This astonishingly generative book is one I will “tarry with” for some time to come, to use a phrase from the Black church tradition invoked frequently by the author. Aside from the formidably constructed argument presented, about which more below, Greene-Hayes introduces the reader to a cast of characters that could hardly have been conjured up by the best novelist. Not a page goes by without a fascinating nugget dug out of sometimes obscure archival sources, local newspaper records, the Louisiana Federal Writers Project, or the always pungent observations of Zora Neale Hurston and sometimes other writers; or without a challenging theoretical clarification or strongly phrased argument; or without an arresting photograph; or without a miniature biography of someone that takes one back to the words of novelist Jesmyn Ward, quoted in the epigraph: “This is the kind of world… that makes fools of the living and saints of them once they dead. And devils them throughout.” All of which is to say, this book richly captures a portions of the lives, the religion making, of largely poor Black New Orleans residents who were surveilled, cataloged, folklorized, harassed, criminalized, rebuked, and scorned, both by the white Christian state (including its social scientific academic apparatus) and by the Black Protestant leadership class.
Beyond capturing those lives, the book makes important arguments that at many points challenge or prod other scholarship. It thereby compels a rethinking of many issues of African American religious history in this period. The author writes: “In the face of gratuitous state violence—lynching, poverty, surveillance, policing, and social scientific voyeurism—they embraced a wide array of Africana esotericisms, such as the production of mystical knowledges, ancestral veneration, dancing, conjuring, rootworking, tarrying, faith healing, and spiritualized sex work. Through these practices, they stretched beyond the enclosures of this world, into the depths of the underworld” (7). The “invocation of Black Atlantic religion making” in the book refers to practices in creating religious practices not in any conventional Western Christian sense but rather “on their own terms and in defiance to Western Christianity” (19). Here, I might suggest it was often but not always in defiance, given that latter chapters of the book cover such topics as Black Pentecostals, unconventional in some ways but still recognizably Christian in others.
Greene-Hayes draws from a variety of sources, but most especially from the Louisiana Writers Project. Just as they turned their gaze on their subject, Greene-Hayes turns a withering gaze on the LWP writers, intent as some of them were to creating “voyeuristic imaginings … to aid the local tourist economy” (24). Those who “constructed these violent archives were more invested in caricature” than in faithful renditions; they were in league with the project of “salvage ethnography,” by which whites sought to simultaneously catalogue and “modernize ‘primitive’ populations and exorcise them of their ‘fetishes.’” (34). For example, “the policing and criminalization of Voudou was a state-sanctioned project in concert with salvage ethnography that attempted to drive Voudou out while simultaneously preserving the lore of it for white folkloric consumption” (54).
Subsequent chapters, one after the other, recount stories heretofore unknown or little-known, each one as compellingly told and analyzed as the next. Chapter two, for example, narrates the story of the Council of God, a Black Israelite congregation that also drew from a variety of theologies, including a belief in the “transmigration of souls” (62). One image in the book reprints a document confiscated by the cops, the “Remarkable Creed of Queer Council of God,” which included not only a theology resembling commandments from the Bible but also realistic social commentary: “the white man is in heaven and the negro in hell” (66). Police surveillance of the church led to a confrontation at a church member’s house; one policeman was killed by some church members, after which the police torched the house church, reportedly saying “‘smoke out the negro devils’” (75). Later press accounts depicted the church as a ritualistic cult; local Black Protestants and Catholics added to the vitriol. Two years later, according to one newspaper account, a former Catholic priest boasted of putting to death the murderer of the police officer. The LWP writer who documented all of this also embellished and fictionalized it, as if she were making some sort of screenplay for a racist horror film. Later, Greene-Hayes uses the stories told by “Informant 864,” a Black practitioner of underworld work who gave extensive interviews to the white Episcopal priest and amateur anthropologist Harry Middleton Hyatt, to recount the career of the Prophet Joseph Rajah Lyons of the Emperor Haile Selassie Supreme Nuway Radio Ethiopia Mystic Light Baptist and Spiritual Kingdom Church. A native Louisianian born in 1899, Lyons pursued a career as a faith healer, itinerant preacher, and sex worker, a combination suggesting that he “used religious spaces to subvert state surveillance of homosexuality” (134). He also hooked into (literally) an elaborate theology of ritual electrification via radio wires, believing it to be part of his power of curing diseases. In later years, he was spotted in Pittsburgh, and then in Oklahoma City, where he was a delegate for the Fair Employment Practice Committee of A. Philip Randolph.
One final story, from a chapter about the New Orleans chapter of Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association: the Madame M. L. T. de Mena, a Garveyite organizer in New Orleans who later turned to Father Divine’s Peace Mission, creating a paper called the World Echo to proselytize for Divine’s message of universal racial transcendence. That seemed to contradict Garvey’s message of Black nationalism, but Greene-Hayes argues that she blended the two, as a “Black transnational religious thinker pulling together different strands of religious and political thought to carve a path forward for the children of Ethiopia” (176).
This is an intellectually challenging text to read; it is also an unforgettable one.
