- Introduction
- Status, Phantasy, and the Christian Dogma Dr. Paul Radin
Part I: Conversion Experience
- Prologue: “A Man In A Man”
- “I Am Blessed But You Are Damned”
- “Hooked in The Heart”
- “My Jaws Became Unlocked”
- “The Loveliest Singing in the World”
- “A Voice Like the Cooing of a Dove”
- “God Struck Me Dead”
- “I Came From Heaven and Now Return”
- “Split Open From Head to Foot”
- “You Must Die This Day”
- “I Came To Myself Shouting”
- “Fly Open For My Bride”
- “The Gospel Train”
- “I Am As Old As God”
- “I Want You to Jump”
- “To Hell With Prayer in My Mouth”
- “Souls Piled Up Like Timber”
- “The Inside Voice Never Leaves Me Lonely”
- “Behold the Travail Of Your Soul”
- “Your Sings All Washed Away”
- “I Ain’t Got To Die No More”
- “Before The Wind Ever Blew”
- “Golden Slippers On My Feet”
- “Everything Just Fits”
- “The Golden Wedge”
- “A Voice Rang in My Soul”
- “Waiting For To Carry Me Home”
- “Angels Warm to Me In My Dreams”
- “I’ll Do The Separation at the Last Day”
- “The Sun in a Cloudy Sky”
- “Pray a Little Harder”
- “There Ain’t No Conjurers”
- “A Burning Over My Soul”
- “Felt the Darkness With My Hands”
- “Jesus Handed Me a Ticket”
- “I Died to Live Again”
- “Little Me Looks At Old Dead Me”
- “The Road So Narrow and My Feet So Big”
- “Barked At By The Hell-Hounds”
- “I Looked at My Hands And They Were New”
- “Behold, I Am A Doctor”
- “Hinder Me Not Ye Much-Loved Sins”
- “Waist-Deep in Death”
- “Baptized in the Spirit”
- “Sitting on Cattle With a Thousand Hoofs”
- “The Lord Spoke Peace To My Soul”
- “More Than Conqueror”
- “Hewn From The Mountains of Eternity”
- “Time Brought You to This World”
- Epilogue: “I Have Seen Nothing and Heard Nothing”
Part II: Autobiographies
- Slave Who Joined the Yanks
- Preacher from A “God-Fearing” Plantation
- “Times Got Worse After the War”
- Sixty-Five Years A “Washer and Ironer”
- Stayed With “Her People” After Freedom
- Slavery Was “Hell Without Fires”
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8 thoughts on “The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Volume 19, “God Struck Me Dead”, Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Negro Ex-Slaves)”
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from the “Prologue: A Man In a Man”, p. 1
I have always been suspicious of ‘conversions’. I remember my own short period of near-evangelical fervour in the sixth form at Bishop Luffa. I always think of the power of my own mind to create illusion; not, in my case, the illusion of images or of voices, but of illusory hope or excessive despair … it is quite obvious, from what I have read of psychology, that proof of religion coming solely from individuals testimonies of what they have experienced is of no value whatsoever in establishing the truth, or otherwise, of religion.
But everything is different with these. This is the first book of these slave testimonies I have opened, but it comes hard upon having watched the Ken Burns Civil War series in full for the first time. These conversion stories are not giving much background to their hardship, but they cite their day-to-day life in such a matter of fact way that it is searing, when you consider what it actually means. This from p. 3, the start of the section titled “I Am Blessed But You Are Damned” in the table of contents:
It is interesting the way in which the angel’s voice so closely mirrors the grammar and diction of e.g. Luke 2:10. But the vision is more personal, and a more direct catharsis from the situation in which the slave might be imagined to have been working (the book does not note either the gender or the location of the slaves (although perhaps from around Fisk University in Tennessee), but we might imagine an hot, bright and arid plowing environment which might give rise to the following vision:
There is also a very direct reference to the physical hardship of slavery in what happens to the slave next:
In Western visions of hell, hell is always in the future. We are saved from hell; the salvation is from what is to come. Not so with African-American slaves:
I haven’t looked at too many of these yet, but I also wonder whether there will continue to be a tendency for the voice of God himself to be soft, rather than loud; a direct contrast to the scolding and whipping of the slaves’ masters?
p.4
Interestingly, the interviewee refers to this him/herself as a trance:
I didn’t expect that, from the master.
from page 9, “Hooked in the Heart”:
This struck me because of the closeness of the religious experience to that of work, but in a different way: the paralleling of a relationship with God to that of a slave or employee to his master. The idea, in more modern terms of a “job description” in addition to the (not merely sufficient) “person specification”:
Is there a psychological need here to be subservient? To enter into a ‘freer bondage’, a ‘happier bondage’? To avoid the chaotic openness of freedom by continuing to receive ‘order’ from ‘orders’?
I don’t know whether this is selection-related, or more applicable to the nature of a ‘calling’ in African-American Christianity that endures to this day, but it is interesting that in many of these memoirs, the slaves are called to “preach”. The word seems, in some ways, at least, more immediately important than the act. The words (e.g. “mainly to hear the moaning and hear the preacher quote the scriptures”) have a primacy of importance, no doubt inextricably related to how the preacher articulates them. But, that said, God is the authority thus far, rather than the content of the words. There is talk of direct punishment or direct love, direct from God, but little of the inherent morality of The Word, as it exists separate from God (i.e. “Love your neighbour as yourself”). It would be interesting to see whether this immediate observation endures across the volume, and other evidence, as a whole.
p. 14 “The Loveliest Singing in the World”
The interviewee has lost (her?) child. It is ambiguous whether the child’s name was Mercy, or whether she is calling on God for Mercy.