus on a particular example of religion’s elision in order to advance some broader claims about the field of disability studies’ preferred subjects—and what we might call their secular shape.³ In the final section of the essay, I return to that elision as an incitement to think more carefully about how practices of piety and devotion might inform experiences of disability and how, in turn, they might inform scholarly accounts of “living with a difference.”⁴

In doing so, it is my hope to join a small group of scholars of American religion who have worked to recommend disability as a rich and heretofore neglected archive for our field. Alongside recent studies by Anthony Petro, Sarah Imhoff, and Mary Dunn, what follows emphasizes how experiences of disability and its cultural construction “spur” moral and theological imaginations, generating unique religious positions and forms.⁵ In line with these other scholars, this essay demonstrates how disability can intensify and refract questions at the heart of religious studies’ enterprise about the human and how communities imagine human potentials, relations, and ends.

What I seek to add to this emerging conversation is the suggestion that the study of disability also belongs to this archive. I stress that it, too, often furnishes answers to the above questions, advancing its own, however partially avowed, theological anthropology. As I explore at the conclusion of this essay, acknowledging the moral and (a)theological assumptions within existing academic discussions of disability returns us to some of religious studies’ most generative problems—how we choreograph our relationships with our subjects and what our representations enable and disable.

REMARKABLE ELIZA SUGGS

This essay was inspired by an ellipsis. That ellipsis appears in the literary scholar Stephen Knadler’s 2013 article “Dis-abled Citizenship: Narrating the Extraordinary Body in Racial Uplift” where he offers a fascinating reading of the 1906 memoir Shadow and Sunshine by the African American preacher and author Eliza Suggs (1876–1908).⁶ Suggs’s life, via her memoir, has received a considerable amount of attention in recent years thanks to the book’s recirculation in the early 2000s via the University of North Carolina’s Documenting the American South online project.⁷ Suggs has been represented and celebrated in venues ranging from promotional materials for the hit 2020 Netflix documentary Crip Camp to the British actor Cerrie Burrell’s recent young adult book I Am Not A Label: 34 Disabled Artists, Thinkers, Athletes, and Activists from Past and Present. Claimed as a pioneering disabled forebear, her profile continues to grow.⁸

As Suggs explains in Shadow and Sunshine, when young, she was diagnosed with “an extreme case of rickets.” Her bones broke from the slightest pressure, resulting in terrible pain. (A contemporary noted, “No sooner would one heal up when another would break.”⁹) Available doctors proved helpless when it came to the child’s condition and Suggs’s mother Malinda did all that she thought was left to do. She sewed her daughter’s burial clothes—each stitch no doubt a prayer and wound—and asked that God would relieve her of her suffering. Although “everyone expected that they would be shortly needed,” the garments were ultimately left unused. With time, young Suggs’s bones became more durable, though they ceased to grow and would bear little weight. Shadow and Sunshine introduced the adult Suggs as possessing “a mite of a body.” “[I] am often taken for a baby,” Suggs wrote, “and spoken to as such.” This was the case, in part, because among the various devices Suggs and her family improvised for her were “baby carriages” which enabled her mobility, first as a student and then as a sought-after speaker and temperance advocate.¹⁰

As an early teen, Suggs demonstrated her talents as an orator, gifts that she shared with her father James, a prominent evangelist and elder in the upstart denomination of Free Methodists.¹¹ Following in his footsteps, Suggs began preaching and warning against “the dangers of strong drink” along a circuit of churches in and around her hometown of Orleans, Nebraska. This work in many ways culminated with the publication of Shadow and Sunshine, as the book served as both an account and extension of Suggs’s evangelical labors. It was filled with stories of God’s transformative activity in the lives of her and her family members, including her parents’ suffering under and liberation from slavery, intended to pull the reader into similar experiences of God’s power. The text was lauded not long after its publication at the national General Convention for Free Methodists, but Suggs died unexpectedly the following year after a sudden episode of respiratory illness. Testifying to her reputation among her peers, her obituary concluded: “The Funeral closed more like a love-feast, which will not soon be forgotten.”¹²

Twenty-first-century accounts of Suggs’s life have marveled at her geographic and social mobility. In the face of what was surely a concatenation of barriers— racist, sexist, ableist—they have celebrated how this woman cultivated an identity for herself, marked by authority and creativity. There are several references to her online as, simply, “badass.”¹³ In “Dis-abled Citizenship,” Stephen Knadler offers consonant approbation, albeit in a different register. He reads Suggs’s text in the context of early-twentieth-century African American “uplift discourse,” which largely repressed and erased experiences of bodily impairment to prove African American capacity before a racist public.¹⁴ Over and against such discourse, he argues, Suggs insisted upon her abilities and rights as a disabled person. She refused to be silenced as an object of pity or to be erased as a sign of supposed racial deficiency. And, in doing so, she posited a vision of the “citizen” defined not in terms of fantasies of self-sufficiency but in terms of what Knadler calls “associative competence.”¹⁵

