Playing Jane: Black Mormon History and Memory

Paul Harvey

While our blog contributor Chris Jones is getting ready to ace his comprehensives, he sent along this outstanding piece by Harvard graduate student Max Mueller: "Playing Jane: The History of a Pioneer Black Mormon Woman is Alive Today," published online at the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin. Highly recommended reading, particularly if (like me) you know absolutely nothing about this subject. The article discusses the historical re-creation efforts of Jerri Halwell, who "plays" the remarkable character of Jane Manning James, an African American woman who served in Joseph Smith's household, became a convert, made the trek to Utah, and remained a faithful member of the Church until 1908. A brief taste from this piece (footnotes omitted):

Last summer, I went to Salt Lake City to look for Jane Manning James in the archives of the LDS Church History Library and the archives of the Utah Historical Society. I hoped that Jane would speak to me from scratchy microfiche and dusty letter-books. I hoped she would tell me how she dealt with the precarious place in which she lived out her life as a black Mormon pioneer in Zion, simultaneously at the center and on the margins of the nineteenth-century Mormon experience. I planned to "ask" her: How did you understand your status as a beloved member of the community, celebrated as a friend of the first prophet's family, as a pioneer of 1847, and as a steadfast member of the LDS Church? At the same time, how did you come to terms with LDS Church policy that, due to your race, defines you as innately cursed and thus unworthy to receive the same blessings as your fellow white saints?

Although this was my plan, during my time in Salt Lake City, I found that the archives are not the only or even the best place to find Jane. Certainly, the archives shed light on the question of how Jane in writing subtly challenged the Church's marginalization of blacks within Mormon history and within the Mormon community. But it was in my interviews with Jerri and in my observations of her reenactments that I discovered the canon is not closed on Jane's story. The legacy of Jane's black Mormon experience unfolds today in the lives of modern black Mormons like Jerri, who strike a precarious balance between their ongoing struggles with the Mormon "folklore" about black spiritual inferiority and the spiritual truth they find within their own Mormon testimonies of faith.

Continue reading here.

Interview with Jennifer Graber

Randall Stephens

[I crosspost here a selection from a short interview with Jenn Graber. The full interview is at the HS blog.]

"Americans incarcerate," writes Jennifer Graber in her new engaging book The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). "Though the United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population," she writes, "it has almost a quarter of its prisoners." Such facts make the long history of American prisons and their maintenance all the more interesting. Graber, an assistant professor in the department of religious studies at the College of Wooster, analyzes the "intersection of Christianity and politics in the American penitentiary system."* Her interesting account also looks at the religious dimensions of discipline and the ideas that undergirded punishment from the 1790s to the 1950s.

Randall Stephens: You write that antebellum Americans disagreed on much when it came to prisons, but most “affirmed religion's central importance” to prisons and reform. How was criminal justice “religious” in this era?

Jennifer Graber: If you were concerned about criminal punishment in the early republic, there were lots of things to fight about. Once the states began to build prisons, the big debate was between a discipline out of Pennsylvania that featured total solitary confinement and one out of New York that combined labor in workshops during the day with solitary confinement at night. Partisans for these two systems called the other side un-American and un-Christian. Beyond the rival disciplines, people debated the best way to reform inmates. They argued about what was more important: a good Sunday School teacher in Sing Sing or clean water and decent food in Sing Sing? Without fail, everyone interested in the debate claimed that “religion”—and they used the word “religion” even though they meant variations of evangelical Protestantism—was central to inmate reformation and the overall health of American prisons as strong institutions. What they didn't realize is that their common evocation of “religion” masked significant differences. For instance, they all thought that prison chaplains were necessary, but disagreed—sometimes violently—over the role these ministers should play inside institutions. Or, they all assumed that God ordained the civil authorities to punish lawbreakers, but varied on the question of that punishment’s severity.

Stephens: What kinds of problems did evangelicals target in the prison system? What can we learn about them by the sort of reforms they pursued?

Graber: Their first target was colonial-era punishments, whether it was steep fines, corporal punishments such as whipping or branding, or the gallows. They joined a trans-Atlantic movement to reform punishment and were active in the construction and administration of the first prisons. Protestant evangelicals—and I include many Quakers in this group, which might ruffle some historians’ feathers—envisioned the prison as an ideal site for prompting criminals’ conversion and reformation.>>>

Peter Gomes, Harvard Minister and Theologian, Dies at 68

Randall Stephens

This obituary for Peter Gomes appeared in the Boston Globe this morning. Gomes was a wonderful preacher and author. The sermons I heard him deliver at the Harvard Memorial Chapel were always as memorable as the were filled with meaning.

The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, who was known internationally as Harvard's pastor and was just as pleased to call himself a son of Plymouth, died Monday night at Massachusetts General Hospital. He had suffered a stroke in early December and his death was confirmed by a hospital spokeswoman.

He was 68 and had divided his time and identity between a 1799 house in his hometown and Sparks House, the 19th-century residence reserved for the leader of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard. . . .

Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and Nobel Laureate, told The New Yorker that the Rev. Gomes's "style is full of cadence, roguery, and scampishness, which is redemptive. With Gomes there is always an element of masquerade as he tempts his audience into complicity."

The man who during four decades at Memorial Church would become known as the conscience and soul of Harvard, was the grandson of a Baptist preacher and was baptized a Catholic.>>>