Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Evangelists, and: Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women (review)

There is little doubt that spiritual narratives are centrally important to African American literary history. As Joycelyn Moody points out, "It is no fortuity that the oldest extant prose texts by black women in America are sacred writings." And yet the inherent complexities of these narratives present difficult theoretical and ideological challenges that seem to demand new hermeneutic paradigms. Whereas the first wave of African American scholarship focused on now canonical authors like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison who clearly challenged hegemonic systems of race and gender, the spiritual narratives explored by Douglass-Chin and Moody are not necessarily best served by situating them in relation to the politics of the color line. While nearly all these works do engage questions of racial oppression, to force them into the ideological mode of "radically challenging racial hegemony" is to risk overlooking the theological struggles that concern these writers much more explicitly. For Moody, Darlene Hine stated the critical challenge clearly in 1994: "[I]t is not enough simply to uncover . . . the obscure names of black foremothers"; theorists need "to develop an array of analytical frameworks" that will allow for a more complicated understanding of the spiritual and political issues that constitute the soul of these extremely important narratives.

While these two authors cover very similar material, their success in devising new theoretical paradigms to highlight the scholarly significance of these texts differs sharply. Douglass-Chin analyzes the spiritual autobiographies of Belinda (1787), Jarena Lee (1836), Rebecca Cox Jackson, Zilpha Elaw (1846), Sojourner Truth (1851), Julia Foote (1879), Amanda Smith (1893), and Virginia Broughton (1907). He strains to fit these theological texts into a narrative of how "black women signify upon hegemonic discourses of their day" and the ways in which these texts reflect the "mythic memory" of Africa. This works well enough in the case of Belinda, who invokes Yoruba gods in her petition against her white master, and Sojourner Truth, who privileges "the spoken vernacular over the written word." As Douglass-Chin correctly observes, these qualities would later be masterfully developed by twentieth-century authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Problems arise, however, in that Douglass-Chin's binary conception of "whiteness" and "blackness" leads him to a series of harsh condemnations. He accuses Amanda Smith, an AME missionary, of "Euro-Christian zeal" and suggests that Zilpha Elaw attempts to "solicit white approval as a ‘good nigger.'" Virginia Broughton falters because she "only rarely . . . returns to the ancestral places of [her] mothers." With a wave of the hand, Britton Hammon, James Gronniosaw, and Olaudah Equiano are dismissed for "embrac[ing] Christianity and the trappings of whiteness" while Frederick Douglass is condemned as a "minstrel" for aspiring to "Euro-civility." Admittedly, these spiritual narratives often defy simplistic ideological analysis (nineteenth-century African American missionary views of Africa, for example, were often derogatory). To equate Christianity with "the trappings of whiteness," however, fails to do justice to the integrity of the black church or to this fundamentally important form of early African American writing. It simply does not seem fair, in the final analysis, to judge these devout, church-going African American women by how well they conform to the figure of the "blues bad preacher woman."

Joycelyn Moody, on the other hand, makes an extremely important contribution to the study of spiritual narratives by offering a new theoretical framework that focuses much more self-consciously on theological dimensions. Sentimental Confessions examines works by Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Nancy Prince, Mattie J. Jackson, Julia Foote, and other African American autobiographers...