Knadler suggests that Suggs’s tenacity and exemplarity were encapsulated in a particular passage from Shadow and Sunshine. In it, she responded to an anticipated audience that found it difficult to imagine her thriving. Here is the passage as it appears in Knadler’s article:

Some wonder how I can be happy in my condition. It is the sunlight of God in my soul that makes me happy . . . I get much pleasure from the reading of good books. I enjoy looking at the beautiful things in nature and in art. I love to listen to the singing of birds and to sweet music. In fact[,] many pleasures come to me through the five senses of which I have full use. Then too I have good use of my hands and can work and earn a little.¹⁶

For Knadler, this self-description “makes visible what had to be left out” of uplift discourse and its “enabling fiction[s].” Suggs declared, against such a backdrop, what Knadler calls “the usefulness of . . . pathologized bodies to the civic community.” With this list—books, birds, money—she demonstrated that she was far from “helpless” and was, in fact, capable of personally curated joy.¹⁷

________

What has gone missing from the passage cited above is the following sentence: “It would be hard to live without the Lord.”¹⁸ Nine words that bridge the word “happy” and Suggs’s list of enjoyments in the text. One might imagine several reasons for such a subtraction. One might conclude that the sentence that precedes them adequately conveys their meaning: Suggs speaks religiously about her pleasures. Or, relatedly, one might read this as a conventional formulation, a rhetorical reflex, and, therefore, as not especially noteworthy.¹⁹ I think, however, that this sentence is unremarkable in a rather different sense. In the following section, I situate the rest of Knadler’s account of Suggs’s faith in the broader context of disability studies historiography and suggest that the absence of this sentence reflects a much broader trouble with religion in the field, shaped by regnant assumptions about how the good disabled subject looks and acts.

WHAT WITHOUT THE LORD

As a field, disability studies has long been skeptical of attempts to translate bodily difference into otherworldly idioms. Such concerns were given robust articulation by two of the field’s early leading figures, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, in an essay that concluded the 2007 collection This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies.²⁰ Mitchell and Snyder’s contribution congratulated the other contributors to this text for their extension of disability studies’ insights into new academic terrain but also challenged them to embrace a broader set of critiques. It noted, with disappointment, the absence of an account of Christ’s healing miracles from the collection and suggested that such an account was precisely what was needed in order to fully appraise the harm caused by what they termed “redemption narratives” in biblical texts and beyond. Mitchell and Snyder decried how accounts of healing, in this world and the next—alongside promises of resurrection—consistently led to what they termed “the devaluation of human life.”²¹ With reference to Fredrich Nietzsche, they underscored how “The concept of the afterlife, as the staple story of salvation, [has] promoted social contempt toward the demands of earthly existence—including the ability to accommodate lives that, at least outwardly, appear lacking in social utility.”²² This is not an unfamiliar argument—that hopes for another world can distract from this one—but Mitchell and Snyder suggest there are particular dangers when it comes to disability insofar as the anticipation of eternal succor (here collapsed with notions of healing) can obscure the world’s disabling conditions while feeding eliminative fantasies of cure.

Suggs’s suggestion that her life’s livability came from “the Lord” might get too close to the kind of divestment from the this-worldly that Mitchell and Snyder name. Indeed, there are additional parts of Shadow and Sunshine that Knadler and others overlook in order to save Suggs from what Knadler identifies as traditional critiques of “the rhetoric of spiritual compensation.”²³ For instance, at the outset of the book’s central autobiographical chapter, Suggs supplies several lines of verse from the seventeenth-century French mystic Madame Guyon (who enjoyed considerable popularity among the Holiness Protestants of Suggs’s day):

My cage confines me round;Abroad I cannot fly;But though my wing is closely bound,My heart’s at liberty.My prison walls cannot controlThe flight, the freedom, of the soul.²⁴

Here is the possibility that Suggs regarded her body and her difference as a “cage” or “prison,” reinforcing the sorts of binaries about which scholars like Mitchell and Snyder warn: between this world and the next; between flesh and soul. What’s more, such distinctions seem to reinforce the disabled body’s classification as especially prison-like. As Knadler himself notes (although not in reference to this passage), such rhetoric runs the risk of “obfuscat[ing] the social construction of disability,” occluding questions about the structures and situations that might make a life like Suggs’s especially challenging.”²⁵

