I knew very well, if God was able to deliver me from the corrupt influence of the world and the power of Satan, that he was able to deliver me from this slave-holder. Yet I was like so many others, I did not see by what method he would secure my deliverance. Still with childlike simplicity I trusted him.1
This chapter explores the reception of Pauline language in conversion stories of enslaved Africans. These narratives demonstrate that African Americans received, adopted, and adapted the apostle’s writings regarding their view of the world and their own supernatural conversion experiences with God, including their call stories.
One way to begin to understand the reception of Paul in these conversion stories is to examine briefly the impact of the Great Awakening upon enslaved Africans. The Awakening’s emphasis on evangelism, salvation, and conversion experiences for all people influenced the Bible’s reception among the enslaved. The evangelists of this movement noted the huge presence and the large number of conversions of enslaved Africans in their meetings.2 Importantly, during the Great Awakening, conversion was linked with the ability to read the Bible for oneself and, thus, compelled the need for literacy among the enslaved.3 The idea of granting the enslaved literacy, however, met with great resistance among slaveholders.4 In addition, the Great Awakening tended to proclaim personal salvation, which allowed blacks and whites to believe that Christ had died personally for them. Such an emphasis destressed a person’s social status.5 Important for the present discussion is the fact that as time went on the emphasis on personal relationship with God became even more important.
Significantly, the Bible became the primary source for religious instruction and education among the enslaved. It shaped the way they thought about themselves, their enslavers, and the world around them. It formed their view of their situation and, for many, became a source of life in the midst of oppression. As Janet Cornelius states, “By the last decades of slavery, with only a few exceptions, black people had fashioned a religious faith which embraced Christianity as a system of morals, a promise for a future life, and ‘spiritual release from anxieties, frustrations, and animosities,’ but they rejected Christianity as practiced by white slaveholders.”6 She also observes that for the enslaved, “knowledge of the Bible, the sacred text, was a tool for attaining salvation and for living in a personal relationship with God.”7 Enslaved Africans did not merely convert to Christianity, but they shaped the Christian tradition to fit their own situation of enslavement. They engaged in a “dual process,” accepting the gospel and at the same time making the gospel their own.8
Part of this dual process involved a deep reverence of Scripture. This reverence created a desire to read Scripture for themselves, which many pursued after freedom.9 Until then, slaves learned many of the biblical stories through oral tradition and committed these stories to memory. C. Michelle Venable-Ridley writes, “Meaning and significance were found in the telling and retelling, the hearing and rehearing of biblical stories—stories of perseverance, of strength in weakness and under oppressive burdens, of hope in hopeless situations.”10 Furthermore, some enslaved Africans, because they could not read the Bible, believed God gave them revelation in their hearts. As Albert Raboteau writes, “Several ex-slaves claimed that they recognized verses read to them from the Bible because they had heard them before in visions they had experienced during slavery.”11 Their reverence for Scripture and their belief in God’s power to deal directly with them allowed many enslaved Africans to apply and shape scriptural teaching to their own life and circumstances. Thus, these conversion experiences highlight God’s transformative presence with the enslaved, and these divine encounters reaffirm the God-given dignity already within them, the dignity that refused to allow them to believe the distorted gospel of their slaveholders.
The African American conversion narratives discussed below often follow a similar pattern. They commence with the convert suffering from a feeling of extreme guilt of sin and a sense of heaviness or being weighed down. Often the initiate cannot eat or sleep and undergoes great anxiety. Next, the person receives a vision, which may consist of potential damnation or divine rescue from damnation or both. In many instances, the person sees hell, heaven, angels, Satan, God, or Jesus. As a result of such divine encounters, the convert prays for forgiveness, mercy, or salvation, and in response to this posture of surrender, experiences acceptance by God and a new birth, often with the outcome of receiving a call to preach.12 This is roughly the pattern these experiences follow, although the order may vary.13 For example, in some cases, prayer may precede the vision, and some converts may pray and fast in order to receive salvation, whereas in other instances no sense of guilt precedes conversion, God comes to them unexpectedly. Nonetheless, these visionary conversion experiences lead the converts to view themselves afterward as completely different people transformed into new creations.
William Andrews touches upon the major themes of these conversion narratives, which are freedom from sin and Satan and a call to a new way of being in the world. As the subsequent conversion accounts demonstrate, the converts often describe themselves in two ways, a preconversion self that existed in sin and engaged in sinful activities and a postconversion self in which they live renewed lives aimed at following God and doing what God called them to do. In many cases, their conversions allow them to view their preconversion selves in light of God’s mercy and grace in that they see that God cared for them and watched over them even before they began to follow God. In other words, their postconversion selves view their past in light of God’s grace.
In the foreword to God Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Ex-Slaves, a collection of enslaved African American conversion narratives from which the excerpts in this chapter derive, Paul Radin argues that although these enslaved conversions may exhibit patterns and terminology similar to those of white models, “they are not mere imitations or an inert continuation of a white tradition.”14 For an enslaved African American, conversion meant “Christ had recognized him and that he had recognized Christ. In fact, it was not so much the Negro who sought God as God who sought the Negro.”15 Conversions of enslaved Africans brought about a disruption and a transformation of their total selves, for conversion signified a disruption of a distorted identity hoisted upon them by the exterior white society in which their black bodies equaled sin and evil. Conversion meant the rejection and cancellation of such an identity and a transformed recognition in which the enslaved saw herself as loved by God and created in the divine image. These conversion experiences point to a distinction between sin as intrinsic to blackness and black people and sin as an outside power that affects them. This distinction refutes the theology of many white believers during this time, in which blacks and sin were synonymous. To the contrary, sin was a power from which both whites and blacks needed liberation.
Correspondingly, although similar patterns may exist between African American conversions and white conversions, the meanings behind the patterns are significantly different because of the social locations of the groups. For blacks, these divine encounters affirmed their equality to whites, their possession of a soul, and their humanity; whites who underwent conversion experiences did not need such affirmations. Because they were white, society assumed they possessed souls, were superior to blacks, and were human. Accordingly, then, conversion experiences for blacks were much more than religious experiences; they were social and political experiences as well, for they enabled them to resist the racist social and political structures built upon white supremacy that sought to reify black inferiority and inculcate black dehumanization.
