short response#3
Playing Jane: Re-presenting Black Mormon Memory through Reenacting the Black Mormon Past
Max Perry Mueller
Journal of Africana Religions, Volume 1, Number 4, 2013, pp. 513-561 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press
For additional information about this article
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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/524363
Journal of Africana Religions, vol. 1, no. 4, 2013 Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
Abstract
By reenacting the “[auto]biography” of the celebrated nineteenth- century black Mormon woman Jane Manning James, twenty-first- century black Mormons hope to explain to their audiences and to themselves why they joined or choose to stay in a religious community that, for much of its history, excluded people of African descent from full church membership. With respect to this history of exclusion, I inter- pret the performance of reenacting James’s autobiography as a means of creating a usable past for present-day black Mormons, one that connects them to the Mormon origin mythos. These reenactments also serve as implicit critiques of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ (LDS) hierarchy: the Mormon Church’s official history and theology makers have yet to fully recognize black Mormons’ contribution to early Mormon history, and likewise have yet to fully recognize the important role Mormons of African descent play in the modern LDS Church.
Keywords: Mormon, African, reenactment, identity, curse
In March 2012, when the political stage was finally set for America’s first Mormon major-party presidential candidate to challenge America’s first black president, the national media descended on Utah to investigate what many journalists and political pundits declared the rarest of religious and racial amalgams: a black Mormon. The New York Times and the Washington Post wrote lengthy profiles of members of Utah’s small (probably no more than a thou- sand) black Mormon community. The national media sought to determine
Playing Jane Re-presenting Black Mormon Memory through Reenacting the Black Mormon Past
m a x p e r r y m u e l l e r
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which of their supposed dichotomous identities—their black or Mormon selves—would pull the lever on Election Day.1 Even Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show got in on the fun. When the show’s “junior black correspondent,” Jessica Williams, was sent to Utah “to talk to Mormons,” Williams was speechless when she came face-to-face with a panel of five black Utahans who explained to her that they too were “all Mormons.” Williams, dressed in a khaki safari shirt, didn’t miss a beat. She pulled out her iPhone and began capturing on film what she described as these “mythical creatures, the unicorn of politics.” “Oh my gosh,” Williams said, gleeful of her discovery, “I’m going to make a fortune off this sh. . . stuff.”2
Yet long before the national media “discovered” them, black Mormons had been putting themselves on stage, performing their own identities precari- ously constructed at the intersection of race, religion, and often gender too. It has not been recent presidential politics, but Mormonism’s past that most often supplies black Mormons with the scripts for such performances. Taking the form of the thoroughly Mormon medium of historical reenactments, especially of Mormon pioneer ancestry, these performances are intended to self-affirm and seek affirmation from others within the Mormon community.3 By reenacting the autobiography of the celebrated nineteenth-century black Mormon woman Jane Elizabeth Manning James, some twenty-first-century black Mormons hope to explain to their audiences and to themselves why they came to join or choose to stay in a religious community that, for much of its history, excluded people of African descent from full membership.4 Until 1978, when Mormon leaders reversed the Church’s policy, black men were not allowed to hold the Mormon priesthood, a requirement for most leadership positions within the Church. Black men and women could not serve missions, and black couples could not marry in Mormon temples. With respect to this past history of exclusion, I interpret the performance of reenacting the autobiography of Jane Manning James as both a celebration of the legacy of a black Mormon pioneer and an implicit critique of the LDS hierarchy: the Mormon Church’s official history and theology makers have yet to fully recognize black Mormons’ contribution to Mormon pioneer history, and likewise have yet fully to recognize the important role Mormons of African descent play in the modern LDS Church.5
In this essay, I argue that when studied together, the religious experiences of Jane Manning James and one of her modern-day reenactors, Jerri Harwell, illuminate how both Mormon women have created—to borrow from Penelope Ingram (2008)—“a place of [their] own,” though an unsettled place, within
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their faith communities and the communal memories of these communities.6 I begin by offering some theoretical orientations about how the performance of memory informs this study, before introducing Jerri Harwell and Jane Manning James as Harwell reenacts James’s autobiography at a recent gather- ing of the Genesis Group.7 I then closely examine the text that Harwell uses for her reenactments: Jane Manning James’s autobiography, which was written and edited between the mid-1890s and her death in 1908.8 I argue that by narrating herself into the mythos of early Mormonism—recounting her inti- mate relationship with Mormonism’s first couple, Joseph Smith and his wife Emma, her participation in the first whisper campaigns about polygamy, her membership in the celebrated first wave of Mormon pioneers to reach Utah in 1847, and her fidelity to church leaders, even as they rejected her petitions to participate in Mormonism’s most sacred temple rituals—James subtly chal- lenges the history and the doctrine that excluded her from full membership in the turn-of-the-century Mormon community. I look at James’s life and legacy by comparing it to the experience of Jerri Harwell, who recounts her own modern-day black Mormon pioneer story in her book, Leaning on Prayer (2004). I argue that by reenacting James’s written autobiography, even a century after James’s own death, Harwell employs the memory of Jane Manning James to “transmit cultural memory and identity,” as performance theorist Diana Taylor (2003) has written, about the connections between the historical and present-day experiences of black Mormons.9 I further argue that Harwell’s performance highlighting James’s status as both a beloved pioneer and a persecuted minority is a way for modern-day black Mormons to connect with Mormonism’s origin myths, as well as to come to terms with the LDS Church’s history of exclusion, especially as the Church looks to a future when increasing numbers of church members are of African descent.
Performance of memory “is as much about forgetting as about remem- bering,” as Diana Taylor has asserted. I show that Harwell redacts James’s memory of early polygamy from her reenactment of James’s autobiography to conform to the mores of a post-polygamous Mormon community. Yet more importantly, Harwell fundamentally alters how James’s racial iden- tity functions in the autobiography, especially in her relationships with the LDS Church’s white male authorities. While James asserts her claim to a Mormon identity over and sometimes against her black one, Harwell cele- brates James because she is a black Mormon pioneer. Still, even though James sought to subsume her racial identity in her religious one, this performed
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forgetting is part of turning James’s legacy into a useful one for her contem- porary black spiritual descendants. In particular, remembering James helps black Mormon women to “manage their lives” the way other contemporary Mormon women who worship in modern-Mormon faith communities and live in modern-Mormon homes do, centered not on the nineteenth-century Mormon polygamous familial organization but on the nuclear family, in which Mormon wives’ attachment to their husband/priesthood holders defines their own identity in the Mormon community.10 But in the post-1978 LDS Church in which African descent is not an official barrier to full membership, these black Mormon women seek to manage these lives as black women.
Finally, by way of conclusion, I offer some reasons why studying the life and legacy of a black Mormon pioneer can be relevant to scholars of Africana religions. Generally, I hope that what becomes apparent in this study is that Jane Manning James’s autobiography and her other written records should be read alongside nineteenth-century religious autobiographies of the likes of Jarena Lee, and perhaps alongside slave narratives like Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. More specifically, I hope to show that James’s story, and the performance of her story, can serve as an entrée into Mormonism’s history of exclusion of people of African descent, as well as Mormonism’s present and future in which Mormon growth in Africa, and in the African diaspora, means that the LDS Church, at least demographically, is becoming an “Africana religion.”
Theoretical Orientations
In this first section, let me make explicit the two theoretical orientations that most directly inform this study. First, I hope to differentiate among identities of dichotomies, dialectics, and dialogics.11 I understand that, through their ver- bal and written performances of the past, James and Harwell engage with their own Mormon communities based not on a set of dichotomous identities, but through identities formed through dialectics. Instead of accepting the notion that, as black Mormon women, they have little ability to participate in the con- struction of their own places within their communities—that the racialized and gendered notions of the Mormon priesthood create an insurmountable wall between the powerful (white, male priesthood holders) and the relatively powerless (black women)—James and Harwell contribute to the formation
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of their own identities, made up of religious, gendered, and racialized com- ponents.12 These identities emerge out of what Mikhail Bakhtin (1982) calls the “social dialect” that they share with the Mormon priesthood holders, a “language” that shapes the self-consciousness of members of a particular social environment.13 Such an approach allows this study to track “back and forth,” as Robert Orsi (2002) has written, “between structure and agency, tradition and act, imagination and reality and in the process, dissolve[s] the solidity of such dichotomies.”14
James’s and Harwell’s relationship to male Mormon priesthood holders— the gatekeepers, I assert, to full membership into the Mormon community—is dialectical and social. Yet their relationship to their own interiorly constructed selves, articulated in their prayer lives with “Heavenly Father,” is perhaps better described as dialogic, a form of what Bakhtin (1973) calls “inner speech,” through which these black Mormon women talk privately to themselves and to God. Though this “inner dialogue” engages with the “outer world,” these women exert more direct control over this speech (and writing), forming the questions that they bring to Heavenly Father independent of white (and in Harwell’s case black) male priesthood holders.15 The “responses” they receive in their “dialogue[s] with Spirit,” as Katherine Bassard (1999) describes it, are “unlike the commands, demands, catechisms, and chastisements that often character- ized black women’s interactions” with male religious leaders because they signify “neither conquest nor coercion.” As Bassard suggests, the knowledge about their selves and about their place within their own communities, gained from these “private encounters with Spirit,” can and often do contradict the denial of “personhood” that sometimes occurs in the “larger social constructions of African American and female subjectivity.”16
In keeping with Paul Ricoeur’s (2006) admonition, the second theoreti- cal orientation insists that historians explore outside the accepted canonical archive, explorations that often lead to a revision of the normative historical narrative.17 Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s recent work (2010) shows that, as a legacy of the experience of slavery, African American theologians and historians have long understood the need to create their own archive in order to “recon- struct a history for themselves.” Maffly-Kipp argues that the act of narrating a history on their own terms “gave African Americans control over their identities, allowed them to refute the pervasive dictum of black inferiority, and affected their ability to shape the future.”18 Katherine Bassard offers a particularly important framework for exploring the relationships among black
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women religious writers. Bassard describes a “matrilineal inheritance” of writ- ing (from Jarena Lee to Rebecca Cox Jackson, and in this study, from Jane Manning James to Jerri Harwell), which, through intertextual interaction and revisions, challenges the static categories of blackness and womanhood often used to exclude black religious women from full membership in their own reli- gious communities.19
Yet caution is needed when applying this approach to the case of Jane Manning James. It is important to note that James’s autobiography is in fact an “[auto]biography,” which James’s friend Elizabeth J. D. Roundy transcribed from James’s “own verbal statement,” as Roundy states at the beginning of the handwritten original copy, and by James’s request.20 It is not “written by [James] herself,” as is so important to the authorial authority of Jarena Lee’s and Harriet Jacobs’s narratives.21 Because James did not herself put pen to paper, her text became subject to direct intervention by the transcriber. As such, James lost control of the legible embodiment of her own narrative, a loss of control, I suggest, that could have been the result of the loss of control over her own (sexual) body.
In recognizing this fact about the authorship of the “[auto]biography,” the always fraught issue of agency must be addressed. While I hope to explain how James and Harwell are actors in their religious worlds, I also aim not to overstate the case of James and Harwell’s power as agents of change. Instead I take to heart Robert Orsi’s exhortation that scholars adopt a “more chastened view of culture generally and of religion in particular, one that steers clear of words like empowerment [and] agency (simply).”22 In fact, as I hope becomes clear through this examination of James’s life, what might be seen as a successful enactment of agency can produce change within a community that the agent did not intend or wish for.23
Playing Jane
On a muggy Fourth of July evening, members of the Genesis Group file into a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) meetinghouse on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. Under the supervision of the (mostly white) LDS hierarchy, but led by a cadre of prominent black Mormon men since the early 1970s, the Genesis Group has never been a “segregated ward” but instead a monthly gathering intended to serve the particular needs of Mormons of
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African descent in the greater Salt Lake City area, supplementing their regu- lar ward activities and responsibilities.24At this particular meeting, the mem- bers of this increasingly multiracial community—made up of the few hundred African American Mormons living in the Salt Lake area, a growing number of African converts who have immigrated to Utah, and several dozen white LDS families who have adopted black children—have come to hear a spiritual his- tory lesson, a story that has as much to do with shaping their present as it does with defining their past.25
On this night, Jane Manning James has come to give her testimony, to speak about how she came to join the LDS Church and about her unique status as “Aunt Jane,” the best-known early African American in late nine- teenth-century Salt Lake Valley. Yet to members of this twenty-first-century Mormon community, who are fanning themselves with programs to supple- ment the church building’s air conditioning, which is struggling to keep up with the midsummer heat, Jane Manning James is much more than their “aunt.” The African American woman making her way to the pulpit clothed in a colorful, multilayered prairie dress and a sunbonnet is their matriarch. Since 1978 when the LDS Church lifted the ban on blacks attaining full church membership, the improbable journey of an unwed teenage mother and daughter of a freed slave whose conversion to Mormonism placed her on a path that ran through the center of Mormonism’s nineteenth-century history has been celebrated on stage, described in books and documentaries, and memorialized in monuments. While she has become a popular topic in articles printed in LDS-sponsored publications, most white Mormons have never heard of Jane Manning James. Among her spiritual descendants at the Genesis Group, however, the mere mention of her name evokes thoughts of essential pioneer Mormonism: strength of spirit and body and long-suffering faith in the face of persecution. For many contemporary black Mormons, Jane Manning James serves as the symbolic link that connects them to the mythol- ogy of the persecuted Mormon pioneers—the self-described latter-day House of Israel forced to flee the borders of the United States and to seek refuge from religious bigotry in the intermountain West—a mythology that in many ways continues to determine the boundaries of Mormon identity.
