Yolanda Pierce. Hell without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative

African American Review, Winter, 2007 by Amina Gautier

Yolanda Pierce. Hell without Fires: Slavery,

Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual

Narrative. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2005.

151 pp. $59.95.

This book examines the conversion of experiences five antebellum African American Christians: George White, John Jea, Solomon Bayley, Zilpha Elaw, and David Smith. Each of the five narrators provides a different way of understanding the African American Christian conversion experience, from George White's collaboration in the formation of the African Methodist Episcopal church, to Jea's miracle of literacy, to Bayley's representation of Liberia as an ideal republic for black autonomy and his participation in the colonization movement, to Elaw's sanctification, and to David Smith's self-interest and classism. The five narratives represent widely varied conversion experiences and social histories. For example, Elaw's narrative does not discuss the importance of literacy, as Elaw was taught to read at a young age, whereas Jea's freedom largely depends on his ability to prove his miraculous acquisition of literacy (he receives the ability to read the Bible in English and Dutch after praying). The narrators' backgrounds and their experiences encompass northern slavery, southern slavery, intermarriage between blacks and Native Americans, colonization efforts in Africa, licensed evangelism, nondenominational preaching, and even conversion from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism.

Pierce is well-versed in past scholarship on which her argument is founded and engages much of it, although disagreeing with scholars on certain important points. Her work asks readers to rethink the accommodationist label that has been frequently attached to 19th-century African American Christianity. While identifying the obvious yoke Christianity placed on slaves and the attempt of slaveowners to reinterpret Christian doctrine so that it endorsed slavery, Pierce argues that late 18th-century and antebellum African American Christians wielded power through their very active engagement with their religious faith. She shows conversion to have far-reaching ramifications not only on the converted individual but on African American communities as well. Though not as fully elucidated as the rest of her argument, Pierce's move to consider conversion experiences in terms of their contribution to a community rather than merely to an individual is an interesting one.

Pierce's scholarship challenges the prevalent stereotype of early American blacks (slave or free) made more docile, passive, and accepting because of their faith. Most of the narrators represented show the ways that their conversion experiences and their faith encouraged them toward agitation. Elaw's sanctification frees her from traditional gender roles that prevent women from preaching, for example. White's faith gives him the tenacity to ignore a (white) Methodist preacher's reasons for refusing to license him. Jea's conversion emboldens him to escape from slavery. Indeed, conversion seems a powerful tool in these narratives; the narrators use their ability to convert to Christianity as proof of their human capacity and of the existence of their souls in racist and slaveholding societies that denied the possibility.

The arresting image of a "hell without fires" is one African American slaves who converted to Christianity adapted to suit their purpose. The fireless hell appropriately described their enduring existence on earth in the midst of slavery, racism, and oppression while representing a process of purification that guaranteed their eternal salvation. Pierce reads the act of differentiating between the hell on earth that described their lives under chattel slavery, and the image of hell in the larger Christian imagination as the site for the eternally damned, as a particularly transformative one for her narrators. By living in a hell without fires, antebellum, African American Christians interpret their suffering on earth as an active rather than passive battle, adapting the biblical representations of Christ, Elisha, Lazarus, and Phoebe to read themselves into biblical tradition and assimilate texts to their experiences.

Most interesting to Pierce's argument is her exploration of gender politics among antebellum African American Christians. Her work asks which forms of oppression are recognized by those who have been converted and called to preach, and it examines the conflict between preaching against racism and oppression while maintaining or participating in gender oppression as a Christian ideal. Though highlighting the inherent sexism in Jea's narrative and in his marriage to an enslaved Native American woman who refuses to convert, as well as arguing the significance of Bayley's identification as a Christian husband and father, Pierce examines sexism fully in her chapter on Elaw, a free born black woman who declares herself a biblical Phoebe. Elaw uses her sanctified status to supersede all human authority, circumventing both white and black male authority, while answering only to God. Pierce's chapter on Elaw draws attention to fact that sanctification was largely popularized by women, and it examines ways that women's appropriation of the image of a "second blessing" or sanctification frequently undermined prohibitions against female preachers.