Friday, January 4, 2013: 10:50 AM
Pontalba Salon (Hotel Monteleone)
In the middle of one of many chaotic escapes of the American Civil War, with Confederate militia gaining on her, the fugitive slave Mary did something remarkable. She stopped running. She knelt down, and she prayed for her freedom in this world. She got it— in a nearby refugee camp behind Union lines. What happens the day after an answered prayer? For slaves who saw Emancipation as a religious event of millennial proportions, what happens in the wake of a Revelation come to pass? Former slaves were hashing out these questions in refugee camps of the Civil War. Religion was central to the discourses newly freed people were creating about themselves. The refugee camps give us a unique opportunity to examine cosmologies and communities being negotiated and remade. As Mary’s act suggests, slaves believed that religious action—not only in prayer but in parables, charms, herbs, and newly evolving rituals--could directly influence their present. This paper takes seriously those religious actions and looks at the spiritual narratives slaves constructed to divine their freedom and affect their post-emancipation lives of changing but continuing inequality. Focusing on the religious understandings that have fallen out of the scope of both black church and northern missionary histories, I am looking at religion in unexpected places—in slave “superstitions,” in understandings of health, food, and clothing. In these camps we find the surprising significances of aprons, currency, beans, coat hooks, spelling books, and fences. These material items possessed both symbolic and functional import that slaves and missionaries struggled over in the construction of changing identities. The unspoken, quotidian practices and categories that controlled thought and action without being noticed, the mechanisms by which inequalities became naturalized, suddenly came into relief as former slaves embarked on a special kind of task: the reconstruction of hegemony.