The belief of the enslaved that God loved them and worked in their lives despite their social status becomes apparent when examining their conversion accounts and divine commissions to preach. Remarkably, despite slaveholders’ attempts to dehumanize African Americans with Scripture, many slaves remained largely “convinced that God is for them.”16 They believed in a “God of infinite power who could be trusted to act on their behalf.”17 The following ex-slave accounts demonstrate this belief in divine power and in God’s ability to overcome any opposition. Moreover, these narratives indicate that this view of divine power derives in part from Pauline language, for these slaves adopt and adapt the apostle’s cosmology and view of the world in relation to God, Satan, deliverance, salvation, and visions. Accordingly, they adhere to the belief in God to overcome satanic power.
The voices of the ex-slaves who tell of their supernatural encounters with God and Satan in God Struck Me Dead display a genuine belief in the supernatural world, that is, that “human and spiritual beings share social space.”18 To share social space means that the realms of the human and the supernatural interpenetrate and intermingle in such a way that the two are intimately connected; events in the supernatural realm affect the human arena, and humanity’s activities impact the supernatural.19 These conversion stories illustrate that the cosmic conflict between God and Satan affects humanity and that humanity’s salvation depends upon God’s power of deliverance. Accordingly, the seers in these narratives express a faith in a God who hears and acts on behalf of human beings, particularly those experiencing oppression.
In the story “I Am Blessed but You Are Damned,” an enslaved African called Morte plows a field and, while doing this chore, encounters God.
One day while in the field plowing I heard a voice. I jumped because I thought it was my master coming to scold and whip me for plowing up some more corn. I looked but saw no one. Again the voice called, “Morte! Morte!” With this I stopped, dropped the plow, and started running, but the voice kept on speaking to me saying, “Fear not, my little one, for behold! I come to bring you a message of truth.” … I looked up and saw that I was in a new world…. As I prayed an angel came and touched me, and I looked new. I looked at my hands and they were new; I looked at my feet and they were new. I looked and saw my old body suspended over a burning pit by a small web like a spider web. I again prayed, and there came a soft voice saying, “My little one, I have loved you with an everlasting love. You are this day made alive and freed from hell. You are a chosen vessel unto the Lord [Acts 9:15—God’s description of Paul to Ananias]. Be upright before me, and I will guide you unto all truth. My grace is sufficient for you [2 Cor. 12:9]. Go, and I am with you. Preach the gospel, and I will preach with you. You are henceforth the salt of the earth.”20
The beginning of Morte’s account is rich with scriptural language and is indicative of the scriptural language that permeates the rest of his narrative. Echoes of prophetic call stories (“Fear not”) exist as well as echoes of the Gospels, such as “salt of the earth.” Interspersed with this scriptural language is language that indicates transport into another world, which leads to: (1) an identification with Paul’s Damascus road experience and God’s subsequent speech to Ananias concerning Paul: he is a chosen vessel unto the Lord, and (2) a linkage to the apostle’s Himmelsreise (ascent) to the third heaven: “my grace is sufficient for you.” These particular references to Paul’s experiences shape Morte’s own supernatural encounter and suggest a connection between himself and the apostle; they become motifs developed further in the account. God’s speech about Paul to Ananias becomes direct divine speech to Morte: “You are my chosen vessel,” and God’s word to Morte about the sufficiency of grace, the same words God gives to Paul regarding his Himmelsreise (ascent), underscores the supernatural element of Morte’s own encounter and signals Morte’s foray into the suprahuman realm, where conflict between God and Satan exists. The sufficiency of grace becomes evident in God’s deliverance of Morte later in the narrative. As this inclusion of Pauline language shows, the divine encounters Paul experiences are now renarrated in the life of this enslaved African.
After this part of the narrative, Morte relates a vision of the heavenly throne in which he sees God and, upon seeing him, falls upon his face. He receives another commissioning directive from God instructing him to preach, and then finally he comes to himself. At that point he realizes that most of the corn has been plowed up since the horse had run off with the plow during Morte’s experience. When the slave owner comes and is visibly upset with Morte about what has happened, Morte relates the next unexpected event of his story. “I told him that I had been talking with God Almighty, and that it was God who had plowed up the corn. He looked at me very strangely, and suddenly I fell for shouting, and I shouted and began to preach. The words seemed to flow from my lips. When I had finished I had a deep feeling of satisfaction and no longer dreaded the whipping I knew I would get. My master looked at me and seemed to tremble. He told me to catch the horse and come on with him to the barn.”21
As Morte attempts to carry out the slaveholder’s orders, he receives another supernatural encounter.
I went to get the horse, stumbling down the corn rows. Here again I became weak and began to be afraid for the whipping. After I had gone some distance down the rows, I became dazed and again fell to the ground. In a vision I saw a great mound and, beside it or at the base of it, stood the angel Gabriel. And a voice said to me, “Behold your sins as a great mountain. But they shall be rolled away. Go in peace, fearing no man, for lo! I have cut loose your stammering tongue and unstopped your deaf ears. A witness shalt thou be, and thou shalt speak to multitudes, and they shall hear. My word has gone forth, and it is power. Be strong, and lo! I am with you even until the world shall end. Amen.” I looked, and the angel Gabriel lifted his hand, and my sins, that had stood as a mountain, began to roll away. I saw them as they rolled over into a great pit. They fell to the bottom, and there was a great noise. I saw old Satan with a host of his angels hop from the pit, and … I cried out, “Save me! Save me, Lord!” And like a flash there gathered around me a host of angels…. Then stepped one in the direction of the pit. Old Satan and his angels, growling with anger and trembling with fear, hopped back into the pit. Finally again there came a voice unto me saying, “Go in peace and fear not … rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for I have saved you through grace by faith, not of yourself but as a gift of God” [Eph. 2:8]…. I must have been in this trance for more than an hour. I went on to the barn and found my master there waiting for me. Again I began to tell him of my experience … my master sat watching and listening to me, and then he began to cry. He turned from me and said in a broken voice, “Morte, I believe you are a preacher. From now on you can preach to the people here on my place in the old shed by the creek. But tomorrow morning, Sunday, I want you to preach to my family and neighbors.” … The next morning at the time appointed I stood up on two planks in front of the porch of the big house and, without a Bible or anything, I began to preach to my master and the people…. Ever since that day I have been preaching the gospel and am not a bit tired. I can tell anyone about God in the darkest hour of midnight, for it is written on my heart.22
Morte’s story illustrates what Albert Raboteau insightfully observes as the potential for religion to “bend the seemingly inflexible positions of master and slave.”23 Morte’s supernatural encounter allows him to experience divine revelations and to experience a divine interruption of the master/slave hierarchy, thereby illustrating that true divine encounters can destabilize an oppressive status quo. Just as Paul’s Damascus road encounter changed the trajectory of his life, Morte’s conversion experience alters his life too. Morte’s second supernatural encounter that comes about as he attempts to “catch the horse” develops the Pauline language present in the opening part of the narrative. During Morte’s otherworldly experience, Satan and Satan’s angels interfere and attempt to grab him, but he prays for deliverance, and God’s angels come to the rescue. The similarity with Paul’s own Himmelsreise in 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 is striking. In these verses, Paul receives a revelatory experience in his ascent, faces opposition from Satan and Satan’s angels to this experience, and formulates a prayer of deliverance from this satanic opposition.24 Morte’s divine encounter follows this same pattern: revelation, satanic opposition, and a prayer for deliverance.
