The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South by Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South by Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Katharine Gerbner (bio) Keywords Slavery, Religion, Culture of dismemberment, Re/membrance, Protestantism, Christianity The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South. By Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 320. Cloth, $95.00, paper, $27.95). Enslaved women in the antebellum south inhabited a "triple consciousness," writes Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh in her groundbreaking new book, The Souls of Womenfolk. Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how bondwomen's intersectional [End Page 334] experiences as enslaved Black women with (re)productive demands led to "ontological ramifications and moral dilemmas" (2). Their triple consciousness should be recognized as the source of enslaved religious and ethical culture, with the "psyches of enslaved men and children" flowing from the bedrock of women's triple consciousness. In The Souls of Womenfolk, Wells-Oghoghomeh introduces several powerful interlocking concepts that help to narrate both the history of slavery and the history of religion in new, distinctive, and important ways. One foundational concept is the "culture of dismemberment," which serves as shorthand for the collective experiences of dislocation, familial separation, rape, and other forms of physical violence that formed the core of the transatlantic system of slavery. The culture of dismemberment also encompassed the system of capitalism that reduced people to profit, and fundamentally shaped the ways in which bodies were viewed and treated. For enslaved women, the culture of dismemberment had distinctive features, most notably the "resignification of the womb." Enslaved women recognized that their wombs were commodified in a transatlantic economic system that relied on their powers of reproduction. This resignifying process in the service of human capital forced women to wrestle with different existential questions than enslaved men, and their experiences formed the core of enslaved religious cultures. They asked existential and moral questions about how to respond to injustice and violation, how to protect themselves and their families, and how to build a life together and in community with others to mitigate the culture of dismemberment. Bondpeople's answer to dismemberment was "re/membrance," a creative and adaptable orientation that drew on West African precedents and responded to the challenges of the Americas (2). Re/membrance came in many forms, and each chapter in The Souls of Womenfolk elucidates varieties of re/membering practices, orientations, and beliefs. As mothers, enslaved women recognized that their wombs had become the producers of human capital, and this knowledge shaped the ways that they understood the cosmos, defined ethical priorities, and engaged existential questions. They also shaped child-rearing, as Black women aimed to protect themselves and their children from the violating effects of slavery and the culture of dismemberment. The orientation toward "re/membrance," and the values that flowed from it, are part of what Wells-Oghoghomeh calls "womb ethics," another [End Page 335] key theoretical formulation (71). Womb ethics encompassed enslaved women's definitions of what was good, just, right, and necessary, and they were flexible and adaptable. Womb ethics had no universalizing notions of what was correct or moral; they were oriented toward re/membrance, mitigation of violence and trauma, and improving the quality of life for oneself and one's kin. Womb ethics could encompass filicide as well as marronage or parental surrogacy. Crucially, the category of "re/membrance" helps to orient the narration of sexual violence and rape, a topic that Wells-Oghoghomeh attends to most directly in Chapter 3. Here, Wells-Oghoghomeh describes the distinctive and devastating culture of sexual dismemberment that enslaved women were born into, and into which they bore children. Justified by logics that impugned the morality of Black women, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how the idea of "sense," or "common sense," offered enslaved women a "mode of perception" that was "pragmatic and adaptable" (96). Sense could include dissembling, disremembering, and strategic silences that helped to preserve psychosocial survival in a dismembering culture. Wells-Oghoghomeh also shows how sexual choice became a sacred value, as did privacy and pleasure. Perhaps more than any other topic, the framework of re/membrance and womb ethics offers a way to write about the culture...