Suggs’s admission that it would be hard to live without Lord might also appear to index affective experiences incompatible with what’s often referred to as “disability pride.” At the outset of his article, Knadler announces Shadow and Sunshine as a “‘feisty’ black female disability narrative, one in which Suggs “proudly embraces her disability.”²⁶ This ascription is a reference to the 2007 essay “Shape Structures Story: Fresh and Feisty Stories about Disability,” by groundbreaking disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson.²⁷ In it, Garland-Thomson collects an emergent archive of representations of bodily difference that refuse the tragedy of so-called “traditional disability plots.” These new stories in poetry, film, and memoir feature disabled subjects as capable, courageous, quotidian, and, often, content. In his essay, Knadler offers Suggs’s text as a fascinating anticipation of these new representations. Locating this text and its authority in relation to a modern disability politics, however, seems to require the muting of the more ambivalent dimensions of her relationship to her impairment, which Suggs sometimes voiced in a register akin to what the late scholar of African American religion Albert Raboteau has dubbed “sorrowful joy.”²⁸

Above all, what I think recommends this passage for redaction most is disability studies’ enduring preference for subjects who enact forms of agency that are often defined against postures of reverence, submission, and/or piety. People who resist. A good example of this preference can be found in the historian Adria Imada’s recent work on medical incarceration and Hansen’s disease on the Hawaiian island Molokai. In the article “Lonely Together: Subaltern Family Albums and Kinship During Medical Incarceration,” Imada attends to the photographic archive of a Chinese man named Franklin Mark who spent half a century detained at Molokai.²⁹ During the 1930s and 1940s, he produced a sizable collection of tender, everyday images which Imada convincingly reads as a powerful rebuke to the violence of the colony—and, by extension, professional medicine and US empire. Of interest here, however, is the image with which Imada begins her analysis, a self-portrait accompanied with the handwritten caption “Busting the Lense [sic]: ‘Saint Mark’ himself.” This is a powerful political statement, we’re told. “Calling himself ‘Saint Mark,’” Imada writes, “was a boldly impudent posture to adopt in a community where . . . Catholic priests and sisters had been a bedrock since the 1800s.” Referring to the eventual canonization of the “leper priest” Damien de Veuster who lived and died at Molokai in the late nineteenth century, she continues, “Mark’s description deliberately inverted the hierarchy of priest and ward by naming himself a ‘Saint.’” Not only is he “busting the lense,” she suggests, he is shattering the authority of the tradition trying, in so many ways, to claim him.³⁰

Yet there is no additional evidence about Franklin Mark’s Christian commitments or lack thereof, apart from the fact that he was buried in the island’s Protestant cemetery. While it is certainly possible that the caption Imada describes was a performance of insolence, what stands out is the obvious preference for this interpretation, against equally plausible alternatives. Unexplored in Imada’s text is the possibility that such a sobriquet was an expression of allegiance to Christian authority, worldly or otherwise. Perhaps Saint Mark’s peers christened him with it in a religious education class, a hardly novel recognition that he shared a name with a gospel writer. Relatedly, unconsidered is the possible compatibility of play or impertinence with devotion and deference.³¹ These readings are moved past in order to arrive at a refusal that is meant to bespeak broader forms of political assertion set in contrast to “the religious.”

Although Knadler does not read Suggs as irreverent, his descriptions of her faith betray a similar desire to find something ultimately subversive in her Christianity. Although he acknowledges—in a telling phrase—that hers is a “staunchly religious worldview,” he immediately moves to assure his reader that Suggs’s Christianity is “not simply a product of [her] immediate church upbringing, but [is] a strategic narrative practice of carving out cultural space for disabled black women.” Here, the reader is offered a tidy juxtaposition between (unidentified) passive religious subjects and those who leverage religion. Knadler underscores his point by emphasizing that Suggs “uses religious tropes to create a collective disability identity and to give disabled black women a public role [. . .].”³² If Suggs’s religious rhetoric matters, in Knadler’s view, it is largely or exclusively for “political” reasons.³³ It derives its interest for modern audiences from what are posited as its real ends.³⁴

It would be hard to live without the Lord. This announcement seems to cede too much of Suggs’s self and will for it to fit within a “feisty” narrative. Whereas Knadler has her as the actor within a circumscribed field (“carving,” “strategi[zing],” “creating,” and “using”), in the sentence he redacts, Suggs positions herself as a person in a rather different kind of story.