Yet, although Morte’s supernatural episode follows the same pattern as Paul’s Himmelsreise, Morte’s social location as an enslaved African adds another dimension. The idea that a supernatural battle rages between God and Satan makes sense to Morte as part of a people whose own lives are filled with hardship and struggle. For them, the conflict in the supernatural realm merely reflects what occurs in their lives on a daily basis. To ascend to heaven and experience opposition on the way mirrors the trials and opposition in life they face every day. Thus, the apostle’s ascent experience both coheres with their view of the world and shapes their view of the world.
Furthermore, just as Paul becomes a mediator of divine knowledge to the Corinthians in which he reveals to them through his ascent the existence of a cosmic conflict, Morte’s experience sanctions him as a mediator of divine knowledge too, a minister of God’s Word who reveals God’s “matchless love,” the need for all to “be born again” and “freed from the shackles of hell.”25 The slaveholder even acknowledges Morte’s experience and invites him to proclaim the gospel to him, his family, and his friends. That Paul’s experience shapes this narrative is evident in the way his supernatural episodes and terminology permeate the account as well as bracket it. At the beginning and the end of the experience, references to Paul occur. In the opening of the narration, God’s words regarding Paul appear as words to Morte, “You are a chosen vessel” and “My grace is sufficient for you.” At the closing of the narrative, God speaks to Morte with Paul’s words regarding salvation as a gift through grace (Eph. 2:8).
For Morte, this experience is both his conversion and commissioning story. God saves him from his sins and from the attack of Satan and Satan’s angels and commissions him to preach the gospel. His vision of the heavenly throne and his reception of divine revelations demonstrate the adoption and adaptation of Paul’s cosmology, including his language of an ascent. In both Paul’s and Morte’s narratives, the visionary becomes a means of revelation, but in Morte’s particular case, the vision allows the visionary to transcend social status, at least to a certain extent. For Morte this experience leads to an unprecedented event in his life, preaching to the slave owner, and precipitates an event that stands as a counternarrative to those many instances of the white slaveholder and the white minister constantly preaching to the slaves, “Slaves, obey your master.” A vision of the heavenly has earthly implications, for here Morte, an enslaved African, proclaims the gospel to the slaveholder and in his own person becomes a tangible symbol of a divine interruption of the oppressive status quo.
In another narrative entitled “The Slave Who Joined the Yanks,” an enslaved African named Charlie provides detailed information about his life under slavery. Several important episodes in the earlier part of his narrative shed light on his use of Paul later in the story. As a house slave, Charlie’s tasks include taking care of the family and doing chores around the house. “I had to get up in the morning, around four o’clock—I guessed the time by the stars—and blow the horn for the hands to get up and go feed. Then I would make fires, bring the water, milk the cows, get the horses ready for school, sweep, and help clean up the house. Along about six o’clock I would have to go in and waken Mars’ Bill, Ole Missey, and Little Mistress.”26 He tells of one particular episode in which his mistress orders him to wake up her daughter and make her bed.
One Saturday morning Little Missey was sleeping late. She did not have to go to school. Ole Missey told me to go and make up her bed. I went in, and she didn’t want to get up so that I could make the bed. I told her then that it was late, and that Ole Missey said for her to get up. Then she got mad, jumped up in the bed, and said, “You black dog, get out of here. I’ll get up when I get ready.” With that she slapped me as hard as she could, right in my face. I saw stars. As soon as I got back to myself I swung at her, and if she hadn’t been so quick I would have almost killed her, for I hit at her with my fist and with all the force I had. I was just about ready to jump up on the bed and choke the life out of her when Ole Missey happened in. She told Ole Missey that I had snatched the cover off the bed and sassed her. Ole Missey turned on me and said, “What do you mean, you black devil? I’ll strap your back good for this.” I was too worked up and full to say anything. She tied my crossed hands to the bedposts and gave me a lashing with a buggy whip.27
Among other things, this episode highlights the complexity of the enslaved life, for enslaved Africans were subject not only to the whims of their male slaveholders but also to those of their slaveholders’ wives and children. And as this episode underscores, white children often took advantage of their status over the enslaved by lying about them. Their word was believed over any enslaved person’s point of view, which often resulted in enslaved people suffering punishment for something they did not do.
After narrating the harshness of his life as a slave and several more whippings he receives for “offenses,” Charlie provides details about another incident in which his enslaver sneaks up on him and his brother Jeff while the two are talking.
My brother had an awful heavy voice and couldn’t talk low, so while we were talking our master came up and listened to what we were saying. I remember so well how I swore and said, “I’ll be damned if I want to run away and be brought back here and whipped and then have to have my back greased in castor oil. When I run away I am going for good.” About this time our master stepped around the corner of the crib and said, “You two damn rascals are plotting to run away, are you? Come right around here and I will teach you how to run away. I will tear your——and backs to pieces.”28
Charlie does receive a severe whipping, and although his brother runs away, he is caught and brutally whipped also. Eventually, however, both Charlie and his brother Jeff run away to join the Yankees and help them fight during the war. Years later, after the war, Charlie sees his former enslaver, and the encounter is worth narrating at length.