James has been dead for 115 years. The task of presenting James’s spiritual testimony on this night falls to Jerri Harwell, a local college professor, author, and wife of the Genesis Group’s president, Don Harwell. For the past decade, Jerri Harwell has reenacted events from Jane Manning James’s life for church
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and civic events throughout the Salt Lake City region. Drawing mostly from James’s short autobiography, Harwell uses James’s own words to recount her experiences as a servant to the first two Mormon prophets, a member of the first wave of Mormon pioneers to settle in Utah in 1847, a mother and grand- mother to a large Utah family, and a faithful, tithe-paying Latter-day Saint until her death in 1908 at the age of eighty-seven.26
Jerri Harwell dedicates much of her reenactment to describing James’s time spent in the Smiths’ “Mansion House,” the seat of political and eccle- siastical power in Joseph Smith Jr.’s Nauvoo, Illinois. In 1843, new convert Jane Manning (she would become Jane Manning James after marrying her husband Isaac James in 1844 or 1845) and eight members of the Manning family, who joined the LDS Church after Jane Manning’s own baptism, trekked by foot from their home in Connecticut to gather with the other Latter-day Saints in the booming city-state on the banks of the Mississippi River. Citing almost verbatim from James’s autobiography, Harwell reen- acts James’s memory of what happened after the family narrowly escaped being jailed for traveling without free papers across Illinois—a state that had some of the strictest black laws in the antebellum North. James recalls fondly that it was Joseph Smith Jr. and his wife Emma Hale Smith who initially housed the Manning family when they arrived in Nauvoo. And because she grew particularly close to the prophet’s family, when the rest of the Mannings found work and housing elsewhere, the Smiths offered Jane Manning a home in the Mansion House, as well as a job as a washerwoman. Channeling James, Harwell recounts:
The next morning [Emma Smith] brought the clothes down to the basement to wash. And among the clothes, I found Brother Joseph’s robes. I looked at them and wondered—[as] I had never seen any before–and I pondered over them and thought about them so earnestly, so sincerely that the Lord made manifest to me that they pertained to the new name that is given the saints that the world knows not of.
James here describes a quasi-mystical experience with the prophet’s dirty laundry—the robes Smith and other Saints wore when performing rituals in the Nauvoo temple. By suggesting she knows that Saints are given a “new name” as part of the temple rituals, James also insinuates that she knows some
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of what goes on inside the temple, which, because of her race, she was forbid- den to enter.27
This was not the only event suggesting James’s intimate relationship with the Smiths, an intimacy that grew in the few months James spent with the family before Joseph Smith was assassinated by an anti-Mormon mob on June 27, 1844.
Sister Emma asked me one day if I would like to be adopted to them as their child. I did not answer her. She said “I can wait awhile so you can consider it.” She waited two weeks until she asked me again. And when she did, I said “no ma’am” because I . . . I didn’t understand or know what it meant!
While James, a new convert to early-nineteenth-century Mormonism, might not fully know “what it meant,” Harwell and the Genesis Group audience—perhaps especially white Mormon parents of adopted black children—understand the significance of this offer of spiritual adoption, if not the specific details of the nineteenth-century Mormon ritual.28 In Mormon soteriology, such an adoption would mean that a lowly, black washer-girl would be attached to a priesthood holder, destined to spend eternity with the Smiths, and attain the same level of heaven as the prophet himself. Harwell concludes this particular scene with an extended pause, allowing her audience to share, in silence, the recognition of what a missed opportunity this represented.
During the reenactment, Harwell not only conjures James’s words, but also James’s own colloquial, African American affectations, as Harwell imag- ines these would be. She draws her words out, dropping g’s and consonants along the way. These theatrical stylings serve to remind the Saints present that despite the multiracial makeup of today’s Genesis Group, this is intended to be a gathering of Mormonism’s African American community. Even the meet- inghouse’s warmer-than-usual temperature is said to add to the ambiance. As people found their seats before the service began, a Genesis Group member laughingly offered, “They must have turned down the air-conditioning to make it more ‘black church!’”
While efforts have gone into making this Genesis Group meeting feel and sound “black,” it is also very much Mormon. For example, the group opens the meeting with the singing of the LDS hymn “Where Can I Turn for Peace?,” followed by the Negro spiritual “Do, Lord, Remember Me.”
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While the contrasting styles in which the two songs are performed—the former sung in a staid, on-the-beat manner, the latter shouted, clapped, and even danced out by the community—might seem to represent a cultural chasm between LDS and black church culture, the shared message in both songs, of deliverance from sorrow and persecution through faith in Heavenly Father, hints at a common ground. This intertwining of black and Mormon identities is essentially the message of Harwell’s reenactment: Despite the long-held racialized theology, which kept early black Mormons on the margins of the Mormon community and excluded them from the official Mormon pioneer narrative, the fact that James’s life story places her at the center of nineteenth-century Mormon history means that black and Mormon are not mutually exclusive identities, and should never have been considered as such. What’s more, for Harwell, James’s experience does not exist exclusively in history. Instead, Harwell places her own expe- rience “in the [dialectical] fissure between the present and the past.”29 In doing so, her reenacting of James’s story helps revise the standard narra- tive of Mormonism in which black Mormons appear only on the margins, if they appear at all: Harwell intends to “restore”—to use LDS parlance—the universality of the Mormon movement, present in the Church’s early years and expanding in today’s LDS Church.
Remembering and Re-presenting the Sacred Mormon Past
In the summer of 2010, I went to Salt Lake City to look for Jane Manning James in the archives of the LDS Church History Library and the Utah Historical Society. I hoped that James would speak to me from scratchy microfiche and dusty letter-books. I hoped she would tell me how she dealt with the precarious place in which she lived out her life as a black Mor- mon pioneer in Zion, simultaneously at the center and on the margins of the nineteenth-century Mormon experience. I planned to “ask” her: How did you understand your status as a beloved member of the community, cel- ebrated as a friend of the first prophet’s family, as a pioneer of 1847, and as a steadfast member of the LDS Church? At the same time, how did you man- age your own life in a religious community that, due to your race, defined you as innately cursed and thus unworthy to receive the same blessings as your fellow white Saints?
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Although this was my plan, I found that during my time in Salt Lake City the archives were not the only, or even the best, place to find James, or perhaps more accurately, the memory of James that James herself helped create. Certainly, the archives shed light on the question of how James wrote (or at least dictated) herself into early Mormon history, and by doing so, subtly chal- lenged the Church’s marginalization of faithful blacks within Mormon history and community. But it was in my interviews with Harwell and in my observa- tions of her reenactments that I discovered that the canon is not closed on Jane Manning James’s story.30 As Robert Orsi has described the importance of combining ethnography and interviews of the living to better understand the archives left by the “dead,” “it is useful to remember that the inert documents stored away in the archives were once the living media of real people’s engage- ment with the unfolding events of their times. The challenge for historians, as for ethnographers, is to figure out the relation between these archived pieces of a once-living world and the world from which they came.”31 The legacy of James’s black Mormon experience unfolds today in the lives of modern black Mormons like Harwell—in particular, but not exclusively, when they don the nineteenth-century sunbonnets and reenact James’s autobiography—who strike a precarious balance between, on the one hand, their ongoing (dialecti- cal) struggles with what today Mormons call “racist folklore,” but was once articulated at the highest levels of the Church about black spiritual inferiority, and on the other hand, the spiritual truth they find within what they call their own “testimonies of faith,” often created out of their dialogic prayer lives with “Heavenly Father.”
Aunt Jane, or Joseph Smith’s Black Daughter
On Thursday, April 16, 1908, only hours after her passing, the LDS Church–owned Deseret News published on its front page an obituary of Jane Manning James. Such star treatment—the obituary’s prominent placement and the urgency with which the announcement went out to the public— was usually reserved for the deaths of high-ranking LDS officials or leading Utah politicians. Yet James occupied neither an ecclesiastical nor politi- cal post. As the Deseret News reported, “Aunt Jane” was in fact a “colored woman” whose exceptional status derived from her extraordinary life, dur- ing which she participated in some of the most important events in early
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Mormon history. Five days later, the Deseret News reported that hundreds of James’s friends crowded into a Mormon meeting house in Salt Lake City’s Eighth Ward. There they listened to LDS Church president Joseph F. Smith deliver a remembrance of the faithful Mormon woman he had most likely first met sixty-five years before in Nauvoo, Illinois, when he was the five-year-old son of Hyrum Smith, Joseph Smith Jr.’s older brother.32
The great fanfare with which the Mormon leadership marked James’s death belies the fact that for at least the previous thirty years the Mormon hierarchy had worked to marginalize black Mormons in the Mormon commu- nity. Joseph Smith Jr.’s vision for the restored Christian church was initially racially universalist. In the 1830s and 1840s, Joseph Smith Jr. and other early Mormon leaders had ordained a few black men to the Mormon priesthood, a position understood as a necessary prerequisite both for achieving leader- ship status within the Mormon community and for reaching the highest levels of heaven. During the second half of the nineteenth century, after they fled from their own persecutors, Mormons moved away from their original policy of relative racial universalism, instead espousing a doctrine similar to many evangelical Protestant churches in antebellum America: that blacks’ dark skin marked them as permanently suffering under a set of divine curses. Mormons reasoned that blacks were set apart from whites, doomed to serve their spiri- tually superior white brethren, and were thus ineligible for any religious leadership position.33 In 1852, Brigham Young declared, “Any man having one drop of the seed of [Cain] . . . in him cannot hold the priesthood”—a position that would become church policy over the next decades.34 In 1908, the same year he eulogized Jane Manning James as a faithful Saint, Church president Joseph F. Smith declared that his uncle, Joseph Smith Jr., had stripped the priesthood from Elijah Abel, the most famous black priesthood holder and a close friend to the original Mormon prophet, when the prophet became aware of Abel’s true race—a statement that directly contradicted Smith’s own previ- ous statements on the subject.35 This racialized theology also meant that black Mormons, including Jane Manning James, could not access the temple where Mormons receive sacred ordinances for themselves and for their dead family members, ordinances which Mormons believe are required for the eternal exaltation of their souls.
The temple might have been closed to Jane Manning James. But another essential Mormon space—the autobiographer’s notebook—was open. Like many early Mormon pioneers, Jane Manning James wanted to preserve the
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memories of the early days of Mormonism for future generations. Yet in the last decade of her life, the elderly James did not or could not sit down to pen her religious autobiography “by herself.” Whether it was because she was illit- erate, as is commonly believed, because she was going blind, as James states herself in the autobiography, or because the story required a white Mormon to validate its claims, James dictated her autobiography to her neighbor, Elizabeth J. D. Roundy.36 While the biography is brief—around twenty-three hundred words—James captures in vivid detail a life dedicated to the Mormon faith. In particular, James recounts a life devoted to the men who, from Joseph Smith Jr. to his nephew Joseph F. Smith, led the Church as its presidents and prophets. James lived with and worked as a servant for two of these presidents, Joseph Smith Jr. and Brigham Young. And James had at least a passing acquaintance with all the presidents who led the Church during her lifetime. Near the end of the autobiography, James explains that in the Salt Lake Valley where she lived and farmed, celebrated good harvests and “suffered hunger and cold,” raised eight children and buried six of them, she also had seen
Brother Brigham, Brothers Taylor, Woodruff, and Snow rule this great work and pass on to their rewards, and now Brother Joseph F. Smith. I hope the Lord will spare him, if this [is] his holy will, for many years to guide the Gospel ship to a harbor of safety.37
James’s profession of reverence for and submission to the Mormon authori- ties was typical in the paternalistic Mormon culture, which maintained both highly regulated gender roles and a strict ecclesiastical hierarchy.38 Yet alongside this professed devotion to Mormon leaders, through a care- fully constructed narrative of a life intimately tied to Mormonism’s original prophet, and a life intimately connected to some of the most important events in Mormon pioneer history, James also offers an implicit challenge to the antipathy the Mormon leadership had developed toward black Mormons as full members of the earthly Mormon community. In this sense, James’s narrative, which includes both explicit submission and implicit dissent, can be understood as an example of what James C. Scott calls a “hidden tran- script.” In her autobiography, James adheres to the strictures of the “public transcript”—professed devotion and promised submission to the church hier- archy—while also embedding within it a “critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant.”39
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The bulk of James’s autobiography is an embedded narrative. In the first decade of the twentieth century, James relates to Roundy the story she told Joseph Smith Jr., his wife, Emma Hale Smith, along with the Smiths’ guests at the Mansion House upon the Manning family’s arrival in Nauvoo, Illinois, in the fall of 1843.40 In this sense, James’s biography is a written record of two (verbally performed) reenactments. In the embedded narrative James reen- acts for the Smiths the Manning family’s conversion and journey to Nauvoo. For Roundy, James reenacts her own experiences in Nauvoo, as well as those of her Nauvoo contemporaries.41 Absent the direct testimonies of the Smith family, James speaks for them, empowering James to frame how her relation- ship with Mormonism’s first family gets archived, remembered, and, a century later, reenacted. And as we will see, in response to James’s narrative formula- tion, the LDS Church would prescribe her official place in Mormon history (and even the Mormon conception of heaven), though not in the way James or, she suggests, the Smiths would have wanted.
