Review: Take Back What the Devil Stole: An African American Prophet’s Encounters in the Spirit World, by Onaje X. O. Woodbine

Abstract

Perhaps the best comparison to Onaje Woodbine’s Take Back What the Devil Stole is Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola (1991). While McCarthy sought to elucidate and destigmatize the religion of Vodou by writing a biography of a Haitian manbo who had immigrated to the United States, Woodbine uses a similar methodology in his portrayal of African American prophet Donna Haskins. While the previous work depicts its subject through a feminist lens, the recent text rests upon a foundation of womanist theory. Perhaps most importantly, both Brown and Woodbine construct compelling, even moving, narratives of lived religion within a marginalized community.As Woodbine puts it, his goal is to examine “how a contemporary Black woman constructs ultimate meanings, often on the peripheries of social and political power” (5). In particular, he focuses on a concept of religion that emphasizes both everyday life as well as the centrality of the body. In order to achieve these goals and lay the groundwork for his subject’s eventual prophethood, he devotes close to half of the book to the period in which Donna, as he consistently calls her, suffers enormously from a succession of tragedies, beginning with an apartment fire that she survived only through divine intervention. For the remainder of her first forty-six years, she experiences abuse at the hands of her mother, struggles learning to read and write, rape and attempted rape, the death of a child through abortion, repeated infidelity on the part of boyfriends, and the murder of two beloved nephews. These incidents prompt her to consider suicide upon multiple occasions.The turning point in Donna’s life comes when she visits a Black Baptist church where she experiences a spiritual awakening that transforms her body into a potential receptacle of the divine. Among her first acts is to separate herself from the control of men by giving up sex altogether. Doing so involves an intense struggle with the spirit of lust, which takes place in an alternate reality that she refers to as the spirit world. Eventually, she meets Jesus in the spirit world, receiving the new name, Child of Light. After this encounter with God, she interacts with increasing numbers of spirits, human, angelic, and demonic. As she progresses spiritually, she receives “treasures from heaven” that allow her to travel throughout the cosmos and to move forward and backward through time. She has become a prophet.Through the power of the Holy Spirit, she strives to use her gifts for good instead of evil. For the living, she is a source of comfort who can carry their emotions and convey consoling facts that she sees from their past, present, and future. Donna also aids the spirits of the dead, freeing them from the effects of lives lived in marginality. Among her foes are perpetrators of violence, sexual and otherwise, against women and children.Along with its moving prose, the greatest strength of Take Back What the Devil Stole is how successful it is at achieving the author’s goal of telling a story from its subject’s perspective. Early in the book, one occasionally runs into jarring theoretical asides embedded in engaging tales of personal struggle. As the book advances, however, readers are apt to find themselves walking the spirit world alongside Donna without losing sight of the embodied lived religion that doing so entails.One of the few things that academic readers might desire to see featured more prominently is context. While the milieu in which Donna lives her life and sees herself spiritually transformed is everywhere in evidence, one might question how the rest of the world interacts with her. Clearly, she has a profound impact on the scholar, personally as well as academically, and there are a good number of anecdotes about Donna’s aid to neighbors, friends, family, and strangers. One is left to wonder, however, about the degree to which others seek her out. Likewise, though Donna and the author mention that there are many who dismiss her claims to prophethood, readers are left with little more than a statement that it happens. These are not so much flaws, however, as they are areas to expand upon in a new introduction to the second edition or perhaps in Take Back What the Devil Stole II.