No Cross, No Crown: Black Nuns in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (review)

The editors, Virginia Gould and Charles Nolan, have entitled this journal most aptly No Cross, No Crown, because the author's conviction that earthly suffering dutifully embraced yields spiritual rewards and graces resonates throughout her work. Sister Mary Bernard Deggs's journal chronicles the nineteenth-century experiences of the Sisters of the Holy Family, the second Roman Catholic sisterhood of African descent in the United States. The paucity of historical records documenting the sisterhood's tortuous evolution from a religious confraternity in 1842 to a community of women religious, whose Rule and habit the Catholic Church formally approved in the 1880's, underscores the historical significance of Deggs's journal, begun in 1894. Deggs's insights about communal spirituality and devotional piety, her revealing accounts of personality conflicts and communal tensions, her explicit and candid comments about color caste and class status, and her reflections on the sisterhood's ministry more than compensate for her lack of literary skills. The journal consists of five parts, covering the administrations of co-founders Mothers Henriette Delille and Juliette Gaudin, Mother Josephine Charles, Mother Marie Magdalene Alpaugh, Mother Marie Cecilia Capla, and Mother Mary Austin Jones.

Gould and Nolan introduce each part with chronologies and commentaries. A few of their editorial emphases raise concerns. Gould and Nolan contradict their own evidence of the "attitudes of race, status, and condition represented in this journal and elsewhere in the archives of the Sisters of the Holy Family . . ." (p. 7), by arguing unconvincingly that from their inception the sisters identified racially with the black slave and free people they evangelized. The editors bolster this contention by asserting, "In one of the most telling actions, the sisters soon after the conclusion of the Civil War eliminated the rule that only women from previously free and elite families were eligible to enter" (p. 6). Adjustment to the reality of the postwar abolition of slavery more plausibly explained this policy change than the sisters' putative rejection of racist social proscriptions. Furthermore, the editors' reference to Sister Borgia Hart's account of the first rift in the sisterhood precipitated by conflict over color and caste, self-characterizations like "young quadroon and octoroon ladies" (p. 10), slave ownership, and explicitly stated preferences for and admiration of light skin color indicate that the nineteenth-century sisters considered the black population, "our people," primarily as the recipients of their ministry.

The editors state, "That a small band of Afro-Creole women founded a religious community in the antebellum South was remarkable" (p. ix). They reiterate, "Conventions of class, race, gender, and condition held implications for free women of color in New Orleans as they did nowhere else in the deep South. It was only there, in the 1840s and 1850s, when the slave-based social system was at its most restrictive, that a band of women of African descent could turn their spiritual energy and hope into the reality of an officially recognized religious community, committed to serving the religious and social needs of their people" (p. xx). Such assertions completely ignore the existence of the first black Catholic sisterhood, the Oblate Sisters of Providence, in Baltimore from 1828. Comparing aspects of the experiences of these two antebellum southern black Catholic sisterhoods—such as respective community attitudes about color and caste, respective acceptance by the institutional church and secular society, and respective responses to clerical requests for domestic service—would have proven instructive.

Nevertheless, Gould's and Nolan's efforts to surmount the considerable obstacles they encountered in editing Deggs's journal prove well expended; for as they correctly assert, "the complexity of this document, the way in which it intertwines issues of race, class, and gender against the backdrop of economic, political, and social change...