James explains to Roundy that the Manning family’s harrowing trek halfway across the continent from her home in Wilton, Connecticut, to Nauvoo, Illinois, ends on the doorstep of the Nauvoo Mansion House. Upon their arrival, Emma greets the Mannings and ushers them quickly into the mansion’s sitting room. There Joseph Smith Jr. himself “gave a warm greeting and placed extra chairs around the room for his new guests.” Once seated and upon the Mormon prophet’s request “to relate your expe- rience in your travels,” Jane Manning (she has yet to marry her husband Isaac James) recounts to Joseph Smith and the others present the story of her early childhood spent as a domestic in the household of the Fitches, a wealthy family in Wilton. She also recounts her conversion to Mormonism, one that is very much in the mold of many early Mormon conversion narra- tives. These often included expressed frustration with the current spiritual offerings, a rationalized acceptance of the truth of the Mormon gospel, as well as experiences with the gifts of the “Holy Spirit,” all of which func- tioned together to prove the Mormon gospel’s veracity.42 In the mansion parlor Jane Manning tells Joseph Smith that as a young woman she was dissatisfied with the local Presbyterian church she had recently joined: “It seemed to me there was something more that I was looking for.” When an “Elder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” passed “through our country,” Jane Manning went on a Sunday to hear the elders preach, in direct disobedience of her Presbyterian pastor who “forbid me going to
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hear them.”43 What the elder preached that day was so persuasive, James explains, “I was fully convinced that it was the true Gospel he presented and I must embrace it.”
Like many early converts, Jane Manning immersed herself quickly in Mormon culture. Jane Manning explains to her audience in the Mansion House that, a week after her first encounter with the missionaries, she was baptized and confirmed into the LDS Church. A few weeks later, while in prayer “the Gift of Tongues came upon me,” an event that “frightened [my] whole family who were in the next room.” Next James Manning tells Joseph Smith that within a year, she and seven of her now-converted family members—she does not mention her son Sylvester (for reasons I discuss later), born sometime around 1834—set out to gather with the other Saints in Nauvoo.44
Despite their status as freemen—Jane Manning tells Joseph Smith that, besides her mother, her family “had never been slaves”—the Mannings’ race made the journey particularly difficult. In Buffalo, New York, the Mormon missionaries who were sent to secure ferry passage for Mormon emigrants crossing Lake Erie refused to pay for the Mannings’ fare.45 Undaunted, and with the teenage Jane serving as “the head of the little band,” Jane Manning explains how her family walked the eight hundred miles to Peoria, Illinois, where their journey was halted once again. This time a local authority threat- ened the family with jail because they had no “free papers” to prove that they were not runaway slaves, but Jane Manning explained that the local author- ity “concluded to let us go.” Even when they arrived at “beautiful Nauvoo,” Jane Manning says that their fellow Mormon brethren forced the Mannings to endure yet another round “of hardship, trial and rebuff,” though she does not specify what form.46 Jane Manning recounts that only once they reached the Smiths’ Nauvoo Mansion House did the Mannings finally find sanctuary.
After Jane Manning finishes telling the Mormon prophet about her fami- ly’s faith-testing journey—marking the end of the embedded narrative and the autobiography’s first reenactment taking place in 1843—she begins the second reenactment, looking back on the events that followed the Mannings’ arrival at the Mansion House from the vantage point of Jane Manning James in the first decade of the twentieth century and in Salt Lake City. James is then a much more aged self who, she readily admits, has forgotten many of the details she told the prophet, “as many incidents has passed from my memory since then.” However, James does recall for Roundy’s dictation how Smith reacted to Jane Manning’s story; the prophet was so impressed by the
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trials and the Mannings’ dedication to Mormonism that he “slapped . . . on the knee” another guest in the Mansion House who also just heard tell of the Mannings’ journey to Nauvoo, and declared, “Isn’t that faith?” James explains that Smith then blessed the Mannings, promising them that “you are among friends now and you will be protected.”47
In her autobiography, James recalls that the prophet upheld his prom- ise, finding both homes and employment for each one of the Manning family members. James became one of the Smith family’s live-in domestics, a position that she clearly treasured because it allowed her to remain in close proximity to the Mormon prophet, whom James claims she had frequent occasion to shake “hands with.” James became such a confidante to the Smiths that Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith (whom James calls “Mother Smith”), even invited James into her room. There Mother Smith “told me all of Brother Josephs troubles, and what he had suffered in publishing the Book of Mormon.” Mother Smith even allowed James to hold, but not to inspect, the instruments with which Joseph Smith had translated the Book of Mormon. James explains that Mother Smith wanted her to recognize the significance of her generous act: “You will live long after I am dead and gone,” James recalls Mother Smith telling her, “and you can tell the Latter-day Saints that you was [sic]48 permit- ted to handle the Urim and Thummim.”
James here reenacts for her early twentieth-century scribe, Elizabeth Roundy, another scene from inside a room in the Mansion House in which James claims to have “handle[d] . . . in my hands” objects that would inspire awe and perhaps envy in most Latter-day Saints. While she was never permitted to set foot in the most sacred chambers of a Mormon temple, in Mother Smith’s bedroom and in the Mansion’s basement, James claims to have handled the sacred artifacts that helped bring about the Mormon dispensation as well as the sacred robes that the prophet wore in the temple where he performed ritu- als intended to bind together, and for eternity, the communal Mormon family.
James tells Roundy that her intimacy with the Smiths developed to the point where Emma Smith asked if James would like to be adopted “as [the Smiths’] child.” Yet not understanding the full significance of such an invitation, namely that according to Mormon theology she would be sealed to the Smiths for all eternity, James refused. Lamenting this decision that would become one of the greatest regrets of her life, James explains that the Smiths “were always good and kind to me but I did not know my own mind; I did not comprehend.”49
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Beyond her special relationship with the Smiths, two other aspects of James’s autobiography stand as indirect challenges to the LDS Church authorities’ attempt at “rewriting” Mormon history to exclude African Americans from Mormon origin myths. As the Smiths’ invitation to adopt a black teenage girl already indicates, Joseph Smith is depicted as racially progressive, at least more progressive than most of the members of his flock. James implies that though Joseph Smith’s treatment of her was exceptional it was not out of character. She recalls that when the road-weary Manning family arrived at the Nauvoo Mansion House, “Brother Joseph said to some white sisters that was [sic] present, ‘Sisters, I want you to occupy this room this evening with some brothers and sisters that have just arrived.’”50 James remembers that the Mormon prophet was willing to open the doors to his home to black Mormon converts, and to integrate the Mansion House’s living quarters seemingly without a thought to the racial implications of such an act. James’s description of Joseph Smith as a generous, fatherly figure who acted with love and compassion to the Manning family suggests that, at the very least, Smith was not someone for whom race stood as a fixed barrier, preventing relations between faithful Mormons across racial lines. James does not mention that she witnessed Smith ordaining any black men. Yet James’s portrayal of Joseph Smith can also be read as a challenge to the notion that, as his nephew Joseph F. Smith would assert sixty years later, “the Prophet himself ” would strip a close and trusted servant like the early black Mormon convert and indefatigable missionary, Elijah Abel, of his priest- hood because Smith discovered Abel was “tainted with negro blood.”51
Besides establishing her intimate relationship with Joseph Smith Jr., in her autobiography, James’s most important task is to describe her status as a member of the first wave of Mormon pioneers to enter the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. By the 1890s, when it is likely that James began dictating her life story to Roundy, the 1847 pioneers had already become an essential part of Mormon mythic history.52 In 1897, Salt Lake City hosted a fiftieth anniversary Jubilee to celebrate the founding of the Mormon desert Kingdom of Zion and to honor the 1847 pioneers as heroes of the faith and of Utah, which had only entered the Union as a state the year before. Those 1847 pioneers alive and able to make the trip to the state capital were paraded on floats down Salt Lake City’s main streets, with golden badges made by Tiffany’s in New York pinned to their chests.53
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Along with some 250 surviving pioneers of 1847, James was honored at the 1897 Jubilee. Yet soon after, the marginalization of early black Mormons from the official pioneer narrative was underway. For example, in 1899, Assistant Church Historian Andrew Jenson published Church Chronology: A Record of Important Events Pertaining to the History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in which Jenson lists the deaths of the 1847 pioneers, yet he fails to mention the deaths of any of the handful of black pioneers of 1847 who were already deceased. In the 1914 edition of his Church Chronology, Jenson includes the deaths of Green Flake in 1903, who was probably the first black person to enter the valley, and Jane Manning James in 1908, probably the first black Mormon woman to settle in the Salt Lake Valley.54 Yet while Jenson’s historical precision extends far enough to point out that Flake and James were “colored,” Jenson simply indicates that they were “original” or “early” pioneers, failing to credit them with the status of a “pioneer of 1847,” which was Jenson’s convention when indicating the deaths of the white Mormons who first settled the valley in 1847.55
In her autobiography, James challenges this move to exclude her from the mythic Mormon pioneer history. James asserts that she and her husband, Isaac James, left Nauvoo “in the Spring of 1846” and passed the winter with the rest of the Saints at the Mormon camp at Winter Quarters along the banks of the Missouri river in western Iowa.56 In the spring of 1847, James recalls that with the rest of her pioneering party, she set out for Utah, gave birth to her son Silas along the way, and entered the Salt Lake Valley on September 22, 1847, “with- out any serious mishaps” save for a cattle stampede.57 James’s chronological specificity of her own trek—spring 1846 to early fall 1847—is important to her argument that she should be considered not simply as an “early pioneer” but a “pioneer of 1847,” part of the first wave of courageous Mormons who, accord- ing to James, followed not a well-established trail, as later pioneers would do. Instead, they only followed their faith in the “the Lord’s blessing” toward the “glorious [Salt Lake] valley,” believing that the Lord would be “with us and protect us all the way.”58
While expressing her devotion to the presidents of the LDS Church in her autobiography by depicting herself as a treasured member of the first Mormon prophet’s household, and even invited to be a member of his eternal family, James also challenges the Church authorities’ official view of Joseph Smith Jr. holding such a distinct prejudice against people of African descent that he actively routed out black men from priesthood. According to James’s depiction of Smith, what mattered more than Abel’s racial identity was his dedication
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to his faith. Likewise, what mattered more than James’s racial identity was the fact that she was a pioneer of 1847; before she was a black woman, she was a Mormon who, alongside her fellow pioneering Saints, with only their ox carts and their faith in the Lord, made the twelve-hundred-mile journey from Nauvoo to the Salt Lake Valley.