One day, while I was down on the public square, I met my old master. I had not seen him for nearly thirty years. He said to me, “Charlie, do you remember me lacerating your back?” I said, “Yes, Mars’.” “Have you forgiven me?” he asked. I said, “Yes, I have forgiven you.” There were a lot of people gathering around because we were a little distance apart and talking loud. I was never scared of nobody, so when he asked me the next question, “How can you forgive me, Charlie?” I said, “Mars’, when we whip dogs, we do it just because we own them. It is not because they done anything to be whipped for, but we do it just because we can. That is why you whipped me. I used to serve you, work for you, almost nurse you, and if anything had happened to you I would have fought for you, for I am a man among men. What is in me, though, is not in you. I used to drive you to church and peep through the door to see you all worship, but you ain’t right yet, Marster. I love you as though you never hit me a lick, for the God I serve is a God of love, and I can’t go to his kingdom with hate in my heart.” He held out his hand to me and almost cried and said, “Charlie, come to see me and I will treat you nice. I am sorry for what I did.” I said, “That’s all right, Marster. I done left the past behind me.” I had felt the power of God and tasted his love, and this had killed all the spirit of hate in my heart years before this happened. Whenever a man has been killed dead and made alive in Christ Jesus [1 Cor. 15:22; Gal. 2:19–20], he no longer feels like he did when he was a servant of the devil. Sin kills dead [Rom. 6:15, 23; 7:11] but the spirit of God makes alive [Rom. 6:2–11].29
This powerful account of Charlie’s exchange with his former enslaver underscores several important elements endemic to slavocracy. As Charlie points out, the slave owner’s cruel treatment of him stemmed from his position of absolute power over Charlie. He whipped Charlie because he could, not because Charlie had done anything wrong. Slave owners’ absolute power over the enslaved facilitated their harsh treatment and torturous habits. This notion of the slaveholders’ unbridled power appears in Julia Foote’s autobiography when she writes of her encounter with a slaveholder looking for a runaway slave. While she is attending a church conference and eating at a house with friends, a slaveholder interrupts the dinner and searches the house for the runaway. The incident, she remarks, “cast a gloom over the whole Conference” and causes her to lament, “What a terrible thing it was for one human being to have absolute control over another.”30 She recognizes the tragic consequences of such unbridled power and that this absolute control permeates every aspect of the life of the enslaved. Charlie’s words to his former enslaver also capture well this vile dimension of slavocracy.
In addition, throughout his narrative about his life under slavery, Charlie emphasizes how his former enslaver and his former enslaver’s family often referred to him as a black devil. Such language, as we discussed earlier, derives from the belief that black people were created by the devil and were devils, and it was a theological linguistic method used to deny their humanity. Yet here in his confrontation with his former enslaver Charlie asserts his humanity and his manhood, stating, “I am a man among men,” thereby illustrating his complete rejection of his former master’s nomenclature for him and the beliefs that undergirded such a classification. The differences that exist between the two do not rest upon Charlie’s supposed creation by the devil but upon the fact that his former enslaver “ain’t right,” because although he goes to church, he does not worship the “God of love,” as Charlie does. Charlie, therefore, underscores the hypocritical nature of the slave-holder’s religion by drawing a distinct contrast between him and his former enslaver and the two different gods they serve, for as Charlie states to his former enslaver, “What is in me, though, is not in you.”
After narrating this exchange, Charlie informs the reader about what exactly is in him and how he is able to forgive the former enslaver. God’s power and God’s love kill the spirit of hate and empower Charlie to love the former slaveholder despite the cruelty he experienced at his hands for many years. As Yolanda Pierce observes, “After his spiritual transformation, Charlie not only turns from sin and toward Christ, but taking on the role of a Christlike figure, he graciously forgives the sins committed against him.”31 Moreover, echoing Pauline language, Charlie speaks of two kinds of death in his explanation of how he could forgive the slave owner, a death that takes place through his conversion experience: he was killed dead and made alive in Christ Jesus, which contradicts and supersedes a death that takes place due to sin’s power: sin kills dead.
Charlie’s language of being killed dead and made alive in Christ Jesus echoes several Pauline passages. Most notably, his words have resonances with Galatians 2:20, where Paul writes, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” To be killed dead means to be united with Christ’s death of crucifixion, and in doing so the believer shares in his death to the old age order and partakes in his resurrection to life anew. Indeed, Christ’s death becomes the believer’s experience and so too his resurrection. The new life that the believer experiences is the new life of the risen Christ living in him. Charlie’s language of killed dead and made alive fleshes out what he means by “what is in him”; the risen Christ makes him alive and lives in him, empowering him to love his former enslaver.
Charlie’s emphasis on being killed dead corresponds with Paul’s focus on God’s action of crucifying him. The passive nature of Paul’s crucifixion indicates that God is the agent behind the deed.32 Similarly, in Charlie’s case, the death he undergoes comes about through divine power. The death Charlie endures includes the killing of hate in his heart, an execution that only God could perform. At the same time, it is important to note what Pierce states about this death of hate: “While the manifestation of religious faith for Charlie allows him to forgive, he does not forget. Charlie’s spiritual conversion is of such a fundamentally singular kind that he is able to live with a memory of hate, but not with the hate itself.”33 God’s assassination of the spirit of hate within Charlie’s heart does not erase the years of torture and pain he endures under his former enslaver, but it does allow him, as he says, to leave “the past behind me.”
In addition, 1 Corinthians 15:22 and Romans 6:2–11 form the background of Charlie’s declaration. In 1 Corinthians 15:22 Paul writes, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” Whereas Adam brought death to humanity, Christ brings life so that where death abounds, life abounds all the more, including in Charlie’s life, where he is made alive in Christ. Paul’s language in Romans 6:2–11 regarding death, life, sin, and grace also reverberates in Charlie’s words, shaping and informing his own experience of God and God’s power at work in him. In these verses Paul speaks of believers sharing in Christ’s death, and by doing so, believers’ former selves are “replaced by a new status as God’s beloved” and are given an awareness of “Christ living in them.”34 Similar to Paul, who declares his death along with all believers’ death to sin, Charlie experiences death and new life in Christ Jesus. Because of this death and resurrection experience, Charlie is no longer a servant of the devil but of the Lord.35
Charlie adopts Paul’s stance of sin as a power with the ability to kill and juxtaposes it with the Spirit, which makes alive. In his phrase “Sin kills dead” Charlie echoes the apostle’s words in Romans 5:12, 21; 6:23, where Paul writes that sin brings death, and 7:11, where he declares that sin slew him. Two powers are at work upon human beings—sin, which brings death, and the Spirit, which opposes sin’s death agenda, by bringing forth life, as the apostle writes in Romans 8:6, 10–11. As this scriptural analysis demonstrates, at a pivotal moment in his narrative Charlie takes up Pauline language and utilizes it to describe his conversion, transformation, new stance toward his former enslaver, and the existence of two powers that affect humanity, the Holy Spirit and sin.
