The Souls of Womenfolk : The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South

Beginning on the shores of West Africa in the sixteenth century and ending in the U.S. Lower South on the eve of the Civil War, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh traces a bold history of the interior lives of bondwomen as they carved out an existence for themselves and their families amid the horrors of American slavery. With particular attention to maternity, sex, and other gendered aspects of women's lives, she documents how bondwomen crafted female-centered cultures that shaped the religious consciousness and practices of entire enslaved communities. Indeed, gender as well as race co-constituted the Black religious subject, she argues--requiring a shift away from understandings of slave religion as a gender-amorphous category. Women responded on many levels--ethically, ritually, and communally--to southern slavery. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how they remembered, reconfigured, and innovated beliefs and practices circulating between Africa and the Americas. In this way, she redresses the exclusion of enslaved women from the American religious narrative. Challenging conventional institutional histories, this book opens a rare window onto the spiritual strivings of one of the most remarkable and elusive groups in the American experience. Cover 1 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction: Of the Faith of the Mothers 14 Chapter One. Georgia Genesis: The Birth of the Enslaved Female Soul 29 Chapter Two. Womb Re/membrances: The Moral Dimensions of Enslaved Motherhood 64 Chapter Three. Sex, Body, and Soul: Sexual Ethics and Social Values among the Enslaved 108 Chapter Four. The Birth and Death of Souls: Enslaved Women and Ritual 144 Chapter Five. Spirit Bodies and Feminine Souls: Women, Power, and the Sacred Imagination 174 Chapter Six. When Souls Gather: Women and Gendered Performance in Religious Spaces 207 Conclusion: Gendering the “Religion of the Slave” 247 Notes 250 Bibliography 284 Index 304 A 304 B 305 C 305 D 307 E 308 F 308 G 308 H 309 I 310 J 310 K 310 L 310 M 311 N 312 O 313 P 313 Q 313 R 313 S 315 T 318 U 318 V 318 W 319 Y 320 "In The souls of womenfolk, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh argues that woman-gendered cosmologies and experiences from the Upper Guinea Coast played a distinct role in shaping the religious consciousness and practices of enslaved communities in the Lower South, and that this process took place concurrently as enslaved peoples in the U.S. South interpreted their new contexts through the cosmological frameworks of their foreparents, while acquiring, innovating, and revising contemporaneous practices"-- Provided by publisher