Near the end of her autobiography, James states very simply that she has “had the privilege of going into the temple and being baptized for some of my dead.”59 This mention of “temple privileges” is not a passing remark, but the proud declaration of partial success in a decades-long petitioning campaign James had waged with the church authorities. Beginning in 1884, James began periodically contacting Mormon officials, hoping to convince them to grant her permission to be sealed to her husband and to her children, which would allow James and her family to attain exaltation in the celestial kingdom. For example, after visiting with then Mormon president John Taylor, James wrote a letter to Taylor in which James balances respect for church authority with a subtle challenge to the conclusions that the Mormon leadership had made about her proper place in the Mormon community. James writes that she accepts the authority of the priesthood, which forbids her from entering the temple. She also accepts scripture from the LDS Book of Abraham, the text the Mormon hierarchy most often cited to justify the ban on black men hold- ing the priesthood, namely that the curse upon the wicked son of Noah (Ham) renders people of African descent unworthy of such an ordination: “I realized that my race and color [mean I] cant expect my endowments as those who are white.”60 Yet citing another verse from the Book of Abraham, James insists, “God promised Abraham that in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blest.”61 James writes that since joining the Church, she has proven herself a faithful and obedient Saint. “You know my history,” she reminds Taylor, “& according to the best of my ability I have lived to all the requairments [sic] of the Gospel.” Based on the rationale that the gospel is available to “all the nations” who prove themselves worthy, James pleads, “is there no blessing for me[?]”62
James, it seems, accepted what Jeremiah Moses has called the doctrine of the “Fortunate Fall,” perhaps most famously articulated by the eighteenth- century black poet and former slave Phillis Wheatley. Slavery would prove to be a blessing because the cursed African children of Cain and Ham would be brought out of Africa, brought into contact with Europeans, and converted to salvific Christianity and likewise civilized. As Wheatley explained to her
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readers, “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, May be refin’d and join th’angelic train.63
Yet in her letter to Taylor, James does more. Even while she submits herself to the authority of the priesthood and scripture, she challenges the doctrine of biblical accursedness that both late nineteenth-century Mormons and ante- bellum pro-slavery theologians used to justify enslavement, oppression, and exclusion of Africans.64 In reading the letter, one can picture James flipping through the pages of this same sacred Mormon scripture, pointing to another verse, which she cites to suggest that the call to universality trumps the narrow- mindedness of the exclusive, white church. James here is reminiscent of Jarena Lee, who famously challenged the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) male leadership’s readings of St. Paul’s prohibition against female preaching, by pointing to Mary, the gospel’s first preacher of the “risen Savior . . . [at] the very climax of Christianity.” Just as Lee’s call, “Is he not a whole Savior, instead of a half one?” demands a response from the male religious authorities, so does James’s “is there no blessing for me[?]”65
By interrogating male religious leaders, these black women reject the premise that, as women and as black women, they are essentially separated from their religious communities’ centers of meaning making, that they are essen- tially silent when it comes to the formation of their own identity. As Katherine Bassard suggests, these women “could not wait for those who had power” to, in Lee’s case, “relinquish the floor” to allow her to preach, and in James’s case, to open the temple doors to allow her to perform the sacred ordinances “for her kin.”66 It is important to note that these interrogations that trans- form dichotomous identities into those formed through dialectics are not intended to dismantle structures of, in James’s case, white male authority, or in Lee’s case, black male authority. They are more narrowly tailored to raise the possibility of opening up these structures: to allow for the creation of a place where a woman could preach on the AME’s sanctuary “floor,” and to allow for the creation of a place where a black woman could perform rituals in the Mormon temple.67
James’s request to Taylor, along with similar requests made to Church presidents Wilford Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith, were all denied. For the gatekeepers of the most sacred spaces in the Mormon community, James’s blackness did get in the way of her Mormonness. Undaunted, James tried different approaches to persuade LDS Church authorities to grant her temple privileges. For example, in at least one of these written petitions James
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requests to be sealed to a man named Walker Lewis, a black Mormon convert who, though having been dead for more than thirty years, was believed to have been ordained a priesthood holder.68 And based on the invitation that James claimed that Emma Smith had made decades earlier to adopt her into the Smith family, James wrote several requests to the Church hierarchy that she be sealed to the original prophet “as a child.” “I did not understand the Law of adoption then,” she explains in a letter to then-apostle Joseph F. Smith dated February 7, 1890. “But understanding now . . . Can that be accomplished and when [?]” While James ends this letter with the typical Mormon saluta- tion, “Your Sister in the Gospel,” she juxtaposes this religious identity with her racial one, indicating that she was fully aware that her case presented social and theological complications. In a postscript, James writes, “I am coloured.”69
James was not alone in her letter-writing campaign to help her gain entrance into the temple. On James’s behalf, in January 1894, Zina D. H. Young, the onetime plural wife of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, as well as the president of the LDS women’s service organization, the Relief Society, wrote to Joseph F. Smith. Young, one of the most respected women in the Mormon community, explained that, based on Emma Smith’s initiation, James wished “to be adopted into Joseph Smiths family as a child.”70 In May 1894, this request was granted, with the exception that she be “adopted to the Prophet” not as his child, but “as his [eternal] servant.” Yet the Salt Lake Temple adop- tion records indicate that James herself was not permitted to enter the temple to participate in her own circumscribed adoption. Instead, a “proxy” stood in for James during the ceremony—an unusual occurrence, since proxies were almost exclusively employed for dead participants.71
Jane Manning James’s minor personal victory may have played an ironic role in the hardening of membership restrictions for current and future black Saints in the Mormon community. Her quest to receive her temple endowments—one she herself framed as a special exception for her special case—may have encouraged the Church leadership to form a more formal racialized sense of who was understood to be a Saint worthy of admission to the temple. Though the practice of excluding blacks from full membership was well established by the first decade of the twentieth century, according to available records, it was only in August 1908, just a few months after James’s death in April, that the Quorum of the Twelve passed a motion—without opposition—stating that “if negroes or people tainted with negro blood apply for baptism themselves they might be admitted to Church membership in
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the understanding that nothing further can be done for them.” In particular, this meant that from August 1908 forward, it was the LDS Church’s official policy that while membership would be open to people of African descent, the Church would not seek out black converts, and those black Saints who did join the Church would not be admitted to the temple, nor could they hold the Mormon priesthood.72
This was not the only occasion when James could not control the conse- quences of her insistence that her version of the Mormon past be recorded, recognized, and acted upon. Recall that, in describing the members of the “little band” of black Mormon converts that she led from Connecticut to Illinois, James did not mention her eldest son, Sylvester. Sylvester James’s absence is conspicuous. By the time his mother dictated her autobiography to Roundy, Sylvester James was a wealthy farmer and landowner. He was one of just two African Americans listed in the popular biographical encyclopedia Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah.73
Why does Jane Manning James not mention the fact that her success- ful son Sylvester was born in Connecticut? Why not mention that as a small boy, Sylvester too made the harrowing journey halfway across the coun- try to gather with the Saints in Nauvoo? It seems as though James’s scribe, Elizabeth J. D. Roundy, also wondered about James’s “reticence pertaining to one of her children,” as Roundy herself describes it. After recording James’s verbal account of her version of her life story—which Roundy states that she dictated according to James’s “own statement and she declared it was true”—Roundy steps away from her role as faithful scribe of James’s “[auto] biography” and interjects her own authorial prerogative into the narrative. Roundy found no cause to challenge James’s claims that she was the beloved washer-girl (and even the potential adopted spiritual daughter) of the Smith family, who handled both the prophet’s temple robes and the sacred Book of Mormon translation aides, the Urim and Thummim. Yet Roundy believed it her responsibility to correct the statement’s “only error, or you may call it evasion,” as Roundy explains to future readers on the last page of the hand- written original document. This “error” was the true paternity of Sylvester James, often described as a “half-breed.”74 Roundy writes that while she “could not get any thing out of Jane” about Sylvester, Roundy learned from James’s brother, Isaac Manning, that Sylvester “was born in Conn . . . that he was the child of a white man[,] a preacher.” Roundy writes that “Jane was nearly eighteen or quite that old when the child was born,” and that she left
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the infant in the care of her own mother to return to her work as a servant in the Fitch household. Soon after this ordeal, Roundy writes, young Jane Manning “heard the Gospel and was baptized.”75
The consensus among contemporary Mormons who have dramatized Jane Manning James’s life through reenactments, plays, and historical novels is that the “preacher” whom Isaac Manning claims was the father of Sylvester was Jane Manning James’s onetime Presbyterian “pastor” whom James recalls forbidding her from attending the Mormon meeting where she became “fully convinced that [Mormonism] was the true Gospel.” The consensus is also that James did not consent to this sexual relationship.76
To be sure, it is plausible to connect the unsympathetic Presbyterian “pastor” James describes in her own statement with the “preacher” who her brother Isaac Manning told Roundy was the father of Sylvester. It is also plau- sible to imagine that this minister used his social position to abuse a young black servant girl in his flock, especially when such an image heightens the contrast between this religious (and perhaps even sexual) tyrant and Joseph Smith Jr., the beloved Mormon prophet and fatherly figure who, in James’s own telling, fulfilled his promise to protect her, both in this lifetime and the next. Finally, while in antebellum America, even in a “free state” like Connecticut, the laws protecting African American women, free or slave, against “rape” by respected white men were all but nonexistent, twenty-first-century understandings of sex and power make a truly consensual relationship between two people of such different social standings all but impossible.77
Today, as it was in the first decade of the twentieth century when Roundy interjected family gossip into James’s “[auto]biography,” attempting to deter- mine the nature of Jane Manning James’s relationship with Sylvester’s father is no more than an act of speculation. But what is more than speculative is that Roundy’s act can be seen, in its own way, as a form of violence; it forcibly alters the identity that James constructed of herself at the point of her conversion. After Roundy’s intervention into the text, James is no longer simply a spiri- tual seeker, dissatisfied with the local religious offerings, who finds a spiritual home in Mormonism. She becomes the young, unwed mother of a mixed-race son, perhaps looking for a new community that would not know her past, and thus not hold it against her. James “evades” the question of whether or not she lost control over her own (sexual) body back in Connecticut.78 But in Utah, because she “herself ” could not write her autobiography, James cannot main- tain control over the memory of her own experiences (sexual or otherwise).
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Thus her narrative is subject to the forced interjections of her transcriber. Unlike Jerena Lee, who, at the end of her narratives, prays that “the blessing of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost accompany the reading to this poor effort”—that Lee’s dialogic relationship with the Spirit helps guide the dialectical relationship between Lee and her readers—it is Roundy who controls the benediction at the end of James’s “[auto]biography.”79
James’s own testimony—the part of the “[auto]biography” that she putatively controlled—remains in the liminal space between the spoken and written word. Yet it is precisely this oral nature that makes it so accessible to reenactors. While I’ve argued that James herself is her own first reenac- tor, despite Roundy’s forced interjections into the “[auto]biography,” Roundy must obviously be credited with recording James’s orally performed narrative. She must also be credited with performing this narrative’s second reenact- ment. On the first page of the original handwritten autobiography, Roundy writes that James “wishes [this verbal statement] read at her funeral by EJD Roundy.” And on April 21, 1908, five days after James’s death, the Deseret News reported that Roundy fulfilled this instruction, reading (reenacting) “a sketch of her life as dictated by Mrs. James” at James’s memorial service, a service at which the LDS Church president Joseph F. Smith eulogized James. This means that the Mormon president and prophet most responsible for institu- tionalizing the racial restrictions against full black membership had to sit and listen as James—from the grave—told the story of a pioneering black Mormon woman, who shook the prophet’s hand, who washed the prophet’s robes, who “handled” the “Urim and Thummim,” and who should have become the spiri- tual daughter of Joseph Smith Jr.80 Turn-of-the-century Mormon officials might not have allowed her to enter the temple. But at her own funeral, by asserting her intimate relationship with the objects and bodies that brought about the Mormon dispensation, James claimed that her Mormonness was recognized in another cherished place in the communal Mormon memory: in the Smiths’ Nauvoo Mansion House.
Jerri, Jane, and Genesis
When Jerri Harwell reenacts Jane Manning James’s autobiography before the Genesis Group, she brings two different black Mormon experiences to the meetinghouse pulpit. Harwell brings to life Jane Manning James, the black
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Mormon woman in the first decade of the twentieth century, widowed and blind, often in penury, beloved by many but forbidden from entering the temple. The Genesis Group audience also knows Harwell’s own story, either because they’ve read her own spiritual autobiography, Leaning on Prayer, or because she has shared her testimony with them.81 They know about Harwell’s middle-class background and her conversion to Mormonism just months before the 1978 revelation. They know about her marriage to the president of Genesis, Don Harwell, to whom she was sealed “for time and eternity” in the Salt Lake City Temple in 1987.
The purpose of Harwell’s doubled reenactment—two testimonies of faith embedded in one narrative—itself takes a double form. The reenactment seeks to answer the conventional evangelical question, how does a wayward soul find its way to redemption in the gospel? But it is the assumed dichotomy of black and Mormon identities that reveals a second, more compelling question: Why would a black woman, of either the nineteenth or the twenty-first century, chose a gospel home among the Mormons, to seek membership in a “white” church governed by a male patriarchy, a church which, until recently, has shown at best ambivalence toward her membership?82
Harwell’s response to this assumed dichotomy is to reject its basic prem- ise. In doing so, she claims that there is both continuity and change in her own and James’s testimonies of faith.83 Harwell combines her own story with that of James in order to proclaim that the LDS Church is not, or should not be, racially particularistic, condemning black Mormons to its margins because they were once thought of as essentially inferior to their white brethren. Harwell through James asserts that the LDS Church, or more precisely the blessings of its gospel, is universal, belonging to, as the Book of Abraham declares, “all the families of the earth.”
Still, when she reenacts James’s autobiography, often word for word, Harwell does leave some important words out. In her autobiography, James describes a scene from the secretive early days of polygamy. James explains that one day she was “discussing Mormonism” with sisters Emily and Eliza Partridge, as well as with sisters Maria and Sarah Lawrence, all of whom were about James’s age, and all of who worked as servants in the Nauvoo Mansion House. “Sarah said [to me] what would you think if a man had more wives than one? I said that is all right! Marie said well we are all four Brother Josephs wives!” James explains her approval of “plural marriage” with glee. “I jumped up and clapped my hands and said that’s good.”84 Even a decade after
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the LDS Church officially ended the practice in 1890, Mormon polygamy still greatly defined Mormon identity, both within the Mormon community, and outside it.85 In the early 1900s, when James described herself as a witness to the beginnings of polygamy, she intended to further solidify her firsthand knowledge of some of the most definitive events of early Mormonism. Yet a century later, when Harwell reenacts James’s autobiography she skips over this entire episode. A recitation of a memory of the early days of polygamy doesn’t fit into a modern Mormon community that no longer differentiates itself by a marriage practice for which the Mormons were persecuted by the U.S. government for a half century. Instead, today’s Mormon community differen- tiates itself from the rest of America by socially conservative mores centered on the heterosexual, nuclear family and specific dietary restrictions.86
Perhaps more important than this redaction of James’s memory of polyg- amy is that Harwell changes the autobiography’s intended audience, as well as its fundamental message. James dictated her autobiography to (and reenacted it for) white Saints. To be accepted within the Mormon community, James believed that she had to perform her Mormonness over, and often against, her blackness. A century later, Harwell reenacts James’s autobiography for the black Mormon community as a black woman, reconstituting James’s black identity that James herself tried at least to deemphasize, if not rhetorically dismantle.87 While James perhaps did not intend it to serve as such, in Harwell’s reenactment before the Genesis Group, James’s autobiography becomes the (matrilineal, intertextual) link that connects modern black Mormons (as both black and Mormon) to Mormonism’s first prophet and Mormonism’s first Utah pioneers. In a culture in which lineages to biblical ancestors have histori- cally been understood as literal (whites long considered descendants of the favored sons of Joseph; blacks long considered the progeny of the biblical anti- heroes, Cain and Ham), and descendants of Utah pioneering ancestors are given favored status in Utah, Harwell’s performance of a century-old script, revised (and sometimes redacted) in light of a twenty-first-century black Mormon woman’s experience, establishes a lineage that ties black Mormon women like Harwell back not to Cain or Ham but to Jane Manning James.88
James’s letters and autobiography testify to her dedication to the Church as well as to her determination to see the Church grant her the endowments she believed she needed to guarantee her soul’s safe passage into the celestial kingdom. Jerri Harwell has also at times struggled with a racialized Mormon culture, and one in which male priesthood holders have the authority
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to establish official bounds of Mormon membership. As such, Harwell’s experiences can perhaps shed some light onto how James maintained her dedication to the Church, a religious community that did not always recip- rocate the affection she demonstrated for it. I argue that for Harwell, as for James, it was often not through their (dialectical) relationships with fellow Saints, especially with male priesthood holders, but through their (dialogi- cal) prayer lives with “Heavenly Father” that these two women articulated their own Mormon subjectivities.