SECULAR SUBJECTS

In her classic account of Muslim women’s piety in Cairo, Egypt, the anthropologist Saba Mahmood offers a searching critique of the unexamined values that have shaped—and forestalled—key aspects of Western feminist inquiry. She argues that scholars have often operated with an implicit anthropology that presumes and naturalizes the desire to “be free from relations of subordination.”³⁵ These assumptions make it so that much scholarship—especially when focused upon “non-Western societies”—devotes itself to the discovery of subversion or resistance in almost any situation. In doing so, such work has advanced a normative— and, Mahmood stresses, parochial—grounds of subjectivity as “the capacity to realize one’s own interests against the weight of custom, tradition, [and] transcendental will.” These values and assumptions, Mahmood contends, have rendered illegible “the lives of women whose desire, affect, and will have been shaped by nonliberal traditions.”³⁶ Women’s choices—like Mahmood’s Cairene subjects’—to pursue their subjection within larger structures of power thus register only, if not as proof of false consciousness, as attempts at subterranean defiance.³⁷

In a parallel argument, offered in the context of an analysis of early African American Christian literature, the literary theorist Michael Warner notes how a commitment to what he terms “the critical problematic of resistance” often constrains scholarly engagement with the eighteenth century writings of Black evangelicals like Phillis Wheatley and John Marrant.³⁸ Enthusiastic for certain forms of political willfulness, modern readers often find themselves, Warner suggests, variously excusing, ignoring, and transmuting the religious claims made by such actors—embarrassed by their evangelical insistence.³⁹

On one front, what’s at stake in these scholarly tendencies according to Mahmood, Warner, and many of their interpreters is the misrepresentation of people’s worlds. As Mary Dunn has recently put it, such well-worn trains of thought “risk . . . misreading the strange in light of the familiar—the subject in light of the scholar, [and in the historian’s case] the past in light of the present.”⁴⁰ On yet another front, what is at stake is the potential for the people studied, whether in the field or archive, to impress themselves upon the persons who study them. As Mahmood puts it, “Critique . . . is most powerful when it leaves open the possibility that we might also be remade in the process of engaging another’s worldview, that we might come to learn things we did not already know.”⁴¹

Given disability studies’ academic emergence—at least in part—from corners of the academy devoted to feminist inquiry, it is hardly surprising that some of the preferences and priorities Mahmood located in the latter would show up in its precincts.⁴² And, as Mahmood explained with respect to the literature whose parochialism she challenged, it is important to note that there have been crucial reasons to find and broadcast accounts of resistant, oppositional agency in various contexts. As many scholars have demonstrated, ascriptions of passivity have been essential to modern constructions of disability as a marginalized subject position.⁴³ The dominance of such representations has created the need for contradiction in the field and beyond, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s above-mentioned article wonderfully demonstrates. She and others have helped to make disability studies a forum for foregrounding people with disabilities who refuse to adhere to the terms of a disabling world.⁴⁴ Yet we still might ask, after Mahmood: what do we miss when the search for such stories comes to crowd out our attention for others? What else might surface when the “critical problematic of resistance” is held in check and what might we learn from actors who do not conform to its imperatives?

In asking these questions with reference to Eliza Suggs and her interpreters, I also respond to what literary scholar Jocelyn Moody has described as the scholarly tendency to “read around” the “spiritual dimensions” of African American women’s spiritual autobiographies. Moody has lamented how habits of thought similar to those described by Mahmood and Warner generate what she calls the “compulsion to apologize” for Black women’s devotional lives, pivoting away from them and toward what can be read as their “political strategies.” My intention here is not to prioritize what is legible as “religion” over what’s legible as “race” or “politics,” but instead to note how widespread scholarly assumptions can circumscribe the representation of someone like Suggs. In what remains of this essay, I try to get a better angle on the “full complexity” of Suggs’s work.⁴⁵

WITH SUGGS

Early in Shadow and Sunshine’s description of its author’s “condition” Suggs speculates, “If I had been strong and healthy like other children and young people, perhaps I should not have known the Lord. I might now have been running after the pleasures of the world.” After describing her childhood conversion (“One day while lying on the bed in my room alone, the Lord came to me . . . and I have served the Lord ever since”), Suggs goes on to conclude, “I am thankful I have been preserved and kept from the wickedness of the world.”⁴⁶

For many scholars of disability, this passage might provide a case in point for how nominating disability as a site of spiritual privilege can pull away from the acknowledgement of disabling social conditions.⁴⁷ It would seem that Suggs’s speculation fails to ask why society produces disability by asking why God does. Yet, Suggs makes clear that the point of posing such a question is, for her, not necessarily to answer it. Rather, its unanswerability is to be embraced as an occasion to trust. She makes clear that her body and what remains opaque about her experience ultimately refer her back to God. The question is an opening. A move toward contact, rather than an effort simply to fix disability’s meaning.

