Rachel Elizabeth Harding
©2005 by Rachel Elizabeth Harding
No portion of this material may be reproduced by any means without written permission from Rachel Elizabeth Harding.
Images ©2005 by Daniel Minter.

In 1936, Martiniano Eliseu de Bomfim, an esteemed leader in the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé, was interviewed by a local newspaper in Salvador, Bahia. Seu Martiniano, as he was respectfully known, was a babalawo, a diviner priest. He had been born in the mid-nineteenth century and his parents, both originally from Africa, had been slaves. In the interview, as he reflected on his life, he talked about the traumas of slavery and the meaning of the religion he inherited from his father and mother. “My mother, I remember well, had a scar on her buttocks from where she was burned as a punishment.” Seu Martiniano’s father maintained an altar room where he regularly thanked and honored Oyá, a Yoruba deity of winds and transformative change, whom the father credited with carrying him through great tribulations. After the father’s passing, the son took over the ritual responsibilities of the family altar.²

The juxtaposition of these subjects – sufferings under slavery and the accompaniment of sustaining spiritual forces – is echoed in the experience of most of the religious traditions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. The song that serves as our epigraph, “Run, Mary, Run” reminds us of the genius and poetry with which the spirituals entered the stories and metaphors of the Bible and opened them to a powerful new set of meanings based in the African American struggle for freedom. Mary is Jesus’ mother, yes, a member of the oppressed Hebrew nation; but, in this song, she is also the enslaved Black woman whose burdens are heavy and whose children have been stolen from her. Run, Mary, Run the spiritual urges, don’t let the sorrows of your present circumstance overtake you. Run meaning, “keep going.” Run meaning, “don’t be afraid to leave, don’t be afraid to go north.” Run meaning “get away, physically and otherwise from anything that denies your humanity.” Run meaning, “run to God.” Run, Mary, Run, because you got a right to the tree of life. The wounded mothers of Brazil and the weeping Marys of North America shared an imperative for connection to a source that would comfort them, affirm them and urge them forward on their journeys. Spirituals, like rooms consecrated to the African divinities, are vessels of the sacred – imbued with a dynamic, holy lifeforce that strengthens, blesses and animates being.

The spirituals, the traditional songs of African American religion, were created by enslaved Africans and their descendants in nineteenth century America, and hold generations of trauma and transcendence in their tones. They are the religious form that has most faithfully nourished the link to ancestors and ancestral traditions among African Americans and they continue to be a source of great cultural and spiritual sustenance for all people who experience them.

Our epigraph suggests another point of connection among traditions of the diaspora in the image of the tree of life.³ Standing at the entrance to a Vodun hounfor (temple) in Haiti, or rising in a place of honor in the yard of a Candomblé terreiro (ritual community) or a Santeria shrine, there will often be a large sumptuous tree, whose sheltering branches are heavy with leaves and whose trunk is tied with cord or a length of white cloth. This is the abode and manifestation of Iroko, a divinity whose differing names – Loco, Loko, Iroko, Zaratembo, Tempo, and others – in different religions all reflect a powerful, shielding spirit whose roots and branches represent the links between the spiritual and material worlds, as well as the connections between living human beings and their ancestors. The Africans who came across the Atlantic as slaves carried with them this tradition of recognizing a sacred tree as the dwelling of a protective divinity and as a symbol of their own relationship to spirit and to lineage. For Blacks in North America, whose religion drew heavily on rituals and understandings from African ancestral traditions, the biblical promise that the children of God have “a right to the tree of life” may have resonated even beyond its liberatory Christian implications toward older assurances of protection, continuity and care.

This essay examines connections between the spirituals, which are the oldest extant religio-cultural form in Black North American life, and other religious traditions of the Afro-Atlantic world. We begin with the assumption, perhaps best articulated by historian Sterling Stuckey, that the spirituals cannot be fully understood “apart from their natural, ceremonial context” and apart from the history that created them. Stuckey writes that too often, the tendency has been to approach the songs as a musical form only, unrelated to dance rhythms and unrelated to ritual.⁴ However, as even the most cursory historical examination will attest, these sacred songs were developed as part of a larger complex of African American religiosity, which is essential to understanding their nineteenth century meaning, their continuing influence and their profound connection to Black religions all over the Western hemisphere.

This text explores the conjunction between the spirituals and that “larger complex” in terms of concepts of reciprocity and embodiment; the transformative power of sound; and the development of Black American Christianity. Woven through the narrative are reflections on ways that the spirituals operate in strikingly similar manner to major ritual forms in other Afro-Atlantic religions: sacred stones in Cuban Santeria, healing leaves in Brazilian Candomblé, and ancestral waters in Haitian Vodou.

For readers familiar with traditional African American religion, especially its Baptist, Holiness, Pentecostal and southern rural forms, many of the links between spirituals and other diasporan religions will be obvious. For others, this essay will perhaps suggest new appreciations of the deep forces of history, culture and spirit that bind together the many parts of the family of Africa on this side of the Atlantic ocean.

II. The Afro-Atlantic Diaspora as a Meaning of Religion