The continuity between Harwell’s and James’s experiences, as well as the centrality of prayer for both women’s religious lives, is evident in Harwell’s own spiritual autobiography, Leaning on Prayer. This short autobiography, an addition to the growing genre of black Mormon conversion narratives, details Harwell’s conversion to Mormonism as well as her sometimes faith- challenging experi- ence as a modern black Mormon woman and mother living in Utah in the post-1978 era.89 As the title indicates, it is foremost a meditation on prayer as a dialogical relationship with God in which Harwell performs her own subjec- tivity away from the structural constraints of the male priesthood.
For example, Harwell writes about how she used prayer to deal with her own frustrating experiences navigating the racialized theo-politics of the LDS Church. In 1977, she was a nineteen-year-old college student and a new convert to Mormonism living in suburban Detroit. During her conversion process, the church leaders who first introduced Harwell to Mormonism also informed her that black Mormons were not permitted to occupy the same “callings” (leadership and service positions within the Church) as their white brethren. Harwell was initially unconcerned with the ban on black men hold- ing the priesthood, saying, “Being a woman, I couldn’t hold the priesthood anyway, so I didn’t think too much about it.” Yet Harwell became “irate” with “Brother Anderson” after he dismissed her expressed interest in serving as a missionary, informing her that because she was black she could only serve as a local missionary and not as a full-time missionary. Harwell recalls Brother Anderson asking, “Whom would [you] teach?”—insinuating that potential white converts would not take missionary lessons from a black Mormon. Harwell writes, “I associated this exclusion with prejudice, and I no longer wanted to be part of the Church.”90
Harwell writes that for several days she did not pray “because I could not bring myself to pray to a God who established a church that excluded blacks from the priesthood and from serving missions.” Quoting from
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her journal from that week in 1977, Harwell writes that she was angry at God, not only for excluding blacks from his restored church, but also for making her black: “I seem to hurt all over. Why isn’t it time for blacks to hear about the gospel?. . . Why was I born with Negroid blood? Why me? God, why me?”91 In an 1899 article in the Deseret News, James is reported to have said that she too understood that her blackness was incompatible with her Mormonness. After repeating her story, by then well-rehearsed, about when Mother Smith allowed her to “handle” the “Urim and Thummim,” James told her friend Dr. Elvira Stevens Barney, “I am white with the excep- tion of the color of my skin.”92 At least in terms of its racial theology, in 1977 Harwell belonged to the same Mormon Church as Jane Manning James, a church that believed that black and Mormon identities were fundamentally at odds, an idea that these two women seemed to have internalized.
However, when Harwell decided to make her heartache about this incongruity between her black and Mormon selves “a matter of earnest and sincere prayer,” she writes that her faith was rewarded:
sobbing and pouring my heart out to God . . . I ended my prayer asking Heavenly Father why blacks could not receive the priest- hood, I felt a burning and heard the Lord say, “I have never given a reason.” What? I thought. I had researched and read so much on the priesthood restriction that surely the truth, the reason was in there somewhere. Again the Lord repeated his answer and said, “I have never given a reason.” I took him at His word. All that I had been reading over the past several months were the opinions of men.93
Harwell here articulates what Katherine Bassard describes as an “ utterance [that has] ‘the quality of turning to someone,’” in this case, a prayerful “dialogic turn” to herself and to God.94 Similar to Jarena Lee’s call, “Is he not a whole Savior, instead of a half one?” and Jane Manning James’s call, “Is there no blessing for me?” Harwell calls out past the male religious authorities, addressing herself directly to God, and hopes for a response that confirms what she believes to be true. Through this private interroga- tion with God, beyond the control of the priesthood holders, Harwell gains the knowledge that the limits that the priesthood sets on her place in the Mormon community are not definitive.
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Harwell did not use this knowledge gained through a dialogic interro- gation with “Heavenly Father” to challenge the “opinions of men.” Instead, the following Sunday, Harwell apologized to Brother Anderson for how she reacted when he informed her that she could not serve as a full-time mission- ary: “I knew better than to curse in the Lord’s house, but I had come pretty darn close. Brother Anderson accepted my apology and told me he loved me and admired my faith.”95 Harwell’s apology to this priesthood holder, submit- ting herself to his authority to set the social limits of her membership within her own Mormon community, is reminiscent of James’s own acknowledgment of the authority of the Church presidents to prevent her from gaining access to the temple. Yet in both cases, James’s and Harwell’s publicly professed submission to male religious authorities also requires from these authorities a response, one that acknowledges these women are members, and members in good standing, within their Mormon communities. While these responses do not mean that these women have the same power as the male priest- hood holders—the structures of Mormon male authority remain intact, even reinforced—this dialectic of submission and empowerment does mean James and Harwell are agents, however circumscribed, in the formation of their own religious identities within their own religious cultures.96
Harwell was eventually able to serve a mission, but only after the LDS Church lifted the ban on black men holding the priesthood, which occurred on June 8, 1978, after the Mormon leadership received revelation instructing them to do so. When she heard the announcement about this revelation during a television news break that day, instead of confirming the news with a long- distance call to a fellow Mormon, she knelt in prayer. Before she could even finish asking the Lord if the news was true, Harwell recalls, “my whole bosom began to burn. My whole body seemed to burn from within. It was true! ‘Does this mean I can go on a mission?’ I inquired. ‘Yes,’ came the reply.”97 Harwell believes that this experience allowed her to learn early in her “spiritual growth not to lean on or depend on my own understanding. As I searched the scrip- tures diligently, prayed always, and believed that I would receive an answer to my prayers, I often did.”98 It is also fair to say that Harwell learned early in her spiritual growth “not to lean on” the opinions of LDS Church authorities, but instead through her interior prayer life, to define her own subjectivity within the community and what she understands as her place within it.
In my conversations with Harwell about her experiences as a black Mormon woman in the LDS Church and about her experiences reenacting
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James’s autobiography, Harwell has told me that she believes that James must have also “turned to prayer” when she needed reassurance that she was a worthy member of the LDS Church. Referring to James’s three-decade-long struggle to get Church authorities to grant her temple endowments, Harwell explained to me, “Certainly something must have kept her going. We know James was a prayerful woman.” Harwell pointed to the passage from James’s narrative that she most enjoys reenacting to support this claim. After being denied passage across Lake Erie with their fellow white Mormon converts, James describes the arduous trek across the frozen midwestern countryside that she and her family endured:
We walked until our shoes were worn out, and our feet became sore and cracked open and bled until you could see the whole print of our feet with blood on the ground. We stopped and united in prayer to the Lord; we asked God the Eternal Father to heal our feet. Our prayers were answered and our feet were healed forthwith.99
To heal the pain caused by her fellow Mormons’ refusal to recognize her as a full member of their community—pain manifested in real physical suffering— James also turned to her prayerful relationship with God. Harwell explained that she often thinks of this moment in James’s autobiography when she doesn’t feel like attending “yet another church function.” “But then, if Jane could walk with bloody feet across the country, God tells me that I better get into my SUV with my leather seats and drive to church.”
James and Harwell both write of their dedication and service to the LDS Church. In her autobiography, James writes: “I pay my tithes and offer- ings, keep the Word of Wisdom. I go to bed early and arise early. I try in my feeble way to set a good example to all.”100 Though she was never invited to occupy a leadership position, or even to lead Sunday school classes, James also participated extensively in Salt Lake City’s Eighth Ward and church-wide Relief Society. Over three decades, James’s name shows up regularly in the Eight Ward Relief Society minutes, often giving her testimony and recalling her relationship with Joseph Smith Jr.101 The Relief Society’s newspaper, The Woman’s Exponent, reported that at a spring meeting in 1897, “Sister James felt to bear her testimony and rejoice that she had beheld the Prophet.” Three years after the ceremony in which she was sealed to Joseph Smith as his servant, James still held out hope that she herself “could go into the Temple; but she
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felt to wait in the patience on her Heavenly Father.”102 While the all-male hierarchy rarely responded to James’s written requests, James had frequent audiences with the leadership of the Relief Society, including President Zina D. H. Young, who wrote to Joseph F. Smith on James’s behalf, and her second counselor, Bathsheba W. B. Smith, who acted as James’s proxy in the 1894 temple ceremony.103
Harwell has served as a counselor to the president of her local relief society. Yet, in Leaning on Prayer, she writes that her initial association with the Relief Society, an organization she considers too conservative, came about only through divine intervention. When Harwell’s bishop called her to the position, she initially refused. She explains that God intervened to tell her she must accept the calling, “to affect change” from the inside. “There will be people who will walk into that room in the next two years that you need to be there for,” God explained to Harwell. She also took counsel from two black male priesthood holders, cofounder of the Genesis Group Darius Gray and her husband, Don Harwell, who both told her that she needed to accept the calling.104 Soon after she accepted the position, Harwell found herself in church, when “I heard the Lord’s voice: ‘And here comes one [of those people you need to be there for] now.” A woman approached Harwell and explained, “maybe her daughter would have come had the daughter (who was Black) known, I, being a Black member of the Church, would be there.”
After this encounter, which Harwell frames as occurring at the inter- section of a private divine dialogic and a public dialectical interaction, Harwell writes, “Humbly, I make sure I’m at every meeting I’m supposed to be to now, especially when I don’t feel like it.”105 Harwell bemoans the fact that her presence—“a Black member of the Church”—is so essential. Yet the reality is, during the seventy years between James’s death in 1908 and the 1978 revelation lifting the ban on full black membership, the highest- ranking Church leaders wrote widely read theological treaties justifying the membership restriction. In these speeches, books apostles and presidents of the LDS Church asserted that people of African descent were spiritually unworthy of full membership in the LDS Church.106 More than thirty- five years after the priesthood ban was lifted, the LDS Church authorities’ unwillingness to repudiate these statements and writings, most notably by Brigham Young, Joseph Fielding Smith (the late Church president and son of Joseph F. Smith), and Apostle Bruce McConkie, means that ideas of blacks’ inherent spiritual unworthiness still circulate unchallenged within
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many Mormon communities.107 As the late LDS Church president Spencer W. Kimball said in 1998, twenty years after the ban was removed, the reve- lation “continues to speak for itself. I don’t see anything further we need to do.”108 Absent any other official explanations from the LDS Church’s prophets, these treatises fill the natural desire for Mormons to understand why the restriction on full black membership ever existed.109
While Harwell has told me unequivocally that she does not “allow McConkie or Smith’s comments to affect my life or membership . . . do their comments still influence members? Yes, absolutely. Members who do not study the scriptures, but instead . . . believe and accept the McConkie and Smith Doctrine. Their thinking is biased with or by false teachings. That’s really hard to overcome.” Harwell’s devotion to church service is both the result of a divine calling and a practical need to guarantee a visible black presence within her community, in part to challenge these “false teachings.” In this way, Harwell’s understanding of her own service perhaps sheds some light on James’s laundry list of faithful dedication to the Mormon community, which she included in her autobiography. Perhaps James’s own service was also a means to an end, a way in which she attempted to, through her own persistent presence and participation in Church life, justify her worthiness to the Mormon hierarchy, the gatekeepers of the temple where James hoped to participate in rituals that would bring exaltation to herself and connect her with her family for eternity.
