By Yolanda Pierce
those tales through 5 of the earliest antebellum non secular writers--George White, John Jea, David Smith, Solomon Bayley, and Zilpha Elaw--create a brand new non secular language that merges Christian scripture with specified retellings of biblical tales, with enslaved humans of African descent at their heart. displaying the methods their language exploits the degrees of that means of phrases like master, slavery, sin, and flesh, Pierce argues that the narratives deal with the desires of these who tried to remodel a international god and faith right into a own and collective method of ideals. The earthly "hell with out fires"--one of the writer's characterizations of daily life for these dwelling in slavery--could turn into a spot the place somebody may be either black and Christian, and faith might supply physically and mental therapeutic.
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Extra resources for Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative
Example text
The unique “manifestation of . . power” White experiences is a force that has been George White’s Call to Preach 29 denied him all of his life. Up to this point, his circumstances have been wholly determined by slave society. ) His identity as slave and former slave avails him little control of his own life and destiny. White’s conversion is the >rst life experience over which other human beings have no control. The moment when the divine presence engulfs White emanates from and is sustained by God.
Graham Hodges (who rediscovered White’s long-neglected narrative) argues that White’s importance lies primarily in his “careful reconstruction of clerical politics between African-Americans and white Methodists” (18). Hodges goes on to suggest that White is a man more concerned about institutions than his own or others’ conversions and states that White is not a “true religious independent” among African-American religious >gures (18). Similarly, Andrews calls George White the “>rst organization man in Afro-American autobiography,” implying that racial self-hatred is manifest in his spiritual conversion and work within a white institution (53).
Born in 1773 in Old Callabar, a region in modern-day southern Nigeria, he, his parents, and siblings endured the 38 hell without fires Middle Passage after being captured and sold by native chiefs of their village. A New York Dutch couple, Oliver and Angelika Triehuen, purchased the entire family who together endured the severe conditions of slavery in rural New York. Jea experiences conversion at the age of >fteen and is spontaneously “blessed” with miraculous literacy. By providing irrefutable proof of his baptism and literacy, he is freed from slavery and, called to preach, begins to travel throughout New York and Massachusetts.