Similarly, just prior to the passage cited above, Suggs notes how people often asked if she did “not get tired of sitting all the time.” With what might be snark worthy of the label “feisty,” she responded, “Of course, I know nothing else only to sit, as I never walked a step in my life.” She continued, conceding that it must be “grand” to be able to walk but notes, of course, this is not something she could know from experience. “Some day,” she affirmed, “I expect to walk the streets of the New Jerusalem just as well as those who now have the full use of their feet.” That would be, she suggested, “exceedingly grand.”⁴⁸

Here, scholars might again feel the need to avoid or apologize for this passage and its apparent participation in fantasies of cure. But here, too, Suggs does not seem especially interested in clarifying or solving what has happened and will happen to her body. What she prioritizes is her ability to move within the eternal. In doing so, she hopes to teach her audience lessons about perspectival limitation and the anticipation of heaven. She points out the flaws in her inquisitors’ assumption that she would know something other than sitting all the time, as if that experience were a given. And then, she explains that what she does have access to, with the authority of a Christian, is the ability to envision and expect eternity. This move does not forfeit footing to the non-disabled but insists upon Suggs’s own preparation for and access to a holiness that is decidedly not equivalent to a “normal” body.⁴⁹

Suggs’s most robust articulation of what we might regard as her theology of the body appears in a passage many readers have prized as the book’s most iconic. As Suggs reflects on her role within a broader Christian enterprise, she makes mention of the fact that many times in her life people have approached her or one of her family members with the suggestion that she be displayed in a “show or a museum.” Referring to fin-de-siecle America’s ubiquitous “exhibiting culture,” these hawkers of unsolicited advice were eager to recognize and further mark Suggs’s body as what one stranger called “ready money.”⁵⁰ Hardly concealing their own appetites, these various voices urged Suggs and her kin to cash in on their neighbors’ hunger for the putatively “odd,” “extraordinary,” and “curious.”⁵¹

It is Suggs’s written response that audiences have relished. “Dear reader,” she retorts, “God did not create me for this purpose. He created me for His glory and, if I can be of help to anyone, and if God can get glory to His name out of my life, amen!”⁵² In his introduction to Suggs’s memoir for Disability Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Other Personal Narratives, Tim Rayborn highlights this passage as emblematic of Shadow and Sunshine’s power as a document of disability history, which he summarizes as its “resistance . . . to enfreakment.”⁵³ Knadler offers a similar reading in his article where he celebrates this passage as evidence for how Suggs “refuses to become the fetishized ‘extraordinary’ and ‘eccentric’ African American body objectified under the white Western stare.”⁵⁴ These readings are apt in their recognition of Suggs’s aversion to these institutions. However, Suggs seems to have been less concerned with institutions than with fidelity to what she understood to be the demands of Christian life.

Shadow and Sunshine’s first chapter offers a brief biography of Suggs’s father James and in it we find an important parallel to the question of Suggs’s exhibition. Readers are informed that James once “had a great struggle over his call to preach.” He had what Suggs labeled as “worldly ambitions.” Though compelled to evangelize, he was making a good living as a blacksmith while homesteading in the postbellum West and he hesitated “to give up all and follow Christ.” For a time, he preached occasionally while continuing to blacksmith until God confronted him, demanding a choice: “Either preach the gospel or work at your trade.” The elder Suggs knew that this was an ultimatum with eternal stakes. “It meant to him heaven or hell.” And so, he decided. “From that time on,” his daughter explained, “it was the business of his life to minister divine truth to dying men and women.”⁵⁵ The hammer put down, he became a portrait of Christian resolution and sacrifice.

Following this portrait, one can see how the question of Suggs’s work in a museum was also a question about devotion. These suggestions or opportunities were, for her, questions about the extent to which she would give herself to—and be with—God. These suggestions or opportunities were, for her, questions about her intercourse with and the extent to which she would give herself to God. This fact is even more obvious as one reads beyond the above-quoted passage. Suggs goes on to recount an instance in which she herself entered a dime museum in Chicago “just to see and learn.” There someone approached her and asked if she’d like to speak to the manager. “Oh no!” she reportedly replied, “Such places are not for me. God wants me to live for Him, and I could not do it there. I must keep separated from the world.”⁵⁶ She then offered a supporting passage from a Pauline epistle, which read,

Wherefore come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you; and will be a father to you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.⁵⁷

Perhaps to further dramatize the stakes of sanctification, this episode opened, rather than foreclosed, the possibility that Suggs, like her father and his work, could have been attracted to these offers. Readers are left to wonder what exactly she hoped to “see and learn” in Chicago and how she ended up in this place “not for [her].” With these queries dangled, Suggs is able to emphasize what was most objectionable about this prospect was the fact that it might compromise her devotion to God. As was the case with her earthly father, salvation was at stake in this choice. Just as blacksmithing threatened to compromise his sainthood, so would such places pollute Suggs’s efforts to live a life rendered completely to God.

