Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher’s Climb to Freedom by Larry Eugene Rivers, and: No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner by Andre E. Johnson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher’s Climb to Freedom by Larry Eugene Rivers, and: No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner by Andre E. Johnson Samuel Graber (bio) Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher’s Climb to Freedom. By Larry Eugene Rivers. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Pp. 311. Cloth, $39.95.) No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. By Andre E. Johnson. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. Pp. 204. Cloth, $99.00; paper, $30.00.) Describing “the Black church” as a single entity oversimplifies an immensely diverse arena of religious life. However reductive, the categorization has proved difficult to shake, partly because it seems to honor a people’s common struggle against racist oppression. Rather than merely a change in nomenclature, scholars of nineteenth-century culture require a deeper understanding of Black churches’ religious diversity and the variety of responses to white supremacy that they fostered. While sweeping, general overviews may partially recover the varieties of Black religion, such works will always struggle to find space for the textured idiosyncrasies and complex interconnections of the many faiths that took root under slavery’s long shadow. More sustained scholarly examinations of individual believers, particularly Black church leaders, can bring a depth of detail to bear on misperceptions of a uniform Black church. Recent works by Larry Eugene Rivers and Andre E. Johnson, though different in style and approach, each present a portrait of an outspoken and controversial nineteenth-century minister that should help to diversify knowledge of Black religious life for researchers working in a range of fields. Johnson’s No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, which may be of particular interest to students of rhetoric and religion, presents a historically grounded rhetorical analysis of the final stage of a career that bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the antebellum, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction eras. Most scholars are aware of Henry McNeal Turner’s advocacy for Black rights, but his understanding of Black Christians’ place in America changed significantly over that time span. His multiva-lent prophetic voice has been misunderstood, Johnson implies, because it has suffered from the same tendencies that have blurred distinctions within African American religious experience generally. Rivers tracks a similarly extensive career in Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher’s Climb to Freedom, the first book-length scholarly biography of its subject and a work that will appeal especially to historians of slavery, religion, and the antebellum South. Beginning his ministry under slavery, Father James Page bolstered the Baptist church throughout the Southeast and [End Page 275] remained a widely revered leader after emancipation. In following Page’s remarkable trajectory, with particular focus on his early history as an enslaved preacher, Rivers reconfigures typical notions of “Afro-Christian religion, black leadership, and the broader black freedom struggle in America” (7). Although the same could be said of Johnson’s study, Henry McNeal Turner was never enslaved. Thus Rivers can more directly address a particularly vexing historiographical problem: accounting for enslaved preachers’ roles in developing Black leadership and identity. Rivers takes exception to the stereotypical view of such clerics as uninformed and compromised religious props for the racist system in which they operated. More specifically, Rivers objects to paternalistic interpretations of slavery, epitomized by Eugene Genovese, which tend to minimize Black agency by portraying Black preachers as easily manipulable instruments of their enslavers. Yet, in combatting this perspective, Rivers must sometimes speculate about motivations the enslaved Page would never have been able to avow, let alone publish. Thus Rivers’s main struggle is not against any particular scholarly perspective, but rather against an underlying absence of information. Despite more sympathetic treatments of enslaved preachers by Albert Raboteau, Bettye Collier-Thomas, and Chanta Haywood, Rivers remains convinced that only more sustained study of individual cases can prevent the proliferation of simplistic renderings, stereotypes, and vilifications of enslaved preachers. Rivers’s careful study of Page, a highly literate bondsman who achieved significant notoriety in his lifetime, seems uniquely suited to correct the record. Its author draws heavily on outside sources...