During a religious service on a plantation near Camden, South Carolina in 1861, a member of the congregation – Jim Nelson, the driver, who was “a full-blooded African” – prayed on his knees facing the assemblage. His eyes were shut and he prayed out loud, clapping his hands at the end of every sentence. A visitor to the service described Nelson’s prayer this way: “His voice rose to the pitch of a shrill shriek, yet strangely clear and musical, occasionally in a plaintive minor key that went to your heart. Sometimes it rang out like a trumpet.” Listening, the observer wept bitterly. Members of the congregation were also moved to tears. Many shouted and swayed back and forth, clapping their hands and calling out “Yes, God!” “Jesus!” “Savior!” “Bless de Lord, amen.” The visitor wrote, “It was a little too exciting for me,” but added, “I would very much have liked to shout too.” Finishing the prayer, Jim Nelson slowly rose from his knees trembling and shaking “as one in a palsy, and from his eyes you could see the ecstasy had not left him yet. He could not stand at all, and sank back on his bench…. Suddenly, as I sat wondering what next, they broke into one of those soul-stirring Negro camp-meeting hymns. To me this is the saddest of all earthly music, weird and depressing beyond my powers to describe.”²⁴

In addition to the ring shout, Black North American religious expression in the nineteenth century included other ritual movements such as clapping, swaying and a deep intimacy with spirit that manifested as “possession.” In the Camden plantation ceremony, as well as in others referenced elsewhere in this text, those elements are all evident. Hand clapping, like dance, is important in many traditions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. Commonly, clapping is used as a percussive accompaniment to singing -- sometimes just a simple, regular marking of the downbeat and sometimes with syncopated varying quick and slow rhythms that recall tambourines or drums. In contemporary Black church settings in the United States clapping is still used to emphasize and affirm the words of a prayer, a sermon or a song, such that the emphasis itself is a bodily acknowledgment of spiritual presence and the emotional richness of the experience. This clapping, as emphasis, often takes the form of several distinct, sonorous beats accompanied by spirited “hmmms” or exclamations such as those noted by the Camden plantation visitor. Clapping can also be an expression of joy, or, like music and dance, another way to use the body to summon spirit. In addition to its use in church, clapping is also common in ludic contexts – especially when laughing. In both ritual and social situations, it is not so much “applause” as an affirmation of the intensity and insight/accuracy of a shared experience.

In Candomblé, clapping is used to acknowledge and show deference to the orixás. Like the emphatic claps interspersed through Jim Nelson’s prayer, and the resounding, singular beats that affirm music and spoken word in contemporary Black churches, clapping has specific ritual uses in Afro-Brazilian religion. Often three or four resonant, single claps are followed by eight to twelve quicker ones of diminishing volume. This series – a few louder more distinct claps followed quickly by a succession of quieter ones – is performed at temple altars and in natural environments representative of the orixás’ energies. The sequence is generally done three times in a row in a posture of respect and submission. A more regular sustained rhythm of quick clapping is used at public ceremonies to honor the orixás who have incorporated in the bodies of their adepts and danced for the gathered community. As the spirits leave the central temple hall and retire to their private altar rooms they are saluted with genuflection and clapping.

In many religions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora, the experience of possession or the ritual manifestation of sacred energies in the bodies of devotees, expresses the fundamental nature of the relationship between human beings and the divine. It is a linkage of exchange, of mutuality, of shared responsibility, and above all, of accompaniment. Anthropologist Sheila Walker writes that “a palpable relationship between people and their deities is a unifying feature of the Africa-to-Afro-America religious continuum.”²⁵ Certainly, Santeria, Vodou and Candomblé are strongly marked by this phenomenon which is a central rite in the ritual life of the faith communities. In Black churches in the United States, especially Baptist, Pentecostal and Holiness churches some members regularly “get the Holy Ghost”, “get the Spirit”, or simply, “get happy.” Reagon refers to this intimacy with spirit as a tendency in Black religion “to get common with God,” that is, to relate to God almost as one would to a family member, and to experience Jesus as a deeply personal friend who, as much as anything else, offers compassionate and powerful company on the road of life. Walk with me Lord, walk with me./While I’m walking this tedious journey/I want Jesus just to walk with me.

Practitioners of other African diasporan religions are also accompanied on their lives’ journeys by the divinities they serve. In fact, much of the rationale for initiation in these traditions is to align a devotee’s energy more fully and more closely with that of the spirits who protect her. Practitioners of Candomblé, for example, speak of their orixás as “meu Pai” (my Father) and “minha Mãe” (my Mother) in a sense both holy and immediate. They turn to these mothers and fathers, the orixás, for comfort, assistance, forbearance, healing and innate understanding of their troubles and joys, in much the same way that African American Christians turn to Jesus.

