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ABSTRACT
In her introduction to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis notes that the abolitionist tradition often harboured a “gendered framework” that defined “black freedom” in terms of the “suppression of black womanhood”. As such, Davis charges us with the task of “develop[ing] a framework that foregrounds both the complexities of gendered violence under slavery and possible gendered strategies for freedom”. In this paper, I engage in this task in two ways. First, I analyse key gendered aspects of the abolitionist tradition that erase black women’s agency. One important implication of my argument is that the abolitionist tradition prioritizes physical resistance in how we define ‘black freedom’ and in narratives of black life. Second, I argue that black women have intervened in this tradition by broadening our sense of agency and extending the landscape of liberation. My primary example will be hoodoo practices that emphasize divine submission rather than resistance in the works of black women abolitionists, such as in Scenes of the Life of Harriet Tubman and The Memoir of Old Elizabeth, a Coloured Woman.
Notes
1 For an example of such canonization, see Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland’s incredible anthology of philosophers weighing in on Frederick Douglass’ intellectual contributions to the field, Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader.
2 I borrow Katrina Hazzard-Donald’s definition of the term ‘hoodoo’: “the indigenous, herbal, healing, and supernatural-controlling spiritual folk tradition of the African American in the United States”. Hazzard-Donald, Mojo-Workin’, 4.
3 All subsequent section titles from Solange’s “Mad” on her album A Seat at the Table.
4 For examples, see Bernard R. Boxill’s “The Fight with Mr. Covey”, Lewis R. Gordon’s “Douglass as an Existentialist”, and Frank M. Kirkland’s “Is an Existentialist Reading of the Fight with Mr. Covey Sufficient to Explain Douglass’ Critique of Slavery?”.
5 For more examples of this type of analysis, see Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow, 147–8 and Smith, Self-Discovery, 33–4. See also Wallace, “Violence”, 76–83, Lawson, “Douglass”, 123–7. Joy James’s distinction between and discussion of ‘feminism’ versus ‘profeminism’ might help us to make sense of the contradiction between Douglass’ literary representations of women and his political record of being a strong advocate for women’s suffrage. “Here feminist refers to women's gender-progressive politics, and profeminist denotes male advocates of women’s equality”, James writes. James, Transcending, 37.
6 Valerie Smith also discusses this dynamic in her comparison of Douglass’ Narrative with Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. While Douglass’ narrative “extols the hero’s stalwart individuality”, Jacob’s story “is not the classic story of the triumph of the individual will; rather it is more a story of a triumphant self-in-relation”. Smith, Self-Discovery, 33. Although, as John Stauffer notes, Douglass amends his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, to include a story of slave woman, Nelly, who physically fights her master, she is ultimately unsuccessful in winning that fight. See Stauffer, “Douglass’ Self-Making”, 34–8, and Douglass, My Bondage, 41–2.
7 As Zora Neale Hurston notes: “‘roots’ is the Southern Negro’s term for folk-doctoring by herbs and prescriptions, and by extension, and because all hoodoo doctors cure by roots, it may be used as a synonym of hoodoo”. Hurston, “Hoodoo in America”, 22.
8 For an extended discussion of these black male slave narratives and examples of their disavowal of conjure, see Martin, Conjuring Moments, 55–60. See also Rucker, The River Flows On, 183–6.
9 See Douglass, Narrative, 185–7, Douglass, My Bondage, 135–7, and Douglass, Life and Times, 77–8.
10 See Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin’, 43–4, Martin, Conjuring Moments, 89–95, and Chireau, Black Magic, 12–13, 25–6.
11 As Tracey E. Hucks notes, black women’s spirituality has a long history of blending Christianity with these West African derived spiritual traditions. Hucks, “Burning with a Flame”, 90, 96–96.
12 See also Hazzard-Donald, “Hoodoo Religion”, 201.
13 For other examples of black women abolitionist narratives with similar themes of spiritual submission in a hoodoo-Christian context, see Gilbert and Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth and Lee, Religious Experience and Journal.
14 As Majorie Pryse notes, “[f]or Jarena Lee and other nineteenth-century black women preachers, religious evangelicalism perhaps provided sufficient sanction of faith to allow them to transcend proscriptions against women’s expression”. Pryse, “Zora Neale Hurston”, 8. For example, we can also see Sojourner Truth appealing to visions and her submission to God’s calling as the basis of her spiritual authority. See Gilbert and Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 31–40.
15 A more recent biographer of Tubman, Kate Clifford Larson, also echoes this sentiment. See Larson, Bound, xviii-xix.
16 Davis notes that Tubman got her rootwork from her father: “[h]e taught her how to walk soundlessly through the woods and how to find food and medicine among the plants, roots and herbs” (Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 23). Tubman also attributed her ability to foretell the future to her father (Sanborn, Scenes, 80). As Larson observes, these practices of dream and fortune-telling formed part of Asante culture, and it is believed that Tubman was second-generation Asante (Larson, Bound, 10–13).
17 See Bradford and Tubman, Scenes, 34–5, 41–2, and 43–4. In particular, the ‘spiritual shuffle’ described on 43–4 is characteristic of the dance of the Ring Shout. See also Humez, The Life, 200, 228–9, 246, and 333.
18 For a broader discussion of Du Bois’s gender dynamics across his corpus of work, see James, Transcending, 35–60, and Carby, Race Men, 9–45.
19 See Wallace, “Violence”, 78–9; Martin, The Mind, 19–20; and Boxill, “The Fight”, 273–6.
20 William D. Hart writes “ … the [black] church teeters between resistance to white supremacy and submission, between ‘manliness’ and ‘effiminancy.’” Moreover, “[a]s historical sociology, Black Religion is bifurcated geographically between North and South, dispositionally between militant church and submissive church, and ethical-politically between fashionable if trivial pursuits and hard questions”. Hart, “Three Rivals”, 477–8.
See also Hazel Carby’s Race Men, 37–40, and West, “W. E. B. Du Bois”, 1968.
21 For examples of similar feminist analyses of submission, agency, and resistance in religious contexts, see Mahmood, The Politics of Piety, 5–16, and Kelley, The Hammer and the Flute, 6–10 and 73–83.