But crucially, Suggs’s anticipated readers would have also registered an additional set of claims in this refusal and its explanation. As historian of American religion Seth Perry has noted, American bible culture and its economies of authority have been consistently constituted in the United States through practices of citation that rely upon readers’ and listeners’ abilities to fill in scriptural references. The incomplete biblical passage can serve as a crucial mechanism of interpellation.⁵⁸ Many readers of Shadow and Sunshine were likely aware that the verse that preceded Paul’s command for “separate[ness]” identified Christians as “temple[s] of the living God.” In this letter, Paul enjoined a group of Christians to avoid “pagan” practices and places as a condition of their capacity to be occupied by the divine. He continued, with additional references to the Hebrew Bible, to elaborate this possibility: “as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”⁵⁹ For Suggs’s readers, her invocation of this passage offered not only a suggestive association between “idolatrous temples” and freak shows, it invited readers to imagine their bodies—as well as Suggs’s—as ready habitations for the holy, as entities that could be activated by “the Lord Almighty.” For these readers, it would be clear that this was not simply a rejection of something but a, perhaps hard-won, affirmation that human beings, in their various forms, might become profoundly God’s.

And what Suggs was keen to emphasize was that both this rejection and subsequent affirmation were results of the complicated means by which God had come to live her life—the success of her sanctification. As a Free Methodist, Suggs believed that the Christian was both capable and obliged to achieve “complete holiness.” Through faith, the believer could overcome the impairments of original sin and become a “perfect” vessel for the divine. As one of her coreligionists explained, “Before the act of cleansing . . . there was [for the Christian] a conscious proneness to wander from God and to go after forbidden objects, but after [sanctification] . . . has been experienced the soul feels always drawn toward God and heaven.”⁶⁰ Suggs furnished proof of the success of this process with these stories about dime museums and their analogs. Somewhat abruptly, she punctuated this section of Shadow and Sunshine with the declaration: “The Love of God in my heart keeps me from wanting to do the things that God disapproves and I love to do the things that he approves.”⁶¹ A complex tangle of subjectivity and intention, Suggs offers herself here as a person effectively occupied by Another.⁶²

Such a self-portrait complicates the inclination to read Suggs’s choices as familiar signs of self-assertion and critique. A similar inclination can be observed in much scholarship on Christian women’s spiritual autobiography, which has sometimes suggested that what is significant about women like Suggs’s relationships with the divine is how such relationships lead “to self-ownership and empowerment.”⁶³ In Holy Boldness: Women Preachers’ Autobiographies of the Sanctified Self, Susan Stanley argues that the texts of her title—penned by both Black and white preachers—merit “inclusion in the canon of women’s autobiography” because of how “women’s religious experience of sanctification emboldened them to . . . move into public ministries.” In these accounts, like Knadler’s, what is important is how these figures’ faith propels them to “transcend” oppressive social positions and scripts and to forge new ones.⁶⁴

Suggs, by contrast, encourages her audience to read the empowerment she experiences as a kind of loss of self. Elsewhere in Shadow and Sunshine she praises how the “The Lord . . . comes to my heart with such refreshing peace. He melts my heart so that it is easy to pray . . .”⁶⁵ Rather than ownership, it is the experience of self-dispossession that Suggs wants to highlight. It is this that sustains her life as an African American, disabled, Christian woman and that motivates her ministry.

Recognizing this emphasis on self-dispossession as a sign of holiness helps to clarify how Suggs understood the question of her public display. While many of Suggs’s readers have tended to interpret her rejection of the museum as resistance to objectification, they have not considered whether a similar “gaze” might have been operative within the evangelical scene in which Suggs’s enjoyed her popularity, including Shadow and Sunshine itself.⁶⁶ Further inspection provides evidence for such a “gaze” but also highlights how Suggs located her sense of self in a sophisticated negotiation between performance and retreat, public appearance and an interiority rooted in the demands of devotion.

