"The All-Seeing Eye is Upon You": Racialized Religious and Sacralized Spiritual Spaces in Antebellum Northeast Mississippi
Abstract
During the antebellum era, white people and enslaved people of Northeast Mississippi ascribed multiple and often contradictory meanings to religious and spiritual spaces. Resistance to day-to-day racialized oppression in work and religious settings simultaneously showed how white people's restrictions shaped enslaved people's interpretations of Christianity, as well as how enslaved people shaped the boundaries of religious and spiritual spaces in antebellum Northeast Mississippi. Through the discourse of the family, evangelicals created a social hierarchy that assigned specific gender and racial roles for white men and women, as well as enslaved men and women. White evangelicals defended enslavement as compatible with Christianity but debated the religious instruction of enslaved people. While slaveholders feared that the religious instruction of enslaved people would undermine their own authority, black people knew that education provided the key to emancipation from white-controlled spaces. Although slaveholders controlled the forms of visible religious activity, enslaved people often shared religious spaces with white evangelicals through the 1850s. Illicit gatherings contested plantation spaces and afforded enslaved people the opportunity to strengthen community ties, appropriate time and space for themselves, express creativity, and combine evangelical teaching with their own messages of liberation. The overriding of plantation order empowered enslaved people but also risked discovery in a space constantly subjected to the white gaze. Communication with the spiritual world showed how enslaved people linked African and Anglo systems of belief and transcended the physical boundaries imposed by white people to occupy a spiritual plane.