Charlie’s conversion, which he describes later in his narrative, offers a deepening understanding of his forgiving response to his former enslaver; his conversion profoundly transforms his life. His first experience of God’s power takes place in the woods while praying. Later, upon invitation from a preacher to attend a revival, Charlie attends the meeting for four nights, and before going on the fourth night, he prays once again in the woods: “Lord I have neither father nor mother. Have mercy on me.”36 Later on, as the people at church pray for him, he encounters God.
I went on to church, and the brothers and sisters prayed around me. Then, like a flash, the power of God struck me. It seemed like something struck me in the top of my head and then went on out through the toes of my feet. I jumped, or rather, fell back against the back of the seat. I lay on the floor of the church. A voice said to me, “You are no longer a sinner. Go and tell the world what I have done for you. If you are ashamed of me, I will be ashamed of you before my father.” I looked about me and saw a deep pit that seemed to be bottomless. I couldn’t hear nobody pray. I began to pray for myself. Again the voice said to me, “Go tell the world what great things the Lord has done for you.” I rose from the floor shouting; a voice on the inside cried, “Mercy! Lord, have mercy!” … Never had I felt such a love before. It just looked like I loved everything and everybody. I went on to work that day shouting and happy…. I can’t tell you what religion is, only that it is love.37
This divine encounter of conversion transforms Charlie’s life and bestows upon him an experience with God’s power and love that affects his entire being. God’s power touches him and grants him a commission to proclaim the gospel to the world. To proclaim the things God has done for him is to proclaim the reality of God’s love for everyone, including enslaved persons. Charlie becomes a witness to God’s inclusion of all human beings in God’s salvific plan, and he has a new identity as a proclaimer of the gospel whose experience of divine love transforms and renews his purpose and life. It is this experience that allows Charlie to forgive his former enslaver. This divine encounter with God endows Charlie with the ability and the courage to face his former enslaver and declare his manhood, his equality, and his new identity.
In another ex-slave conversion narrative, the author begins the account by telling of life before conversion. “I don’t know why it was I got converted, because I had been doing nearly everything they told me I ought not to do. I danced, played cards, and done just like I wanted to do.”38 Yet one day the author becomes very heavy and begins to pray. The heaviness and the prayer precede a vision of Jesus. “And there I saw Jesus. He turned my face to the east and said, ‘Go and declare my name to the world, and I will fill your heart with song.’ While I was laying there I saw the city. It was the prettiest place that I ever saw.” Although the author does not state that the city is heaven, the vision of angels that fly around the city suggests as much. This experience is both the author’s conversion experience and his commissioning episode, for afterward the author relates the event’s transformative nature in Pauline language. “After I passed through this experience I lost all worldly cares. The things I used to enjoy don’t interest me now. I am a new creature [2 Cor. 5:17] in Jesus, the workmanship [Eph. 2:10] of his hand saved from the foundation of the world. I was a chosen vessel [Acts 9:15] before the wind ever blew or before the sun ever shined. Religion is not a work but a gift from God. We are saved by grace, and it is not of ourselves but the gift of God [Eph. 2:8].”39
The Pauline language of new creature points to the author’s perceived difference between a past self and a new self. What was once important to the narrator is no longer important. Similarly, the language of workmanship demonstrates that conversion enabled enslaved Africans to see themselves as God’s creation, and neither a creation of the devil nor a child of Ham but a human being whom God creates with divine attention and care. The author’s status as “a chosen vessel before the wind ever blew or before the sun ever shined” indicates a divine plan that always included the ex-slave. There was never a time in which God did not have this ex-slave’s life in the divine mind and purpose. In highlighting the gift nature of salvation, the author affirms the beginning statement of the narrative—“I don’t know why it was I got converted …” God comes to the author through divine initiative and agency, and illustrates what Radin observes is a common occurrence in these narratives, which is that it is “God who sought the Negro.”40 God’s act of seeking the author and then granting a vision of Jesus solidifies the gift nature of salvation. God’s grace seeks humanity and transforms those it finds.
Terminology akin to death and Paul’s ascent to the third heaven appears in the account of another enslaved African in which the seer provides several episodes of divine encounters. The first account this seer outlines begins in this manner: “When the Lord freed my soul I was sitting out praying, and he told me that the sun was going down and said, ‘This day you got to die.’ And I said, ‘If I die I want to go with a prayer in my mouth.’ And while I was trusting him he carried me away in the spirit. He told me he was God, and there is none before him nor behind him.”41 God tells the narrator that he is the enslaved’s Father and that the enslaved person is his child. The ramifications of this divine recognition cannot be underestimated. God’s statement refutes the common beliefs during this time that the enslaved have no god,42 that they are children of Ham,43 and are therefore worthy of subjugation. The statement of divine paternity underscores the enslaved African’s humanity and creation by God. God then tells the enslaved African to “Go and go in my name.”44 In other words, God authorizes the seer to take on his name and to reject and resist the name given to him by white enslavers and those that support the slavocracy. The seer no longer needs to take on the identity of descendant of Ham but can now take on the name “child of God.”
After narrating this episode, the seer reports another event in which travel to the third heaven takes place.
He told me to look and behold, because he was God. He carried me to the third heaven [2 Cor. 12:2] year before last, and I shouted that place over, and I saw angels flying from place to place. In the first heaven I seen people who’d been there for years and years. I saw my mother, sister, and brother, sitting as far back as possible. I saw angels in the second heaven and the Lord spoke to me. He told me, “I am God the Messiah, I am God Almighty. There is none before me nor behind me. I made everything on this green earth. I even made the serpents, even the worms and birds.” If he wanted water he wouldn’t ask me for it, because he was God and made everything.45
Here the seer adopts Paul’s cosmological framework in which the seer, as in Paul’s description of his journey in 2 Corinthians 12:1–10, travels to the third heaven. However, unlike the apostle, the seer provides details about the sights and sounds distinct to each heavenly realm.46 The first heaven contains those who have died, and in the second and third realms, angels exist. The seer’s ascent to the heavenly realms provides the background for the affirmation of God’s role as Creator of all things. God’s declaration that he “made everything on this green earth” includes the creation of the enslaved African to whom he speaks and all the enslaved. Here again a divine encounter serves as a counternarrative to a distorted white theology that maintains blacks were created by the devil.