One of the white clergymen who offered a prefatory endorsement for Suggs’s text promises its contents would be “thrilling”—a reference to perhaps both the book’s documentation of scandalizing “incidents of slavery” and Suggs’s exceptional embodiment.⁶⁷ The book’s other introductory endorsement frames the text explicitly with an act of and invitation to a kind of gaping. Shadow and Sunshine’s first sentences of prose read: “While attending a camp meeting near Alma, Nebraska, during the summer of 1895, my attention was drawn to a little colored girl sitting in a baby cab, who appeared to take a deep interest in the services. I was told that it was Sister Eliza Suggs . . .”⁶⁸ Here readers are enjoined to do nothing if not gaze. And, it seems, so were many at the revivals and meetings which Suggs helped to lead in her lifetime.

In the book’s second introduction, the minister C.M. Damon, who founded Orleans Seminary where Suggs was educated, invited readers to marvel at her, as had many others. “Carried in arms or wheeled about in a carriage, her frail hands and well developed head have accomplished wonders . . . she has presided in public meetings with marked dignity and ability. Carried on the platform and moved about as occasion required by kind and willing attendants, I have perhaps never seen more clock-like precision than the execution of an interesting program, at which she presided . . .” Damon goes on to describe the spectacle of Suggs’s speech when her sister would lift her before crowds: “When Eliza, hidden in church behind the seats in the front, would testify, Kate rises with her in arms, and she speaks clearly and forcibly.”⁶⁹ He makes clear that part of the appeal of Suggs’s message was the show, one grounded in others’ interest in the optics of embodied difference.

While such an introductory frame highlights how, regardless of her intentions, Suggs did not entirely escape certain kinds of objectification and attention, her choices about how Shadow and Sunshine was framed also provide insight into her understanding of the purposes of her public work—locating these performances, like her rejection of the museum, within a framework of holiness and devotion.

Just prior to these endorsements, the book opens with a photograph of Suggs. It is the first thing one encounters after the text’s cover. It depicts Suggs seated against a woven cushion in a collared dress and necklace with her hands crossed in her lap. It is unclear where her gaze is directed but it is clear where the reader’s is: toward her body. Look, we’re enjoined. On the next page, however, there’s a different sort of movement. In addition to the book’s publication information, Suggs has supplied an epigraph from the book of Psalms which reads: “Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.—Selah.” Here we have a kind of double-movement: a presentation and retreat. An invitation to behold but then the suggestion of something—a person—hidden. And again, as in the above-discussed passage from the New Testament, it is what might be filled in around this verse that proves most poignant. This psalm begins with the following verses:

Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven,Whose sin is covered.Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputethNot iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.Where I kept silence, my bones waxed old throughMy roaring all day long [. . .]I acknowledge my sin unto thee, and mine iniquityhave I not hid. I said I will confess mytransgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavestthe iniquity of my sin [. . .]

The psalm then continues through Suggs’s chosen epigraph (“Thou art my hiding place . . .”) before it concludes, after a shift of address, “Be glad in the LORD, and rejoice, ye righteous: and shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart.”⁷⁰

Figure 1.

Photograph of the first pages of Shadow and Sunshine. The left features an image of a woman, identified as Eliza Suggs, seated against a woven cushion, wearing a necklace and collared dress. Opposite is the book’s title page and the passage from the Book of Psalms discussed above. Courtesy of the Marston Memorial Historical Center.

It is difficult to imagine that Suggs’s did not expect her reader to connect her epigraph to this image of one’s “bones wax[ing] old.” With this psalm, Suggs introduces her life story with an account of osseous pain relieved through speech, that resulted in both a protective self-enclosure and a compulsion to externalize—to “shout”—because of one’s pleasure in God. Such a framing seems to name a motivation quite different than (but not antithetical to) “carving out” cultural space for herself and others like her. It announces the book as a testimony, one that renders experiences of self-surrender and submission (to God and God’s ends) that, perhaps paradoxically, result in and require public recognition and performances of self-disclosure. It is an account of Suggs’s understanding of her impairment and her bodily difference less as an identity in which to root claims and instead as that which find their significance relationally. “Bones waxed old,” her impairment is part of what ultimately impels her to speak of God and allow God to author her life.

In the end, Shadow and Sunshine is a text about how God capacitates. Its ambition is, in Mary Dunn’s formulation, to bring “God into being as a narrative subject . . . as an actor in the midst of the mundane world.” ⁷¹ With respect to her body, Suggs’s interest is in showing how the divine has come to transform it, not in terms of physical healing, but in a way that makes her body perfect.

