A Black Woman’s Spiritual Journey to the City

“Crossing the thresholds between worlds…”

So begins today’s story from Dr. J. T. Roane.

For further reading:

“A Totally Different Form of Living: On the Legacies of Displacement and Marronage as Black Ecologies” Southern Cultures 27 (2021) by Justin Hosbey and J. T. Roane

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

Transcript

90 Second Narratives

Season 8: “Journeys”

Episode 3: “A Black Woman’s Spiritual Journey to the City”

Sky Michael Johnston: 

Welcome to 90 Second Narratives, the podcast that brings you “little stories with BIG historical significance.” I am Sky Michael Johnston and I am pleased to introduce today’s storyteller, Dr. J. T. Roane, Assistant Professor of African & African American Studies at Arizona State University. Listen now as Dr. Roane shares the story, “A Black Woman’s Spiritual Journey to the City.”

J. T. Roane:

Crossing the thresholds between worlds toward a Black migrant phenomenology of the city, just before the Great Depression of the 1930s, Mrs. W, a black woman in her early thirties moved from a rural community in Virginia to Philadelphia. One day while still new to the city she discovered a group of men gambling in front of her stoop and was dismayed by her encounter of the world of the city’s underground, here materializing as mobile and temporary instantiation of the illicit economic order outside sanctioned exchanges. Perhaps it frightened her because she had witnessed or heard about the potential for physical violence and coercion in unregulated speculative financial arranges like dice games. Perhaps her rearing in the church of her upbringing in the South set specific prohibitions against gambling that she maintained after her relocation. Whatever the nature of her alarm, Mrs. W recalled how her experience with the crap shooters prompted a prophetic vision and an experience with the formless but transformative Holy Spirit. “I felt myself lifted high on a mountain, so high I could see, I could look and see over the world.” The sun which was going down right at her back cast a transfiguring light over the urban landscape. Suddenly, the endless rows of dense housing gave way to open fields. “It looked like it does in the country, like if you went to the end of the field you could touch it,” she recalled. “This represents the Son of God,” a voice rang out to her. The disembodied voice went on to charge her with an earthly mission, “You must warn men and women to be holy,” it demanded. As she recalled, Mrs. W took to heart the work of spreading holiness, for her an ecstatic feeling, “Just like an electric shock,” as well as its attendant doctrine of purity and sanctity in anticipation of the imminent second coming. 

By the time Black folklorist, Arthur Huff Fauset, interviewed Mrs. W in the early 1940s, for his book, Black Gods of the Metropolis, she had made her spiritual home as “an ardent worker” as part of a holiness group praying for the end of the world. Through her spiritual mission, Mrs. W elaborated a vision for transformation, interpreting the displacement of an agricultural field as a sign that she must work to draw more people into the fold of holiness, a temporal and spatial pocket defined by proximity to divinity, healing and righteousness, a world of anticipation, a state yet to come yet already practiced in the bonds of the community that she forged in the storefront holiness church. Critically, the multiple social, geographic, and temporal registers operating within Mrs. W’s recollection provide an opening for outline the complex cartography Black migrants built of the city and the distinctive phenomenology of the city they wrote in their practices, actions, discourses, inscriptions, and efforts. Even through its cartographic registers, Mrs. W’s memory is not a one-to-one reproduction of the series of events, a proven inscription in the archive unshaped by her rendering of it to Fauset and his interpretive rubrics as a folklorist, or a straightforward linear mapping of a space. Rather, the architectonics of her memory-scape suggest the meaningful nature of this juxtaposition of what I call dark agoras, this encounter with the gamblers punctuating her cognizance of the competing modalities of living in the city shaping her and her collective identity formation as well as the narratability of experiences in the city.

Sky Michael Johnston:

If you would like to discover more of Dr. Roane’s important scholarship on Black Ecologies, take a look at his new article, “A Totally Different Form of Living: On the Legacies of Displacement and Marronage as Black Ecologies” published in the journal Southern Cultures. Dr. Roane co-authored that with Justin Hosbey and you can find a link to it in the episode description.

Thank you for joining me today.