In another narrative from this collection of conversion stories, an enslaved African American woman recounts her conversion experience, which includes her travel to hell and heaven. She begins by describing her mother. “I was born in Huntsville, Alabama, during slavery time. When the war broke out I was married and had one child. My mother was a good old-time Christian woman. Me and my sister used to lay in the bed at night and listen to her and my aunt talk about what God had done for them. From this I began to feel like I wanted to be a Christian.”47 This woman goes on to speak about her first divine encounter: “The first time I heard God’s voice I was in the blackberry patch. It seemed like I was all heavy and burdened down more than common. I had got so I prayed a lot, and the more I prayed it look like the worse off I got. So while I was picking blackberries I said, ‘Lord, what have I done; I feel so sinful.’ A voice said to me, ‘You have prayed to God, and he will bring you out more than conqueror [Rom. 8:37].’”48 Eventually this woman narrates an experience in which she reaches heaven. Before arriving in heaven, however, she wakes up “in hell” and sees “all kinds of animals and people” who “looked like they wanted to devour” her.49 Once she overcomes all the obstacles before her, she and her guide come to a gate. “The gate opened. We went in. We stood before the throne of God. The little man said, ‘Here is one come from the lower parts of the world.’ God spoke, but he didn’t open his mouth. ‘How did she come?’ ‘She came through hard trials with the hellhounds on her trail.’”50 The account highlights the hard trials and opposition faced by this woman, since the guide’s response to God’s query carries more than one meaning. On the one hand, the hard trials refer to her existence as an enslaved woman. On the other hand, the words also refer to her experience before she came to heaven’s gate, which includes the heavy burdens she felt during her conversion experience as well as her experience of waking up in hell. Moreover, the angel’s reply that “she came through hard trials” indicates a divine recognition of this woman’s struggles, an acknowledgment that not all she suffers escapes divine notice. Thus, the guide’s words allude to her earthly difficulties as well as her supernatural trials in her otherworldly encounter. Her earthly and supernatural tribulations mirror each other and converge as obstacles that only God enables her to overcome.
Nevertheless, she receives protection, escapes the clutches of those who want to “devour” her, and ultimately hears a divine commissioning. “A voice said, ‘You are born of God. My son delivered your soul from hell, and you must go and help carry the world. You have been chosen out of the world, and hell can’t hold you.’ When I came back to myself I was just like somebody foolish. I felt like I wanted to run away. I cried and shouted for joy, so glad to be one of the elect children. This is why I say that a child that has been truly born of God knows it.”51 The divine assurance she receives that God “will bring you out more than conqueror” leads to her throne-room meeting with God and gestures to her victory over spiritual obstacles as well as her conquest of the present horrendous realities she faces on a daily basis. Her attainment to the throne signals her triumph over the difficulties of an enslaved life. Like so many other narrators in this collection of conversion stories, she is told that she must die, language that points to her impending conversion experience. Yet the declaration of becoming more than a conqueror encourages her throughout the entire ordeal. The Pauline formulation foreshadows her climactic, triumphant episode in heaven and her ultimate salvation as she goes through her conversion experience and receives a heavenly commission. This commission God seals with the promise that “hell can’t hold you.”
Throughout these conversion narratives Pauline language appears. Language, in phrases like God’s “workmanship” and “chosen vessel,” focuses on the enslaved’s divine creation in Christ. In addition, these experiences are filled with visions that these seers encounter and contain references to God’s power and authority. The authors see God, the heavenly throne, Jesus, angels, Satan, and hell. For a people constantly denied education and information, these divine visions demonstrate a reversal of such a practice. God grants these seers access and information regarding the divine realms, access that bestows upon them knowledge. Although they may not be able to control their own circumstances or the larger vicissitudes of societal existence, God is ultimately in control of all things, and these revelations provide them with “privileged insight” into the events of the heavenly realms. As a result, the implication is that what these seers see in the earthly realm is not all there is to their existence. The activities in the supernatural realm illustrate that a greater narrative is unfolding, a story in which they are a part.52
As one seer put it, “[God] never leaves me in ignorance. Neither does he leave any that trust him in ignorance.”53 The bestowal of visions and dreams points to God as the ultimate arbiter of knowledge and indicates that this God reveals divine knowledge to those forgotten and deemed unworthy by society.
In other conversion accounts in God Struck Me Dead, the narrators point to God’s power and authority by using additional Pauline passages: God works all things after the counsel of his own will (Eph. 1:11), God removes the sting of death and robs the grave of its victory (1 Cor. 15:55–56), and God finishes what he starts (Phil. 1:6). Such passages underscore God’s sovereignty, wisdom, and power over death, creation’s cruel enemy. These conversion episodes depict this sovereign God as one who bestows power to the recipients and describes this granting of divine power in Pauline language in that God’s power makes them more than a conqueror (Rom. 8:37), shoes them with the gospel of peace (Eph. 6:15), clothes them with spiritual armor (Eph. 6:11–17), and assures them of the sufficiency of divine grace (2 Cor. 12:9) as they go forth to proclaim the gospel; God extends divine aid and assistance to the seers of these encounters.
Why are these conversion experiences important for African American Pauline hermeneutics? First, they illustrate how Paul’s language is used to depict heavenly encounters; this indicates that the enslaved see themselves as part of the apostle’s story and in turn make him part of their own story. The God who revealed God’s self to Paul now reveals God’s self to them in a similar manner.
Second, and relatedly, sharing these conversion stories is an act of resistance to the dominant interpretations of Pauline Scripture. By recounting these divine episodes, the slaves in effect proclaim that their experiences invalidate whites’ textual interpretations or text-based interpretations of the apostle. The reality of their conversions and heavenly encounters provides them with testimonies of resistance in which they bear witness to the God who acts in and for them, not a God who wills their enslavement.