CONCLUSION

In what ways might this closer look at Shadow and Sunshine and Suggs’s theology disappoint? And why? Part of the aim of this essay has been to trace what I understand to be the gap between existing accounts of Shadow and Sunshine and Suggs’s articulation of her life “with the Lord.” I’ve underscored how pervasive assumptions about personhood and religion in the field of disability studies/history have given shape to what I’ve called the “good disabled subject.” Those assumptions promote a vision of subjectivity defined in terms of self-assertion and “resistance” as described by Mahmood, Warner, and others and tend to reduce religion to either a mystifying impediment or a transparent political tool. I’ve tried to make the case that the desire to find persons—in archives and elsewhere—that affirm and conform to these assumptions constrain our encounters with those we study and obscure the nuanced ways in which someone like Suggs makes sense of her body and her world.

By way of conclusion, I want to highlight some of what we might yet learn from Suggs beyond the revelation of our biases. I outline how Suggs might lead us, if permitted, toward more capacious ways of imagining and interpreting disability even as she resists clear conscription into contemporary disability politics.

For one, Suggs can help draw attention to a different register of and for the political. Her memoir points away from overt battles for social standing and recognition and toward what makes given experiences of both impairment and social disablement livable. She prompts us to ask, what relationships, habits, and beliefs sustain a life? Such a focus, its shifts in scale, resonates with and encourages scholars of both religion and disability in their growing interest in the practice and stakes of care.⁷²

Insofar as Suggs’s answer to the question of livability is a description of being occupied by the divine and how the divine compels her to act—rejecting freak show managers, railing against alcohol, and preaching salvation—she also helps to trouble our confidence in distinguishing religion and politics. Whereas some might be inclined to read “religion” for its “political” potentials, Suggs demonstrates how a holy life can confound the separation of the internal from the external, the natural from the supernatural, and the public from the private. Listening to Suggs, it becomes clear that there is not an obvious way to speak discretely of her religion.

And it is along these lines that learning from someone like Suggs might contribute most directly to the project of disability studies and some of its enduring impasses. For some time, scholars have criticized what the anthropologists Don Kulick and Jens Rydström have called the field’s “implacable drift away from the least articulate to the most articulate.” These critics have lamented disability studies’ exclusionary preference for those regarded as “politically aware, combative, independent, and articulate.” While acknowledging the value and power of such voices (for reasons mentioned above), they have challenged the field to account for persons whose disabilities likely prohibit them from “carving” space, people who, for example, “have little or no verbal language, who do not engage in cultural critique or political activism, who live in institutions or group homes, who require a great deal of assistance to manage basic activities.”⁷³ These critics have asked, what would have to change to locate such persons within the scope of disability studies’ concern?

Suggs encourages an attunement to something akin to what the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has labeled “the middle ranges of agency,” a space where questions of human activity and subjectivity are not reducible to measures of acceptance or refusal, “compulsion or voluntarity.”⁷⁴ Suggs does this by representing herself gladly as the product of her parents’ faith and a community’s tradition (pace scholars’ assurances otherwise). And her depiction of faith as an experience in which she becomes both more of and other than herself orients readers to forms of life that blur distinctions between self and other, actor and acted upon. She elicits more subtle rubrics. While it is important to underscore the differences between someone like Suggs and those for whom Kulick and Rydström advocate, her representation of a self capacitated through its attachments and deferral to Another (as well as various others) might improve our attempts, to “recognize the agency of people who remain dependent upon others in sometimes ‘dramatic’ ways.”⁷⁵

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What I’ve offered here remains, of course, a necessarily partial account of Suggs’s life and work. This essay has its own ellipses. For example, future readers might do more to attend to Suggs’s participation in what Kathryn Lofton and Laurie Maffly-Kipp have named the “women’s work” of African American historiography in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. They might explore how Suggs’s autobiographical writing was and wasn’t meant to work with the parts of Shadow and Sunshine that chronicled experiences of slavery, those of Suggs’s relatives and others. They might parse her negotiation of what Jenifer Barclay has underscored as the “hell of a metaphor” that linked disability and slavery in American imaginations in this period. And still others might work to better situate Shadow and Sunshine within accounts of African American temperance work and the genre of African American women’s spiritual autobiography.⁷⁶

The ambition here has not been to offer the word on Suggs but, rather, ultimately, to follow Suggs, through her writing, back to some of the study of religion’s most basic and vexing questions. What do we ask of our subjects? How do we know them? And what do we owe? As growing ranks of scholars, among them scholars of American religion, set out in search of disability in the field and in the past (versions of what Jennifer Natalya Fink has named “lineating”), Suggs and her interpreters invite us to query our appetites for examples and models. As a person committed to discerning and mediating a voice other than her own, Suggs demands that we persist in asking about the ethics and practice of letting others speak through us—when this is and isn’t possible.⁷⁷