Perhaps James believed that gaining access to the temple was even more important for her children than for herself. In her autobiography, while James highlights the fact that she was able to convince her family to leave their homes in Connecticut and join the Mormons in Nauvoo, she does not mention that the only other family member who eventually settled in Utah and remained Mormon was her brother Isaac Manning, the source of the family gossip about her son Sylvester’s paternity. By the time of James’s death in 1908, Sylvester had been excommunicated in 1885 for “unchristian like conduct,” her other children had left Utah, and none of her grandchildren were active members of the LDS Church.110 Despite the fact that none of her kin had remained active Mormons, James held out hope, as was reported in the Woman’s Exponent in December 1893, that “light would yet reach her people.” In fact, in the Woman’s Exponent, James recounts yet another half-century-old conversation that she had with Joseph Smith in Nauvoo, and her hope “that her son might be faithful and go to [her people], as the Prophet Joseph had predicted.”111
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Like James, Jerri Harwell’s conversion to Mormonism led to the conversion of some of her closest relatives. Impressed with the changes they saw in her life after her mission in Texas, Harwell’s brother and sister grew interested in and eventually converted to Mormonism. Yet, just as it was for James, the Church, for Jerri and her family, has been as much a source of loss and regret as it has been a source of hope. Since the 1978 revelation, the LDS Church has gone to considerable lengths to meet the needs of its black members in the United States and abroad. It has also extended its mission- ary work into predominantly black neighborhoods in American cities and in African countries, in areas where missionaries had almost never prosely- tized before. Despite these efforts, a “racist folklore” still pervades Mormon culture, the legacy of more than a century and a half of racialized theological justifications for the ban against full black membership.112
During the last two decades, Jerri and Don Harwell have raised six children in the LDS Church. Jerri Harwell reports that on several occa- sions the Harwell family, especially the children, have encountered overt racism within the Church. Years ago, when she complained to her ward’s primary school supervisor after her son was called the n-word during Sunday school, Harwell was rebuffed and was told “you need to get over what happened three hundred years ago.” Harwell responded: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My son was called a nigger seven days ago.” Harwell says it has been particularly hard for her children to bring white friends to church because these friends are often called “wiggers” by the other white Mormons. In response, Harwell reports, her children have “gravitated to friends who didn’t associate them with their race,” who most often were not Mormons. Despite Harwell’s prominent role in the Mormon commu- nity and her willingness to defend her children, none of her six children are members of the LDS Church. Reflecting on her children’s inactivity in the Mormon community, Harwell told me: “I hope to think that it is because they don’t believe. But yes, racism played a part.”
Jerri Harwell’s painful acknowledgment of her inability to keep her children active helps us to understand Jane Manning James’s similar experi- ence. James, too, must have been profoundly frustrated and disappointed that none of her offspring chose to embrace the church she so clearly loved. And Harwell’s experience suggests that it is likely that racism, implicit or more overt, may have been a factor in James’s children’s decision to reject the LDS Church. Perhaps James’s persistent quest to get access to the temple,
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baptize her dead relatives, and preserve their eternal souls was borne out of this frustration. In the temple baptismal font, James could be baptized for those loved ones who could not, or would not, be baptized themselves.113
Conclusion
Why is the study of two black Mormon women relevant to the study of Africana religions? By way of conclusion, let me offer three responses. First, let us briefly return to Jerri Harwell and her reenactment of Jane Manning James’s autobiography. Harwell calls the LDS Church a “denomination,” organized and governed by people, in particular men, and as such, it is imper- fect. “Women weren’t in the room when the [priesthood] ban was created,” she once told me. Despite its imperfections, Harwell chooses to belong to this denomination. For this reason, when she reenacts Jane Manning James’s autobiography, her intent is not to dwell on the past, be it a Mormon polyg- amous or Mormon racist past. She intends to make Jane Manning James’s story a useful one for twenty-first-century black Mormons. In large mea- sure, Harwell’s reenactment moves from the integrated Nauvoo Mansion House in 1843–1844 to the post-1978 multiracial gathering of the Genesis Group in a suburb south of Salt Lake City, skipping the painful history of racial exclusion in between, a past that Harwell herself knows firsthand is far from history.
Harwell’s attempt to create a useful black Mormon past highlights the first reason she and Jane Manning James are relevant to Africana religions: black Mormons are a key component of Mormonism’s future. Since 1978, hundreds of thousands of people of African descent have converted to Mormonism. In fact, in recent decades the LDS Church has grown fastest in Africa and in the African diaspora.114 Before the 1978 revelation, a few dozen Mormon communities totaling perhaps two thousand Saints had been created in Ghana and Nigeria, independent of any direct missionary activity. According to LDS Church membership rolls reported at the end of 2011, there are 152,476 Mormons in those two countries, and 359,130 across Africa. There are about three times as many Mormons in the Dominican Republic as there are in Mitt Romney’s birth state of Michigan.115 Mormon growth in the African diaspora means that the LDS Church is increasingly becoming a global church, even an “Africana” church, at least in terms of demographics.
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Yet, even though the 1978 priesthood revelation opened the door to full black membership and missionizing efforts in Africa and in the African dias- pora, questions remain about how black Saints will confront their church’s past history of racial exclusion.116 This examination of the legacy of Jane Manning James can help provide a framework for scholars who study how these new converts answer questions about the LDS Church’s past of exclusion and its present commitment to a universal global mission. While a “patrilineal inheri- tance” of church teachings from church prophets, Joseph Fielding Smith, Joseph F. Smith, and even back to Joseph Smith Jr. and his translation of the Book of Abraham remains unredacted, black Mormons are adding to the matrilineal inheritance of Jane Manning James, asserting their own perspec- tives on the position of blacks within the Church. To this end, many black Mormons like Harwell see that efforts to include James and other early black Mormons in the narrative of early Mormon history emphasize that the post- 1978 era is a “restoration” to a universalism that was (more) present in the Church’s earliest years.
As I have argued here, Jane Manning James’s autobiography should have a place in the canon of nineteenth-century black women’s spiritual narratives. Yet before this study, James had not been analyzed in relation to the likes of Jarena Lee and Harriet Jacobs. This is the case for two reasons: first, her auto- biography is short; and second, it is Mormon. The latter reason is particularly relevant to the scholarship of Africana religions because James’s Mormon identity can help scholars to understand, and perhaps to confound, the racial- ized notions that certain religious traditions (e.g., Mormonism) are “white,” while others (e.g., modern holiness movements) are “black.”
This is especially important for scholars studying the growing numbers of people of African descent who join churches that have, in the past, served as institutional vehicles for black essentialization and oppression. Beyond the LDS Church, this work can help scholars understand how, for example black members of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and the segregated communities of South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) contextualize these two institutions’ long histories as staunch defenders of segregation and oppression of black people. Studying black Mormons can provide a framework for understanding the experiences of people of African descent within theses denominations, including the experience of what I call the double- displacement of conversion, leading to (and sometimes requiring) a geographical and social displacement from converts’ former racially constituted community and the
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(often) partially successful re-placement, both socially and existentially, in the converts’ new religious community.117 I argue that this new place that these converts create for themselves in a social dialectical relation with their racial and religious communities, and often in a private dialogical relationship with God and with themselves, is always unsettled. 118
Finally, and more broadly, this study can help scholars understand the rela- tionship between people on the margins of a religious tradition and the centers of this religious tradition’s power. Black members, and their allies within the LDS Church, lack the authority to demand that the Church officially repudi- ate the racialized justifications for the exclusion of people of African descent. In fact, such efforts in the past have seemed to backfire, making members of the hierarchy—which remains almost exclusively white—less willing to enter into public dialogue about the history of the ban.119
Thus, efforts to come to terms with the history of racial exclusion might not have much to do with a religious community’s official history and theology makers. In other words, what happens in a nondescript Mormon meeting house ten miles south of Salt Lake City might not lead to discussions of racial reconcili- ation in Temple Square. But reenacting Jane Manning James before the Genesis Group has a powerful effect on participants in that community, perhaps allowing them to stake their own claim in their church’s mythic past and sacred present.
Notes
I began studying the life of Jane Manning James in Marie Griffith’s “Lived Religion in America” class at Harvard Divinity School. Thanks to Dr. Griffith for her contin- ued encouragement and mentorship. Thanks as well to my dissertation advisers, David Hempton and Laurel Ulrich, for their continued support. Thanks to David Holland for his thorough and thought-provoking reading of this article. A pre-dissertation research grant from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Science funded my summer 2010 research in Salt Lake City, and a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard Divinity School allowed me to continue this research during the 2010–2011 academic year. Thanks also to the LDS Church History Library, in particular Bill Slaughter, Michael Landon, and Brittany Chapman for all their research help. Thanks to the JOAR’s anonymous readers whose probing questions and encouragement deepened my thinking and writing. Thanks to the HDS Bulletin, in which some parts of this article first appeared, for its support. Thanks to Louis Duffy, Jane Manning James’s great-grandson, for his willingness to share the rich history of his family with me. Finally, my great thanks to the Genesis Group community, in particular Don and Jerri Harwell, for their willingness to answer my questions and for making me feel right at home at any Genesis Group gathering.
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1. Susan Saulny, “Black Mormons and the Politics of Identity,” New York Times, May 22, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/us/for-black-mormonsa- political-choice-like-no-other.html?pagewanted=all; Jason Horowitz, “The Genesis of a Church’s Stand on Race,” Washington Post, February 28, 2012, http://a r ticles.washingtonpost.com/2012-02-28/politics/35443157_1_ george-romney-first-mormon-presidential-nominee-michigan-governor.
2. “The Black Mormon Vote,” The Daily Show, October 9, 2012, http://www .thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-october-9-2012/the-black-mormon-vote.
3. Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 113; Megan Sanborn Jones, “(Re)living the Pioneer Past: Mormon Youth Handcart Trek Re-enactments,” Theatre Topics 16 (2006): 113–30.
4. Four of the five black Mormons interviewed for The Daily Show’s black Mormon segment have either reenacted Jane Manning James or acted in the play dramatizing her life, I Am Jane.
5. Harwell’s reenactments are directly affecting the histories being discussed in the LDS Church headquarters in Temple Square, Salt Lake City. In March 2011, I gave a lecture on James’s life in the central auditorium of the LDS Church’s office building. I first became aware of James’s life through Harwell’s reenact- ments at Genesis Group. Max Perry Mueller, “Jane’s Faith: Early Black Pioneer,” Men and Women of Faith Series, LDS Church History Library, March 8, 2012, http://history.lds.org/event/jane-manning-james?lang=eng.
6. Penelope Ingram, The Signifying Body: Toward an Ethics of Sexual and Racial Difference (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), xxv.
7. Like Catholics and Anglicans, Mormons are divided geographically into local communities called wards, which are overseen by lay “bishops” who belong to these communities. The Genesis Group is a “dependent branch” of the LDS Church that meets monthly for social and educational events intended to help black Mormons integrate into their local wards and teach them about their rights and duties in the Church’s worship life. The group is overseen by a member of the Quorum of the Seventy, the international LDS hierarchy based in Salt Lake City. “What Is Genesis,” The Genesis Group, http://www.ldsgenesisgroup.org/whatis.htm.
8. Jane E. Manning James and Elizabeth J. D. Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James,” MS 4425, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City. In his groundbreaking article on Jane E. Manning James, Henry Wolfinger points out that while James might originally have dictated her autobiography in 1893, as the original handwritten statement indicates, it was clearly later revised and updated. For example, James suggests Joseph F. Smith was then the LDS Church president, a position that Smith did not assume until 1901. See Henry J. Wolfinger, “A Test of Faith: Jane Elizabeth James and the Origins of the Utah Black Community,” in Social Accommodations in Utah, ed. Clark Knowlton (University of Utah, American West Center Occasional Papers, 1975), 170n86.
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9. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), xvi.
10. Ibid., 11, 8. See Kathleen Flake’s essay on how—in the same decade James dictated her biography—Joseph F. Smith helped reshape the narrative of the Mormon origin myths away from his uncle and namesake Joseph Smith’s revelations on polygamy and toward Smith’s narratives of his “First Vision.” This shift, Flake argues, allowed “the Latter-day Saints to forget, as a practical matter, the once- definitive marriage practice . . . without destroying their identity, much less their confidence in Joseph Smith as church founder.” Kathleen Flake, “Re-placing Memory: Latter-day Saint Use of Historical Monuments and Narrative in the Early Twentieth Century,” Religion and American Culture 13 (2003): 71.
11. Mae G. Anderson, “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics and Dialectics and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition,” in Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, ed. Cheryl Wall (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 16–37.
12. Here, I add religious identity to Anderson’s conception of “simultaneity of discourse.” Anderson writes, “This concept is meant to signify a mode of reading which examines the ways in which the perspectives of race and gender, and their interrelationships, structure the discourse of black women writers.” Anderson, “Speaking in Tongues,” 17.
13. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” reprinted in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 292, quoted in Anderson, “Speaking in Tongues,” 18.
14. Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), xxiii–xxiv.
15. Bakhtin, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), 2:29, 38, quoted in Anderson, “Speaking in Tongues,” 18.
16. Katherine Clay Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3.
17. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
18. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African American Race Histories (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3.
19. Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations, 18–19, 109. See also Dianne F. Sadoff, “Black Matrilineage: The Case of Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston,” Signs 11 (October 1985): 4–26.
20. James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.” 21. Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations, 21, 87; Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).
22. Italics in the original. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 170.
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23. Catherine A. Brekus, “Mormon Women and the Problem of Historical Agency,” Journal of Mormon History 37 (Spring 2011): 58–87.
24. See discussion of wards in note 7. 25. Scholars have estimated that since 1978, when the LDS Church lifted its ban
on blacks achieving full membership status, the number of Mormons of African descent has increased from perhaps a few thousand worldwide to more than 500,000. Most of this growth has taken place outside the United States, the result of expanding missionary efforts to include blacks in Africa and Brazil. According to the 2009 Pew Forum U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, only 3 percent of Mormons in the U.S. self-identify as black. “A Portrait of Mormons in the U.S.,” Pew Forum, http://www.pewforum.org/Christian/Mormon/A- Portrait-of-Mormons-in-the-US.aspx.
26. Kate B. Carter, The Story of the Negro Pioneer (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1965), 11; James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.”