Third, these conversion experiences give rise to a body hermeneutic—their bodies, which were often the locus of their masters’ domination, torture, and violence, now become the sites of divine engagement. Here the observations of Diana Hayes on the meaning of violence are important. She writes that violence includes physical abuse, but also entails more than that, for
Violence is a violation: “Whatever violates another in the sense of infringing upon or disregarding or abusing or denying that other, whether physical harm is involved or not, can be understood as an act of violence. The basic overall definition of violence would then become violation of personhood,” an attack on the very being of a person created, as all are, in the image and likeness of God…. Depersonalizing a person—making him or her a thing unworthy of notice or consideration—can destroy in more critical ways than simply sticks or stones battering flesh can…. Names do hurt, because they steal our identities as human beings and make us things that can be manipulated according to the whims and wishes of the namer—it is a theft of one’s very soul.54
These enslaved Africans’ conversion stories often contain episodes of or references to violence perpetrated upon their minds and bodies along with stories of divine encounters with God. It is significant that bodies that experienced physical, mental, emotional, and verbal violence receive visitations from the divine realm. The actions of white slave owners carried out upon their bodies and minds sought to steal their souls, but these divine encounters, to paraphrase the words of the psalmist, “restored their bodies and souls” (Ps. 23:4). For example, after the angel touches him, Morte describes the transformation of his body: “I looked new. I looked at my hands and they were new; I looked at my feet and they were new.” A divine touch transforms Morte’s view of his body; a body that had suffered so much and which he repeatedly referred to in the narrative as subject to his master’s whipping was now the object of God’s love and affection, resulting in his being called “a chosen vessel” and “salt of the earth”—new names to replace the depersonalized names placed upon him. Indeed, God not only touches his body but even takes over his speech, for he begins to shout and preach, acknowledging that “the words seemed to flow from my lips.”
Similarly, the other enslaved Africans in their narratives highlight the effect of God’s presence upon their bodies. Divine power strikes Charlie in the top of his head and then goes through the toes of his feet. Others see themselves as new creations, workmanship of God’s hands, and for many the experience of being killed dead and made alive involves their bodies. They fall to the ground, go into a trance, or begin shouting or preaching. Their divine Pauline-like experiences give them another way to interpret and understand their black bodies: their bodies that were degraded by physical whips and by emotional and mental whips with words such as “ugly” and “devil” were now bodies touched by angels, called “chosen” by God, and made a new creation. Their ears that were often filled with the cries of fellow slaves were now filled with angels’ songs and God’s own voice. Their eyes that beheld mothers taken from children, fathers sold, and fellow slaves on auction blocks now beheld the throne of God, the glory of Jesus, and in some cases family members that had made it successfully to heaven.55 The body hermeneutic highlighted in these conversion stories illustrates that conversion not only took place in the soul but was a totalizing transformation that involved the body as well, resisting the powers that sought to rob their “very souls.”
These experiences enabled a relocation of power and authority; the power and authority of the enslaver were undermined and relativized in the conversion experiences of the enslaved. The slaveholders did not have the final word about to whom they belonged. The divine encounters indicated that the enslaved belonged to God, not the slave owner. This relocation of power and authority also involved scriptural interpretation, for their bodies now enabled them to interpret Scripture for themselves. They did not need to rely upon the enslaver’s scriptural interpretation of their bodies. Whites interpreted black bodies as demonic, cursed, evil, soulless, and a devilish creation. But these liberating experiences of God’s power and Spirit upon the bodies of the enslaved enabled them to see that their bodies were holy, created by God, possessors of souls, and blessed. Such encounters enabled the enslaved to separate the notion of sin from their black bodies. Sin was an outside force from which they could be delivered; it was not associated with their blackness.56 The God of the Bible loved their bodies and did not curse them.
Fourth, these conversion narratives illustrate divine interruptions of the demonic, God’s incursion into human oppressive structures, such as slavery. God shows up in inexplicable ways in moments and times of deep oppression and suffering, and such encounters give formidable examples of the counternarratives that existed among the enslaved. In many instances, these divine interruptions took place during ordinary, everyday events, such as Morte’s encounter while plowing in the field, Charlie’s experience in the woods, or the enslaved seer’s encounter with God while lying on the bed. The weaving of these religious experiences into ordinary life demonstrates that for the enslaved, a unity between the sacred and the profane exists; God could meet them anywhere and respond to their needs.57 Raboteau remarks about the importance of understanding “the profound connection between the other world and this world in the religious consciousness of the slaves…. Following African and biblical tradition, [the slaves] believed that the supernatural continually impinged on the natural, that divine action constantly took place within the lives of men, in the past, present, and future.”58 Although his comments regarding the enslaved’s connection between the other world and this world occur in his discussion of spirituals sung by the slaves, his statements are apropos for conversion accounts as well. For the enslaved the natural world and the supernatural world were intricately linked.
Fifth, these conversion stories confirm enslaved Africans’ identity as spiritual beings with souls with whom God almighty communicated, souls that visited paradise and beheld the heavenly realms. As Yolanda Pierce observes, “religious conversion provided proof that a slave had a saveable, redeemable soul. Endowed with a soul, the slave could no longer be chattel.”59 These conversion experiences reaffirm the God-given humanity of the enslaved, a humanity that refused to allow them to believe the distorted gospel of their slaveholders. Such divine events also illustrated that the enslaved could communicate with God and God could communicate with them. In a society where their voices were muted and their cries were ignored, the power to speak with God and the power to have God speak with them relocated authority. As we have seen in these narratives, these mystical happenings bestowed upon them agency: God tells them to go and proclaim the Word; they are given the ability and the power to speak to others on behalf of God.
That God could come to them and use the same words God spoke to the apostle, such as “You are my chosen vessel” and “My grace is sufficient for you,” and that they could have similar experiences as the apostle, such as traveling to the third heaven, also shifts authority regarding how Paul should be interpreted. If the enslaved are having similar experiences as the apostle, and if God is speaking to them just as God spoke to him, then Paul can be understood in a different way than how he is taught and preached to them by white interpreters. In other words, apostle-like divine encounters with God mean that these experiences become the lens through which to read Paul, not the slave minister’s sermons. The touch of the numinous transports them to the heavenly realms, indicating the shared social space between human and divine, between ἄνθρωπος (man) and θέος (God), in which both realms remain dynamically related and connected.
Sixth, these accounts share an underlying theme, which is an implicit Pauline understanding of the life of faith and one’s encounter with God: “I have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live.” The repeated language of “You must die,” “I was killed dead,” “I died but now I’m alive” echoes Paul and his understanding of the necessity of death in that the believer dies to self, to sin, to the world, and receives resurrection to new life in Christ. Pauline language permeates these narratives, indicating the apostle’s significance to the religious experiences of the enslaved.
