"Afro-Atlantic Catholics" Excerpt

AFRO-ATLANTIC CATHOLICS

America’s First Black Christians

JEROEN DEWULF University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

ONE Portugal 13

TWO Africa 35

THREE The Americas 89 FOUR The Catholic Roots of African American Christianity 161

Conclusion 207 Notes 211 Bibliography 255 Index 311

Introduction

In August 1733, Jacobus van Cortlandt placed a runaway advertisement in the New-York Gazette in an attempt to recover a “very black” and “tall lusty fellow” called Andrew Saxon. The latter had been working as a carpenter and cooper, either at the brewery the Van Cortlandts owned or at their wheat plantation in the Bronx, where today’s Van Cortlandt Park is. His advertisement used the standardized language of the time, specifying certain physical characteristics of the runaway Saxon walked “lamish with his left leg” and had a stiff left thumb “by a wound he had in his hand formerly” language skills he spoke “very good English” stolen objects Saxon took a broadax and other instruments with him and clothing he wore a pair of breeches and an old coat but then the staunchly Protestant Van Cortlandt made a surprising reference to the fact that Saxon “professeth himself to be a Roman Catholic” and that “the shirts he had with him and on his back are marked with a cross on the left breast.”1

By marking his shirts with a cross, Saxon clearly did not make a secret of his faith. Van Cortlandt’s confidence that he would continue to wear these shirts as an escapee shows that it was a meaningful aspect of Saxon’s

identity. This zeal is all the more remarkable considering the profoundly anti-Catholic sentiment in a state where, only a decade later, rumors of a “popish plot” would lead to the execution of thirty Black and four (Irish) White people.2

While his origin is unknown, it is tempting to relate Saxon to socalled Spanish Negroes, Spanish-speaking Black or Mestizo soldiers who had been captured during battles and were subsequently enslaved. Those involved in the 1741 New York Plot proudly identified as Catholic. Sig nificantly, all “Spanish Negroes” arrested in the course of the investigation insisted on being identified in court by their Iberian Catholic baptismal names not as “Powlis” or “Tony,” but as Pablo Ventura Angel and Anto nio de St. Bendito. After one of them, Wan de Sylva (Juan da Silva), had been sentenced to death, he made a point of kissing a crucifix on the day of his execution.3 As the New-York Weekly Journal confirmed, da Silva “died steadfastly in the Roman Catholick profession.”4

It is also possible that Saxon was one of the many enslaved people who had been taken to New York from Caribbean islands such as Jamaica, Antigua, or Barbados. Despite being under English colonial rule, there is evidence that some of the enslaved on these islands identified as Catholic. For instance, when the French Catholic priest Antoine Biet visited Barbados (in disguise) in 1654, he met with a group of Africans, all “very good Catholics,” who told him that they “were extremely sorrowed to see them selves sold as slaves in an island of heretics.” He concluded that “if some of them received a tinge of the Catholic Religion among the Portuguese, they preserve it the best they can, doing their prayers and worshipping God in their hearts.”5 Saxon may also have come to New York via Curaçao. When Manhattan was still part of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, there had been close relations with this Caribbean island that served as a depot in a network of Dutch Atlantic slave trading operations. Even after the Dutch surrender to the English in 1664, New York families with Dutch roots, such as the Van Cortlandts, tended to maintain good relations with Curaçao. There, too, we find early signs of Catholicism among the en slaved. In 1660, for instance, the Dutch Reformed Church in Amsterdam received a letter from Curaçao, warning that “papists . . . who sometimes arrived here” were baptizing the children of the enslaved.6 Catholic priests from nearby Venezuela did, in fact, regularly come to Curaçao to baptize newborn children of the enslaved. As a result, the island developed into a