27. David John Buerger, The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), 142–44.
28. Gordon Irving’s 1974 study remains perhaps the most detailed analysis of the evolution of the Mormon “Law of Adoption.” As early as 1842, Smith began teaching that husbands and wives could be “sealed” to one another, and chil- dren to their parents, binding together a family unit that would endure in the heavenly kingdoms. Exaltation to the highest levels of heaven required that families be connected to the newly restored apostolic succession. Through spiritual adoption to the apostles of the Church, these family units could be “‘grafted’ into the patriarchal order” that extended back to humanity’s first couple, Adam and his wife, Eve. In this sense, Irving writes, “‘The Family of God’ became more than a metaphor.” These spiritual adoptions, often to early Mormon leaders, especially Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, all but ceased by 1900. Irving, “The Law of Adoption: One Phase of the Development of the Mormon Concept of Salvation, 1830–1900,” BYU Studies 14 (Spring 1974): 3. See also Samuel M. Brown, “Early Mormon Adoption Theology and the Mechanics of Salvation,” Journal of Mormon History 37 (Summer 2011): 3–52; Jonathan A. Stapley, “Adoptive Sealing Ritual in Mormonism,” Journal of Mormon History 37 (Summer 2011): 52–118. Even if the theological nuance behind the Law of Adoption is not known to the vast majority of modern Latter-day Saints, the spiritual import of the adoption of children—today a legal rite as well as a religious one—into families that Mormons believe exist eternally resonates for twenty-first-century Latter-day Saints. Specifically for LDS families adopting “transracially,” see Shannon Guymon, Child of Many Colors: Stories of Transracial Adoption (Springville, Utah: Cedar Fort, 2010).
29. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street, xi. 30. Ibid., xxvii. 31. Ibid. 32. “Death of Jane James, Utah’s Black Pioneer of 1847,” Deseret News, April 21,
1908; “‘Aunt Jane’ Laid to Rest,” Deseret News, April 21, 1908.
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33. The true origin of the ban on black men holding the priesthood has been one of the most controversial subjects in Mormon history. Since the 1978 revelation that lifted the ban, most Mormon scholars have come to the consen- sus that Mormon leaders did ordain black men in the 1830s and 1840s and that the ban developed only after Joseph Smith’s martyrdom in 1844. Lester E. Bush, “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” Dialogue 8 (Spring 1973): 11–68; Newell G. Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People within Mormonism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); Lester E. Bush Jr. and Armand L. Mauss, eds., Neither White nor Black: Mormon Scholars Confront the Race Issue in a Universal Church (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1984). For discussion of the issue of race in early and contemporary Mormonism, see Newell G. Bringhurst and Darron T. Smith, eds., Black and Mormon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Jessie L. Embry, Black Saints in a White Church: Contemporary African American Mormons (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994); and Armand L. Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
34. Quoted in Mauss, All Abraham’s Children, 212. See Genesis 9:20–27, and LDS scriptures The Pearl of Great Price: Moses 7:5–8, and Abraham 1:21–27. See Alma Allred’s essay “The Traditions of Their Fathers: Myth versus Reality in LDS Scriptural Writings,” in Black and Mormon, ed. Newell G. Bringhurst and Darron T. Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 34–47.
35. “Minutes: August 26, 1908,” “Minutes: June 4, 1879,” “Excerpts from the Weekly Council Meetings of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, Dealing with the Rights of Negroes in the Church, 1847–1940,” George Albert Smith Papers, Manuscripts Division, Marriott Library, University of Utah.
36. Testifying to its authenticity, William Lloyd Garrison provided a preface to Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was validated twice, once by Amy Post, who is credited with helping Jacob write the text, and a second time by Lydia Marie Child, who edited the volume.
37. James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.” 38. Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American
West, 1528–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 155. 39. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), xii. 40. We can date the Manning family’s arrival to late October or early November
1843 thanks to an advertisement in the Nauvoo Neighbor, from December 6, 1843, searching for information about James’s lost trunks.
41. See among others, “Dr. Elvira Stevens Barney Interviews a Well Known Colored Woman,” Deseret News, October 4, 1899; Zina H. Bull, “Ladies’ Semi-Monthly Meeting,” Woman’s Exponent, May 1, 1897, 138; “‘Aunt’ Jane James (Colored Servant in the Prophet’s House),” Young Woman’s Journal, November 11, 1905, 551–53.
42. Brigham Young famously quipped about his own conversion to Mormonism, “I reasoned on revelation.” Yet in his recent biography of Young, John Turner
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asserts Young’s conversion was the result of his careful study of the Mormons’ new scripture, the behavior of the Mormon people—including tongue speak ing—and his own experience with what his longtime friend and aide Heber Kimball described as their encounter with “the glory of God [which] shone upon us” and “caused such great joy to spring up in our bosoms, that we were hardly able to contain ourselves.” John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012), 26. See also Steven C. Harper, “Infallible Proofs, Both Human and Divine: The Persuasiveness of Mormonism for Early Converts,” Religion and American Culture 10 (Winter 2000): 99–118; and Donna Hill, Joseph Smith, the First Mormon (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), 101–2.
43. James claims that she left for Nauvoo “in the fall of 1840.” Yet, according to Salt Lake City’s Eighth Ward record of members (which James joined in 1870), James was baptized by Charles Wesley Wandell on October 13, 1843. Mormon missionaries only arrived in southeastern Connecticut in 1841, and a branch of the Church was established just south of Wilton in Norwalk in the spring of 1842, and missionary activity took place during that spring. Wandell reported from Connecticut that “the brethren here are very anxious to emigrate to Illinois; so you may expect to see all of us in Zion this Fall that can possible get there.” Times and Seasons, August 15, 1843. See also Times and Seasons, July 1, 1842, and Albert Merrill, “Autobiography and Family record,” MS 14632, LDS Church History Library; Wolfinger, “A Test of Faith,” 126–29.
44. James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.” Based on revelations he began receiving as early as 1830, Smith believed that God intended the Latter-day Saints to gather “for the same purpose that Jesus wanted to gather the Jews—to receive the ordinances, the blessings, and the glories that God has in store for His Saints.” And all this sacred work would be performed in a Mormon temple. Joseph Smith Jr. et al., History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. B. H. Roberts (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1902–), 4:213–14, quoted in Martha Sonntag Bradley, “Creating the Sacred Space of Zion,” Journal of Mormon History 31 (Spring 2005): 1–30.
45. Within a few weeks of the Connecticut Saints’ arrival in Nauvoo, on December 9, 1843, the missionary leading the Connecticut Saints, Charles Wesley Wandell, was brought before the Church’s “High Council” on two charges: “1st Unchristian conduct towards certain colored brethren by leaving them at Cleaveland [sic] in Ohio—after having engaged to conduct them to Nauvoo. Charged 2nd A viola- tion of his word in not using his endeavors to deliver their effects at Nauvoo according to promise.” These charges were not sustained, and Wandell “was therefore honorably acquitted.” John S. Dinger, ed., The Nauvoo City and High Council Minutes (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011), 480–81.
46. Here James is most likely referencing her fallout with Wandell and the other migrating Saints from the east coast. In her autobiography, James makes no mention of Wandell’s trial, but does state, “During our trip [to Nauvoo] I lost all my clothes, they were all gone, my trunks were sent by Canal to the car of Charles Wesley Wandel [sic].” James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.”
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47. James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.” 48. This small grammatical error is worthy of some interpretation. It could simply
be Roundy’s accurate transcription of James’s storytelling, rendering in a very modest manner James’s vernacular, a combination of nineteenth-century African American and Utah Mormon dialect. It could also be intentionally placed in the narrative to suggest authenticity; Harwell explained to me that the reason why James needed to call on Roundy to “transcribe” her life story was that James was illiterate. James however was a businesswoman who was forced to run her own household in the long absence of her husband. She was also a faithful Mormon and thus expected to study scripture on a regular basis. In her autobiography, James suggests another possible explanation for her need for a scribe; in her ninth decade of life, her failing eyesight was a “great trial” for her to bear. Yet, the illiteracy hypothesis cannot simply be dismissed as latent Mormon racist folklore of African American intellectual inferiority. Mormons have long justified the divine authenticity of the Book of Mormon by asserting that Joseph Smith Jr. was himself of limited literacy. He was thus incapable of fabricating the book’s complex narrative or developing the book’s rich characters. Suggesting that James too was illiterate might be a way of validating the miraculous life story that places James at the center of some of Mormonism’s most important events. And perhaps, it might also be another way that James herself, and those modern black Mormon women who have turned to her life story to find personal mean- ing, connect James with Mormonism’s first prophet. Whatever the case may be, the complex narrative structure and the rich vocabulary in James’s biography indicate some serious forethought and editing, suggesting to me that James’s life story was not simply the fruit of her oral narration and Roundy’s transcrip- tion. On Joseph Smith’s supposed limited literacy, see Leonard J Arrington, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-Day Saints, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 5.
49. James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.” James’s memory of this offer of spiritual adoption and the accepted historical timeline for the develop- ment of this practice do not quite match up. While most scholars of early Mormonism agree that spiritual adoptions were performed frequently after Joseph Smith’s death in 1845, whether the practice was initiated before his death, and for whom it was performed, is less certain. Gordon Irving has suggested that if Smith himself engaged in spiritual adoptions, the adop- tees would most likely be “trusted leaders,” and thus probably not household servants. Irving,“The Law of Adoption,” 3.
50. James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.” 51. “Minutes: August 26, 1908,” “Excerpts from the Weekly Council Meetings of the
Quorum of Twelve Apostles, Dealing with the Rights of Negroes in the Church, 1849–1940.” The racial identity of Abel (sometimes spelled Able) seems to have been somewhat fluid. The religious autobiography (1891) of one of his converts, Eunice Kinney, describes him as “a black Elder . . . ordained by Joseph, the
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martyred prophet.” “Letter from Sister Kinney, September 1891,” in “Wingfield Watson Correspondence, 1891; 1908,” MS 16323, LDS Church History Library. Yet in the 1867 Salt Lake City directory, while the members of the James family are listed as “colored,” no such label accompanies the entry for “Elijah Able.” Salt Lake City Directory (Salt Lake City: G. Owens, 1867), 33, 67. Newell Bringhurst has suggested that “the Abels stood apart from the other well-known black Mormons,” and his descendents, some of whom held the priesthood, may have “passed over the colorline.” Newell G Bringhurst, “Elijah Abel and the Changing Status of Blacks within Mormonism,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 12 (Summer 1979): 30.
52. Brigham Young organized and led the first few hundred Mormons who, between the spring of 1846 and the fall of 1847, established a viable route from Winter Quarters in Nebraska to the Salt Lake Valley and who began the farming and homebuilding needed to supply and house the thousands of Mormons who would follow them. James was not in the famed “Vanguard Company” (which included three slaves, Green Flake, Hark Lay, and Oscar Crosby) who arrived on July 24, 1847, now celebrated as Utah’s “Pioneer Day.” With the Spencer/Eldredge Company, James entered the valley on September 22, 1847. “Daniel Spencer/Ira Eldredge Company,” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, http://history.lds.org/overlandtravels/companyPioneers? lang=eng&companyId=285. See the chapter “The Pioneer Trek to the Great Basin,” in Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 130–53.
53. Marvin S. Hill and James B. Allen, Mormonism and American Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 140. Jane Manning James can be seen at the center of a gathering of more than 250 surviving pioneers of 1847 in the 1897 Pioneer Jubilee celebration photograph. “Utah’s 1897 Pioneer Jubilee,” Daughters of the Utah Pioners, http://www.dupinternational.org/jubilee/pioneers.htm. Though Green Flake does not appear in the photograph, visitors to the LDS Church History Library can see his jubilee medal on display.
54. Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 71. 55. Andrew Jenson, Church Chronology; Or, A Record of Important Events Connected with
the History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the Territory of Utah (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1914). James and other early black Mormons disappear from official church histories after 1914. In B. H. Roberts’s multivolume A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Century I (1930), African Americans (“negros”) are mentioned just twice. The first reference is to a “negro” explaining to a “minister” the “Eleben[th]” commandment and the second is to the mecha- nism in Missouri by which slaves could be freed. B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Century I (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1930), 8, 327.The revised edition of A Comprehensive History (1965) mentions the “black race (Negro)” only when explaining the
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biblical roots of the curse against “the descendents of Egyptus.” B. H. Roberts, Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Salt Lake City: Brigham Young University Press, 1965), 128. For what he calls the “rewriting of Mormon past” to exclude early black Mormons, see Newell G. Bringhurst, “Elijah Abel and the Changing Status of Blacks within Mormonism,” 31.
56. There are no records to indicate that Isaac James, whom Jane Manning met and married in Nauvoo, received the priesthood.
57. James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.” 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid.
60. The Book of Abraham is an 1835 translation Joseph Smith Jr. made of Egyptian papyri that he purchased from a traveling mummy exhibition. Canonized by the LDS Church in 1880, the book focuses on Abraham’s life and struggles against idolatry and on the origins of the Abrahamic covenant and how it might be fulfilled by Abraham’s descendants. For the verse most cited to justify the ban on the priesthood see Abraham: 1:26. Jane E. James to John Taylor, Salt Lake City, December 27, 1884. Some original letters are reprinted in Wolfinger, “A Test of Faith,” 148–51.