This familiarity with God, rooted in African understandings of relationship between human beings and the divine, appears to have taken on especially marked characteristics in the Americas. It was as if, in the experience of slavery and the consequent struggles of resistance, there was a greater need for the presence and protection of sacred spirits. French photographer and scholar of African religions, Pierre Verger, wrote that in West Africa ceremonies for the embodiment of divine energies are the responsibility of a relative few liturgical leaders especially designated and trained for that work. In the New World, he noted, receiving the Spirit is a more widespread occurrence. African-born individuals interviewed at the end of the nineteenth century in Bahia reported that Candomblé devotees who were born in Brazil were more susceptible to cair no santo, become possessed by an orixá. These former slaves noted that in their African homelands comparatively few people personally experienced the direct embodied presence of the deities.²⁶

The relatively more common experience of possession and initiation into the service of the orixás and lwas on this side of the Atlantic is perhaps a reflection of the effects of the physical and psychic disjunctions caused by the Middle Passage and slavery. Surviving the traumas, one could surmise, required a stronger grip, a tighter embrace between deity and devotee, than that which had existed previously.²⁷ The spirituals facilitated this strong embrace, and songs such as Come Down Angels reflect the importance of calling on the embodied presence of the Holy Spirit. Come down angels, trouble the waters/ Come down angels, trouble the waters/ Come down angels, trouble the waters/Let God’s saints come in.

The angels, the saints, the Holy Ghost, Jesus, the Lord. African Americans called on the sacred spirits of the Bible just as their foreparents and their relatives in other parts of the hemisphere called on the African spirits. Hurston wrote that all over the diaspora, the divinities cultivated and honored by Black people are “hardworking gods who serve their devotees just as laboriously as the suppliant serves them.”²⁸ In Vodou, Candomblé and Santeria, relationship to lwa, nkisi or orisha is very often understood as an inherited trait, a ritual obligation to which devotees are called. The tradition of generationally-linked pastoral roles in the Black church may perhaps be seen in an analogous light. Certainly the deep, abiding, almost familial devotion to Jesus associated with traditional southern Black religion is related to the personal connection people of African descent have nurtured with their spirits all over the New World.

In most traditions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora the body is an essential conduit for spirit. It is not understood as somehow in opposition to the sacred, but as a housing for it, a place for spirit to enter into the world. The Black body, in the countries of the western hemisphere, has also been overwhelmingly a laboring body, a commodified body, a body undergoing many kinds of distress and signification. This tension – between the suffering body and the sacred body; the despised body and the cherished body – is lived out in the creation and perpetuation of the spirituals.

In her book, The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes about the relationship of human creativity to the challenge of expressing physical trauma. Ultimately, she says, the inexpressibility of great distress in simple verbal exposition leads to a “wider frame of invention.”²⁹ That “wider frame of invention” for African Americans, included these songs, which emerged from the bodies of slaves as much as from their voices. The spirituals were a means of engaging the depth and complexity of a people’s experience of enslavement and resistance. A way to open up a pathway to another kind of gnosis: “Running the songs through your body,” Reagon implies, is a means toward a different understanding, an-other way of knowing who one is in the world.

A powerful example of the way nineteenth century Blacks used the creation of songs to collectively engage a challenge comes from the report of Henry Goddard Thomas, who in July 1864 spent time in the camp of a Black Union regiment near Petersburg, Virginia just before the battle of the Crater. Thomas describes how the soldiers would, in response to momentous news, form songs out of silence; first “studying” on a problem and then raising up sounds in many permutations until the final form is the one that best speaks to the need of the moment.

“Any striking event or piece of news…was followed by a long silence. They sat about in groups ‘studying,’ as they called it…. When the spirit moved, one of their singers would uplift a mighty voice, like a bard of old, in a wild sort of chant. If he did not strike a sympathetic chord in his hearers, if they did not find in his utterance the exponent of their idea, he would sing it again and again, altering sometimes the words or more often the music. If his changes met general acceptance, one voice after another would chime in; a rough harmony of three parts would add itself; other groups would join his, and the song becomes the song of the command.

The night we learned that we were to lead the charge the news filled them too full for ordinary utterance…. They formed circles in their company streets and were sitting on the ground intently and solemnly ‘studying.’ At last, a heavy voice began to sing, We-e looks li-ike me-en a-a marchin’ on, we looks li-ike men-er-war. Over and over again he sang it, making slight changes. The rest watched him intently; no sign of approval or disapproval escaped their lips, or appeared in their faces. All at once, when his refrain had struck the right response in their hearts, his group took it up, and shortly half a thousand voices were upraised….The sound was…weird…when all the voices struck the low ‘E’ (last note but one), held it, and then rose to ‘A’ with a portamento as sonorous as it was clumsy. Until we fought the battle of the crater they sang this every night to the exclusion of all other songs. After that defeat they sang it no more.”³⁰

The use of spirituals in labor – in battle, in fields, in kitchens, on waterways – and the association of the music with the trials and dangers of slave life reminds us of similar connections elsewhere in the Americas between Black religions and the context of struggle out of which they developed. Iyalorixá Valnizia Pereira Oliveira (Mãe Val), a high priestess of Candomblé in Salvador, Bahia Brazil, reflects that her religion, the religion of her ancestors, is not easy. “Everything about the slaves’ life was hard. Even their religion was hard.” Mãe Val talks about the tremendous effort Brazilian slaves made to find safe, distant places to hold their ceremonies, the sacrifices of labor and rest made to properly honor and care for their deities; the risk of jail, the beatings and condemnation for holding onto their ancestral faith. But the difficulty of their worship life was compensated by the joy they had in communing with their gods and depending on them for accompaniment and aid, she said. The iyalorixá says of the current generation of practitioners, “We know that joy.”³¹

VII. The Folhas: Balm in Gilead: Brazilian Candomblé