A Sacred Communion

Chapter 2 focuses on another trope that upsets the realist and rationalist discourse of slavery: spirit possession. Whereas existing scholarship stresses the postmodernist resonances of this trope, the chapter argues that Catholicism serves to frame—and even to facilitate—the antirealist effect that spirit possession has on two contemporary narratives of slavery. First is Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which is one of the earliest examples of the genre and a novel rarely associated with either spirit possession or Catholicism. By highlighting where Jane’s narrative voice is possessed by other speakers, this chapter documents how the Catholic characters in the novel enable it to engage radically antirealist views about history without ultimately endorsing them. The second part of the chapter focuses on Leon Forrest’s critically acclaimed but insufficiently studied novel Two Wings to Veil My Face, which also figures storytelling as a kind of spirit possession. Despite its obvious skepticism towards organized religion, the novel depicts these spiritual intercessions as Catholic sacraments: rituals of eating and drinking that recall the Eucharist. Thus, Catholicism is implicated in the way the narrator remembers slavery and in the parts of his history that are “beyond understanding.”

Catholicism and Narrative Time

Chapter 3 opens the examination of the trope of temporal disjuncture, which will continue in chapter four. It argues that Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata and Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale manipulate past and present modalities (respectively), to contradict the Enlightenment principle that history moves forward progressively and linearly. However, where most scholarship on these novels links temporal disjuncture to non-Western conceptions of time, this chapter suggests that their alternative temporalities reveal a strange and often disconcerting faithfulness to the theology of time that Augustine of Hippo laid out in some of his most canonical works. Since Augustinian theology has had such formative, lasting consequences for Western Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, the argument uncovers a tension in these novels, both of which very plainly reject Western conceptions of chronological progress. Yet such theological contradictions constitute the revisionary historiographic aims of the genre and establish its importance to our understanding of African American literarature.

Toni Morrison’s Sacramental Rememory

Chapter 1 considers two novels by Toni Morrison which are widely celebrated for undermining Enlightenment rationalism: Beloved and A Mercy. As critics often note, Morrison’s concept of rememory—an antirealist trope, premised on the supernatural irruption of the past in the present—achieves this by imagining an alternative history of slavery. Yet a complete picture of these novels requires an account of the way that Morrison structures rememory—quite remarkably and with palpable historical reservations—as a Catholic sacrament. The chapter therefore addresses a significant gap in scholarship on Morrison (who identifies as Catholic), but never does it imply that her religious vision is uncritical or pure. Rather, it suggests that the sacramental aspects of rememory are in constant tension with the sharp critique of Catholicism evident in both novels. That critique builds upon the sociological study of slave religion that Orlando Patterson developed in Slavery and Social Death, particularly his pioneering claim that “the special version of Protestantism” which arose in the American South as slave religion was, in key respects, theologically “identical” to Catholicism.

Introduction

This introduction considers why African American authors would engage Catholicism in their efforts to revise the national discourse on slavery during the civil rights and Black Power movements, a period characterized by a deep suspicion of the cultural institutions that historically supported the rise of slave societies in the Americas. Contemporary narratives of slavery, from the earliest to the most recent, devote significant aesthetic attention to Catholic rituals and mysteries—even as they remain sharply critical of the political and social policies of the Catholic Church. The introduction charts this tension by locating the genre’s emergence during a time when heightened public attention to Catholicism following the Vatican II proceedings on race coincided with the rise of a broader national conversation on the legacy of slavery. It argues that this confluence is reflected in the ambivalence with which the contemporary slave narrative approaches Catholicism.

Coda

Sacraments of Memory’s conclusion affirms the contention that Catholicism operates as a site of oppositional discourse in contemporary narratives of slavery, wherein alterative ways of remembering the past are realized. It reminds the reader, however, that these “sacraments of memory” should never be considered unproblematic or pure modes of dissent. Rather, they remain deeply conflicted discursive strategies.

Catholicism and Narrative Time, Continued

Chapter 4 continues the discussion of temporal disjunction started in the previous chapter through an extended examination of Edward P. Jones’s use of the flash-forward technique in his highly acclaimed 2003 novel The Known World. Jones manipulates conceptions of the future, just as Perry and Johnson manipulate past and present time, to disrupt the linearity of the narrative. These narrative disruptions, the chapter contends, are similarly framed in terms of Augustinian theology. Specifically, the chapter argues that the flash-forward technique in The Known World is informed to a significant extent by the concept of divine prescience that Augustine of Hippo developed in his analysis of the biblical story of creation. Jones’s engagement with Augustine reveals itself throughout The Known World, especially with regard to how the novel represents art and artists. Moreover, the Augustinian subtext of Jones’s writing accounts for the surprising presence of Catholic characters and Catholic themes in the narrative.