61. Abraham 2:11. See also Genesis 18:18. Scholars remain unsure if James herself wrote either this letter or the half-dozen other such petitions that are located in the LDS Church History Library; see Bringhurst and Smith, Black and Mormon, 53n16.
62. Jane E. James to John Taylor, Salt Lake City, December 27, 1884. Ronald G. Coleman and Darius A. Gray, “Two Perspectives: The Religious Hopes of ‘Worthy’ African American Latter-day Saints before the 1978 Revelation,” in Black and Mormon, ed. Newell G. Bringhurst and Darron T. Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 53.
63. “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” quoted in Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 144–45.
64. Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 137–43, 229.
65. In the nineteenth century, white Mormon women also posed such questions, which required male priesthood holders to affirm their subjectivity, and even their citizenship. Carol Cornwal Madsen, “Emmeline B. Wells: “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister,’” BYU Studies 22 (Spring 1982): 161–78.
66. Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations, 107; James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.” 67. Brekus, “Mormon Women and the Problem of Historical Agency,” 72. 68. Jane E. James letter to Apostles Joseph F. Smith, February 7, 1890, reprinted in
Wolfinger, “A Test of Faith,” 149. 69. Ibid., 149, 150. 70. Ibid. 71. Salt Lake City Temple Adoption Records, A, p. 26. John Nicolson, Temple
Recorder, May 18, 1894; Newell G. Bringhurst, “The ‘Missouri Thesis’ Revisited:
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Early Mormonism, Slavery, and the Status of Black People,” in Black and Mormon, ed. Newell G. Bringhurst and Darron T. Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 24.
72. “Minutes: August 26, 1908,” “Excerpts from the Weekly Council Meetings of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, Dealing with the Rights of Negroes in the Church, 1847–1940.” In a meeting of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the LDS Church’s First Presidency in early 1902, members of the highest level of the Mormon hierarchy discussed Jane Manning James’s continued petition to receive her temple endowments. According to the meeting’s minutes, the fact that “Aunt Jane was not satisfied” with the Church’s decision to seal her to the original prophet as his eternal servant drew a lot of attention from Joseph F. Smith. The Church president’s response to James’s declared unhappiness was to assert that, like “stock- men engaged in the improvement of breeds . . . in all cases where the blood of Cain showed itself, however slight, the line [denying admittance to the temple] should be drawn there.” During the 1890s and 1900s, James’s case was frequently discussed in Quorum of the Twelve Apostle meetings. See “Excerpts from the Weekly Council Meetings of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, Dealing with the Rights of Negroes in the Church, 1849–1940.” See also Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks, 148; Max Perry Mueller, “Joseph F. Smith and ‘Black Jane’: Challenges to the Formalization of Mormon Racial Identity (1908)” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of American Studies Association, Baltimore, Maryland, October 20–23, 2011).
73. The other African American listed in this volume, published by the Utah Pioneers Book Company, a group of Mormon and pro-Mormon Utahans, was Franklin Perkins, a former slave and farmer who was the father of Sylvester James’s wife, Mary. Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah Pioneers Publishing Company, 1913), 86, 1096. For a period in the 1870s, Perkins was also Sylvester James’s stepfather; records show that Jane Manning James was briefly married to Perkins after she divorced Isaac James in 1870. Ronald G. Coleman, “‘Is There No Blessing for Me?’: Jane Elizabeth Manning James, A Mormon African American Woman,” in African American Women Confront the West:1600–2000, ed. Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 150.
74. See for example the May 18, 1874, article in the Deseret News. “Yesterday after- noon, the stable of Mr. Sylvester James, a half-breed, in the lower part of the First Ward, took fire and was soon wrapped in flames.”
75. James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.” 76. In their trilogy of historical novels about early black Mormons, Margaret Blair
Young and Darius Gray imagine a rape scene in the pastor’s church office during which Sylvester was conceived. Margaret Blair Young and Darius Aidan Gray, One More River to Cross (Salt Lake City: Deseret Books, 2000), 52.
77. Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 57–63, 171.
78. John Stauffer has argued that Hannah Crafts defined the difference between freedom and slavery as the ability to choose one’s sexual partner, specifically
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one’s spouse, to whom one is bound through the “holy ordinance” of marriage. Stauffer, “The Problem of Freedom in The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” in In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on the Bondwoman’s Narrative, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Hollis Robbins (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004), 64–65.
79. Katherine Clay Bassard, “Gender and Genre: Black Women’s Autobiography and the Ideology of Literacy,” African American Review 26 (Spring 1992): 122.
80. “‘Aunt Jane’ Laid to Rest: President Joseph F. Smith Speaks at Funeral for Aged Colored Woman,” Deseret News, April 21, 1908.
81. During most Mormon meetings, time is set aside for the “sharing of testimony,” when Mormons are encouraged to give spontaneous and (hopefully) brief stories of how they came to be Latter-day Saints and to proclaim their faith in the church.
82. Jessie L Embry, Black Saints in a White Church: Contemporary African American Mormons (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994).
83. Vanessa Agnew, “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and Its Work in the Present,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 11 (2007): 299.
84. James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.” Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery, Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 132.
85. Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
86. Matthew Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (New York: Random House, 2012), 152–70.
87. I am not arguing that James denied her black identity—because of the racial theology of her own Mormon community, she couldn’t. I am arguing that while James thinks of herself as Mormon first, and this Mormon identity requires she cast her own self in the valence of whiteness, Harwell connects to James because James’s black and Mormon identities allow Harwell to reconstitute James as wholly black and Mormon in the twenty-first century, an act not possible in James’s lifetime. Here I follow Bassard’s reading of Karla Hollaway that “‘race has a cultural presence’” in black women’s literature, one in which race is not “a stable and transhistorical category of identity,” but instead is “dynamic, complex, and constitutive of black women’s intertextuality.” Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations, 20.
88. See “The Curse of African Lineage in Mormon History,” in Armand L Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 212–30.
89. Jerri A. Harwell, Leaning on Prayer: A Story of Faith, Perseverance, and Conversion (Salt Lake City: Spring Creek Book Company, 2004). See also Wynetta Clark Martin, I Am a Negro (privately published, 1970), and Mary Sturlaugson, A Soul So Rebellious (Salt Lake City: Deseret Books, 1980). Keith Hamilton’s The Last Laborer: Thoughts and Reflections of a Black Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Books, 2011) is a compelling and controversial addition to this genre.
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90. Harwell, Leaning on Prayer, 12, 13. 91. Ibid., 13. 92. Dr. Elvira Stevens Barney, “Jane Manning James,” Deseret News, October 10, 1899. 93. Harwell, Leaning on Prayer, 14. 94. Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations, 26. 95. Harwell, Leaning on Prayer, 15. 96. R. Marie Griffith, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 199. Mormon agency is not understood to be emancipatory from or resistant to authority; it is not consti- tuted of individual or collective acts intended to dismantle structures, as scholars of religion, especially scholars of religious women, have long understood the term. As Terry C. Warner has written, “in the LDS concept of agency, obedience and agency are not antithetical . . . obedience—willing and energetic submission to the will of God even at personal sacrifice—is a central gospel tenet. Far from contradicting freedom, obedience is its highest expression.” “Agency,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 26–27. Brekus, “Mormon Women and the Problem of Historical Agency,” 71–72.
97. “Burning in the bosom” is a classic Mormon expression for evidence that, in prayer, God has revealed truth to the supplicant; Harwell, Leaning on Prayer, 17.
98. Ibid., 18. 99. James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.”
100. “Word of Wisdom” is the law of Mormon dietary restrictions. James and Roundy, “Biography of Jane E. James.”
101. Jane Manning James joined Salt Lake City’s Eighth Ward Relief Society when she moved from the First ward in 1870. She was received into the Relief Society on November 1, 1870. “Minutes, November 1, 1870,” Eight Ward Relief Society and Records, 1867–1969, LR 2525 14, LDS Church History Archives.
102. Zina H. Bull, “Ladies’ Semi-Monthly Meeting,” Woman’s Exponent, May 1, 1897, 138. 103. Through the Relief Society and its publication, the Exponent, James belonged to the
network of Mormon women—often elite Mormon women—who both worked to serve Utah’s needy and advocated for women’s greater participation in politics and in the Church. “As the voice of Utah’s women,” Judith Rasmussen Dushku has written, “the Exponent exemplified the three defining qualities of feminism in any age: a desire to encourage women to speak for and to women,” a sense of injustice and inequality of opportunity, a conviction of the absolute equality of the sexes.” Dushku, “Feminists,” in Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, ed. Claudia L. Bushman (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997), 181.
104. Harwell, Leaning on Prayer, 51–52. 105. Ibid., 54. 106. See for example, Joseph Fielding Smith, The Way to Perfection, Short Discourses on
Gospel Themes (Salt Lake City: Genealogical Society of Utah, 1931). Smith’s The Way to Perfection includes an entire chapter, “The Seed of Cain After the Flood,” dedicated to explaining the “curse placed on Cain,” which makes Cain’s supposed
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progeny, people of African descent, ineligible for the priesthood and other spiritual blessings and authorities. The Way to Perfection went through at least a dozens editions and was published as a “church classic” into the twenty-first century; the LDS Church-owned Deseret News publishing house made it available as a Kindle e-book until mid-2012. See also Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1958). For the impact of these writings, see Mauss, All Abraham’s Children, 29–31.
107. In March 2012, after some racially charged statements by a Brigham Young University were printed in a Washington Post story about black Mormons, the LDS Church released an “Official Statement,” in which the Church made indirect reference to these past writings, describing them as “personal state- ments [that] do not represent Church doctrine.” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Race and the Church: All Are Alike Unto God,” http://www . mormonnewsroom.org/article/race-church. Jason Horowitz, “The Genesis of a Church’s Stand on Race,” Washington Post, February 28, 2012.
108. Cala Byram, “LDS Church Says Story Is Wrong,” Deseret News, May 19, 1998, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/630911/LDS- Church-says-story-is- wrong.html?pg=all.
109. In late February 2013, the LDS Church published a new English edition of its scriptures, which included the addition of a header placed above “Official Declaration 2,” the Church’s 1978 announcement lifting its ban on black males holding the priesthood. The new header states in part, “During Joseph Smith’s lifetime, a few black male members of the Church were ordained to the priest- hood.” Many Latter-day Saints understand this addition to be an important step toward official recognition from the hierarchy (and hopefully acceptance at the local level) of the existence of a black Mormon past during the Church’s formative years. Peggy Fletcher Stack, “New Mormon Scriptures Tweak Race, Polygamy References,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 1, 2013, http://www.sltrib.com/ sltrib/news/55930173-78/church-lds-changes-mormon.html.csp.
110. Wolfinger, “A Test of Faith,” 145–46n73, 168. 111. Lydia D. Alder, “Ladies’ Semi-Monthly Meeting,” Woman’s Exponent, December
1, 1893. 112. Darron Smith’s essay on his experiences as a black Mormon convert teaching
African American studies at Brigham Young University is perhaps the most eye- opening testimony to the persistent nature of this racist folklore; Darron Smith, “These House Negros Still Think We’re Cursed,” Cultural Studies 19 (July 2005): 439–54. See also Embry, “Black Saints in a White Church,” 119–57.
113. For the historical genesis of the Mormon ritual of baptizing dead relatives who were never baptized into the Mormon faith, see Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Vintage, 2007), 422.
114. Peggy Fletcher Stack, “LDS Church Growth Fastest in Africa, Caribbean,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 26, 2010, http://www.sltrib.com/faith/ci_14891709.
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115. In December 2011, the LDS Church reported having 122,024 members in the Dominican Republic and 42,696 in Michigan. According to the U.S. Census (2011) and the World Bank (2011) respectively, Michigan has 9,867,187 resi- dents whereas the Dominican Republic has 10,056,181. “Facts and Statistics,” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, updated December 31, 2011, http:// www.mormonnewsroom.org/facts-and-statistics.
116. Philip Jenkins, “Letting Go: Understanding Mormon Growth in Africa,” Journal of Mormon History 35 (Spring 2009): 18–20.
117. Conversion to Mormonism often elicits accusations of “abandoning the race” and disconnecting black converts from African American culture. To join with the Mormons, James left behind the small community of free blacks in early nineteenth-century Connecticut, while Harwell left a middle-class black community in late 1970s Detroit to move to Utah. Even in Utah, a black minister once told Harwell that she is “living a lie being a Black member of the LDS Church.” Yet among the Mormons, these black women found that they also struggled to assert their rights to full membership in the Mormon community. James and Harwell dealt with the apparent disconnect from the sacred memory of both black and Mormon histories by narrating their own histories—narrating, both in oral and written form, their inclusion into the Mormon pioneer myth. Harwell, Leaning on Prayer, 50. See also, Hamilton, Last Laborer, 56–72.
118. This double-displacement, the place created between their “black” and “religious” communities, is inspired by Du Bois’s “double-consciousness,” the bifurcated self of the African American’s existence “in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr. with new introduction Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1994), 2. This sense of double-displacement holds true even for Christian denominations that have a less overt legacy of racism than the LDS Church or the SBC. Maffly-Kipp points out that the 2008 controversy over the United Church of Christ Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s jeremiad against what he saw as America’s imperialistic foreign policy abroad and continued racism at home led some to diagnose Wright’s “version of ‘Black and Christian’ as [an] intellectual pathology.” Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 2010), 2.
119. Richard Ostling and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2007), 102–5.