Book Review: Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Evangelists

Abstract

By Richard J. Douglass-Chin. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8262-1311-1. Pp. ix + 228. $34.95. Richard J. Douglass-Chin has written an important, albeit uneven, book on origins of African American women's spiritual autobiography. Certain to appeal broadly to students of African American history, literature, and culture, Preacher Woman Sings Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Evangelists joins a number of recent works on awesome mystique of spiritual in black women's writings. Eight of thirteen writers examined in this detailed chronological study published texts before 1900: Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw (chapter two); Sojourner Truth, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Julia A. J. Foote (respectively, chapters three through rive); Amanda B. Smith, Elizabeth Broughton, and Virginia Broughton (chapter six). The life history of a ninth woman, Belinda, stolen into bondage, forms subject of chapter one, its title (The Cruelty of Men Whose Faces Were Like Moon) taken from African native's 1787 legal petition for reparations for involuntary labor. At chapter seven Preacher Woman pivots into twentieth-century African American women's literature by examining Zora Neale Hurston's acknowledgments and transformations of sacred-blues black traditions of modern novelist's literary foremothers. The eighth chapter reads invocation and deployment of spirituality in recent novels by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and late Toni Cade Bambara. Specifically, book attends to oppositional discourses that emerge at intersection of ecstasy, orality, Western literacy, and African expressivity. Douglass-Chin cogently combines analyses of blessed and blues to reclaim evangelist as a folk signifier and to ameliorate its definition so that the evangelists may all be seen as blues `bad' women [...] cut from a more pious cloth than their secular singing sisters (10). Too frequently Preacher Woman drops thread of blues matron and blues matrix as method and trope. However, a more urgent problem undermines Douglass-Chin's achievement: his study misrepresents primacy of sentimentalism as deployed by both African- and Anglo-American women in nineteenth century. It appears that Douglass-Chin perceives early black women's blues to be at odds with sentimentality. Indeed, Douglass-Chin insufficiently recognizes sentimental strategies, contending in introduction that, refusing to employ sentimental form and content of so many nineteenth-century women's texts, majority of black female evangelists' works were ignored and bypassed on literary market and simply fell out of circulation (14; my emphasis). The relatively brief shelf life of most black holy women's writings, however, had more to do with poverty, illiteracy, and fallacies about black and female intelligence--all institutionalized by white patriarchy--than with their authors' failure to conform to sentimental conventions of more lucrative narratives. Moreover, rhetoric of one Baptist missionary's autobiography, The Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (not cited in Preacher Woman) discloses deep ambivalence about propriety of sentimentalizing black life. Significantly, Prince's Life first appeared in 1850 and was reissued at least twice--in 1853 and 1856. As such, it is representative of black women's spiritual texts. An apparent bias against sentimentalism undercuts Preacher Woman most conspicuously in chapter rive, in which Douglass-Chin misreads Foote's combined engagement and subversion of sentimental pedagogy in A Brand Plucked from Fire. Because Preacher Woman glaringly omits recent scholarship on role of sacred in early American sentimentalism, it cannot elucidate thirteen authors' codification of Christian morality and theology in sentimental terms. …