This brief exploration of the reception of Paul’s language and the function of this language in enslaved Africans’ conversion and commissioning stories demonstrates the integral nature of the apostle’s language to blacks’ understanding of God and God’s power at work on their behalf. Indeed, scriptural language and imagery permeate these accounts and illustrate a divine interruption in the lives of the enslaved. As Cheryl Sanders writes, “[The enslaved] believed that the same God who transformed the sinful status of their souls in the conversion experience would transform the sinful structures of the society. The God who had freed their souls from sin could certainly free their bodies from slavery.”60 Sanders’s observation points to the deep relationship the enslaved perceived between spiritual and physical freedom; for both were to the enslaved indissolubly linked.
Paul and his experiences were a “religious source” for the African Americans in these conversion narratives.61 The God who dealt with Paul, called him on the Damascus road, and took him to the third heaven likewise dealt with them. Such encounters reinforced their dignity and self-worth and undermined the idea that their existence depended upon slavery. They were, in fact, privileged seers, enabled by divine initiative to see and hear the world beyond them. The apostle’s language gave them the words to connect their experiences to his and at the same time make these experiences their own.
1. A quote from David Smith, an enslaved person, in Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 311.
2. Janet Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 19; Raboteau, Slave Religion, 128–29, 132–33.
3. Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear, 19.
4. For more information on this subject, see Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear, especially 32–58. As Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1978), observes, “The master class understood, of course, that only a carefully censored version of Christianity could have this desired effect. Inappropriate biblical passages had to be deleted; sermons that might be proper for freemen were not necessarily proper for slaves” (159–60). See chapters above regarding slaveholders limiting access to Scripture.
5. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 148. See also the discussion on 132–47.
6. Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear, 86.
7. Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear, 87.
8. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 209.
9. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 240.
10. C. Michelle Venable-Ridley, “Paul and the African American Community,” in Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 212. Here she credits Vincent Wimbush.
11. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 242.
12. William L. Andrews, introduction to Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, ed. William L. Andrews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 11; Raboteau, Slave Religion, 266–75.
13. James Craig Holte, The Conversion Experience in America: A Sourcebook on Religious Conversion Autobiography (New York: Greenwood, 1992), writes that “most conversion narratives follow a predictable three-part structure—early sinful life, the conversion experience, life and works after conversion—each writer adapts that pattern to the particular circumstances of his or her own experience” (vii).
14. Paul Radin, foreword to God Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Ex-Slaves, ed. Clifton H. Johnson (Philadelphia: Pilgrim, 1969), x.
15. Radin, foreword to God Struck Me Dead, xi.
16. Cleophus J. LaRue, I Believe I’ll Testify: The Art of African American Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 59.
17. LaRue, I Believe I’ll Testify, 60.
18. Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “Prayers of Deliverance from the Demonic in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Early Jewish Literature,” in The Changing Face of Judaism, Christianity, and Other Greco-Roman Religions in Antiquity, ed. Ian H. Henderson and Gerbern S. Oegema, Studien zu den Jüdischen Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit 2 (Gutersloh: Gutersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 163.
19. Lisa Bowens, An Apostle in Battle: Paul and Spiritual Warfare in 2 Corinthians 12:1–10, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungern zum Neuen Testament 2.433 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 30, 35–36.
20. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 15.
21. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 16.
22. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 16–18.
23. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 148.
24. Bowens, An Apostle in Battle, 123–204.
25. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 18.
26. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 24.
27. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 24–25.
28. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 29.
29. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 40–41.
30. Julia Foote, A Brand Plucked from the Fire: An Autobiographical Sketch by Mrs. Julia A. J. Foote (Cleveland, OH: Printed for the author by W. F. Schneider, 1879), reprinted in Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit, 220.
31. Yolanda Pierce, Hell without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 4.
32. A number of scholars have noted the passive nature of the term σύνσταυρόω in Gal. 2:19 (συνεσταύρωμαι), which is understood as a divine passive. God’s action in Paul’s life leads to a total transformation of the apostle. J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Yale Bible 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 258, remarks, “It is Christ who now lives in Paul, but that does not mean that there is no longer an I. The I has been crucified and re-created.”
33. Pierce, Hell without Fires, 4.
34. Robert Jewett, Romans, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 395.
35. Pierce, Hell without Fires, 4, believes that with the phrase “servant of the devil” Charlie indicates “not just a reference to the spiritual bondage of Satan, but to the physical bondage he experiences under a human devil.”
36. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 45.
37. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 45–46.
38. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 111.
39. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 111.
40. Radin, foreword to God Struck Me Dead, xi.
41. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 167.
42. See John Jea’s narrative above in chap. 1, in which he relates how this notion was preached to the enslaved.
43. See the discussion of Josiah Priest in chap. 1.
44. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 167.
45. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 167.
46. In some ancient Jewish texts, seers and biblical figures are known to travel to different heavens. Some of these texts posit as many as seven heavens, others as few as three, as in this seer’s account and in Paul’s own narration of his ascent in 2 Cor. 12:1–10. See, for example, The Life of Adam and Eve, Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah, as well as The Book of Watchers. The seer in this narrative follows the pattern of the ancient seers in describing the journey. Paul’s account is quite laconic in this regard.
47. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 169.
48. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 169.
49. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 170.
50. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 171.
51. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 171.
52. These divine experiences of the enslaved have analogues with the seers in Jewish apocalyptic literature, literature believed by some scholars to originate out of oppressed communities. See my brief discussion of Daniel in Bowens, An Apostle in Battle, 181–83; John Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); Mitchell Reddish, ed., Apocalyptic Literature: A Reader (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990), 19–38.
53. Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, 156.
54. Diana L. Hayes, “My Hope Is in the Lord,” in Townes, Embracing the Spirit, 19–20.
55. These conversion experiences did not stop the atrocities that these enslaved Africans witnessed. They did, however, provide what I have termed in this chapter “divine interruptions of the demonic.”
56. See the discussion of Jupiter Hammon above in chap. 1, where he emphasizes in his speeches that all have sinned, both blacks and whites, not just blacks, and so all need salvation.
57. Kimberly Rae Connor, Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African-American Women (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 24.
58. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 250.
59. Pierce, Hell without Fires, 53.
60. Cheryl Sanders, “African Americans, the Bible and Spiritual Formation,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (New York: Continuum, 2000), 590.
61. Venable-Ridley, “Paul and the African American Community,” 214.