Black Sacred Rhetoric: Katie Cannon and the Power of Memory

Abstract

Black Sacred RhetoricKatie Cannon and the Power of Memory Stephen G. Ray Jr (bio) I begin by noting that as with all biblical scholars—or better yet, writers of sacred scripture—Katie Cannon began her sacred discourses with the recitation of her table of ancestors. Specifically, with Mary Nance Lytle in Mecklenburg County in the state of North Carolina in the sometimes-divided United States of America.1 Her genealogy began with a woman who, like the ancestors of Nana Peazant in the film Daughters of the Dust, "chose to survive" so that the tribes born of the family she pieced back together after slavery might have something with which to build a future. I begin here, because reflecting on any public discourse as sacred rhetoric requires that it be anchored in a web of history, witness, and conviction. So, to reflect on the particular discursive deployment of sacred rhetoric by Katie Geneva Cannon of Kannapolis, North Carolina, requires such an anchoring. It requests, as well, attention to the specific points of finite. This requirement comes from the nature of sacred rhetoric being the language by which human beings describe their relationships with and response to the particular reality they conceive as being the ultimate reality. Put another way, sacred rhetoric is the words used by discrete human beings to talk about their walk with God. Notice of this particular web brings me to my first point: The discursive use of sacred rhetoric by Katie Cannon was a speech-act of recognizing the divine subjectivity of not one, but a universe of human beings who had such status in their own time. The recognition of their subjecting in relation to a God whose subjectivity is in a mutually constitutive relationship serves rhetorically as a hand that appears from nowhere to inscribe SACRED on the memory and lives of [End Page 127] these people "forgotten" to history. Moreover, this particular enactment of sacred discourse unmasks the demonic subjugation of a faith that requires a woman to piece her family back together because its practitioner had sanctioned their sale as chattel.2 So, as its first moment, this enactment of sacred rhetoric in the public discourse of Katie Cannon: 1) restores the divine subjectivity of those made in the image of God but ensnared in the wickedness of slavery, and 2) unmasks the demonic subjection of the Christian faith to the powers of this world mediated through corrupted notions or relationality inscribed through the notion of race. In our shared tradition, Reformed, we would refer to this as the ministerial office of priest and prophet, respectively. The second point to which I bring our attention is the quality of Katie's enactments of sacred rhetoric to break the mesmerizing glance of fallen intellectuality as it colonizes the mind and appropriates ideational objects rightly conceived of as sacred and renders them utterly profane. Put another way, her sacred rhetoric exposed the normative structures of the academy that allow/ed courses to be taught on the agony and suffering of the Passion, which explicitly disallowed the agony and suffering of enslaved divine subjects as having any capacity to illumine what time of the cross really means. Her work and deployment of sacred rhetoric service/ed then to expose the falsity of the estrangement of the heart and mind which characterizes so much of life in the academy. Throughout this, all-too-brief presentation, I have referred to the work of Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon as sacred rhetoric without making explicit connections to preaching. I have done so because I want to suggest, finally, that rhetoric which takes life in the public square and restores the divine subjectivity of the least among us; liberates faith made captive to the demonic structures of its day; and binds up the heart broken from the mind is divine discourse made flesh. And so it was with Katie Geneva Cannon of the tribe of Mary Nance Lytle of Mecklenburg County in the State of North Carolina in the sometimes United States of America. [End Page 128] Stephen G. Ray Rev. Dr. Stephen G. Ray Jr. is president of Chicago Theological Seminary (a seminary related to the United...