religiously segregated society; whereas the enslaved population was Catho lic, the slaveholding elite was either Dutch Reformed or Jewish. The fact that enslaved people lived in a colony ruled by Protestants is, thus, no reason to assume that they had had no exposure to Catholicism. However, Saxon may also have been brought to New York directly from Africa. The Van Cortlandts were closely related to the Philipse family, which since the 1680s had been involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Although Frederick Philipse focused mainly on the Madagascar Trade, he also brought to New York a number of enslaved people from Kongo, a re gion in Africa with a Catholic history dating back to the fifteenth century.7 That Saxon may have had Kongolese roots is revealed by the fact that his shirts were marked with a cross. The use of shirts with an embroidered cross was prevalent among Catholics in the Kongo region, where it was a prerogative of those who had been granted knighthood in the Order of Christ.8 In 1798 the Capuchin Raimondo da Dicomano confirmed that only knights of the Order of Christ enjoyed “the privilege to put lots of crosses made with pieces of cloth in several colors on their capes.”9 As the Portuguese explorer Alfredo de Sarmento observed in 1856, however, this once highly prestigious distinction had become so common that he had the impression that “all or almost all inhabitants . . . are knights in the Order of Christ.” They were all wearing “the cross of the order made with pieces of cloth in several colors” or “shave their head and leave only a small plug of hair, which they style in the form of a perfect cross.”10

If Saxon had, indeed, been knighted in the Order of Christ while living in Central Africa, it implies that he would have made an oath to a Catholic priest, with his right hand placed on the Bible. The priest would then have touched his shoulder three times with a sword, whereupon he would have sworn on the Holy Gospels “to defend our king [and] the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, to honor only one God, to assist all priests who come to the Kingdom of Kongo, and to persecute all idols and witchcraft.”11 While we can only speculate whether Saxon became such a “soldier of Christ,” it would certainly explain his zeal and Van Cortlandt’s surprise about an enslaved man who, in eighteenth-century New York, proudly “professeth himself to be a Roman Catholic.”

Saxon’s story becomes even more intriguing if we connect him to the city’s earliest Black community, or “charter generation,” at the time when New York City was still called New Amsterdam. There, not just a handful of

individuals, but virtually the entire Black population originated from parts of Africa with a historically strong Portuguese influence: the Cape Verde is lands, the island of São Tomé, Kongo, and, in particular, Angola.12 The same predominance of people with roots in the broader Kongo region also characterized the charter generation in South Carolina.13 If we turn west ward to Louisiana, we find that, after the French king Louis XV granted all of the Louisiana territory west of the Mississippi to his cousin Charles III of Spain in 1762, the majority of enslaved Africans brought to the region had roots in Kongo. As Gwendolyn Midlo Hall confirms, “shortly after the Spanish took over, it became heavily Kongo in New Orleans.”14

This implies that some of the main centers of African American iden tity formation in the United States share a history to which Africans origi nating from regions influenced by Portuguese and Catholic culture contributed substantially. It would, naturally, be naïve to assume that all enslaved Africans from those regions professed Catholicism with the same zeal as Saxon. Many, especially those originating from peripheral areas to the north and west of the Kongo kingdom, may have had little or no exposure to Catholicism, and, even among those who originated from the kingdom’s heartland, many may have rejected the faith introduced by the Portuguese in the late fifteenth century. It would, nevertheless, be equally naïve to assume that their presence left no marks whatsoever and that African Ameri can religious history can be told accurately without taking into consider ation the profound influence of Iberian Catholicism in the Atlantic realm, especially during the first two centuries of the transatlantic slave trade.

Large numbers of the earliest sixteenth-century enslaved inhabitants in the Americas had previously lived in the Iberian Peninsula or in heavily Iberianized African societies, such as those of the Cape Verde islands and São Tomé.15 From the late sixteenth until the mid-seventeenth century, Luanda was the dominant source of America-bound Africans, which Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton aptly labeled “the Angolan wave” in the history of the transatlantic slave trade.16 Considering the Por tuguese influence in the Kongo/Angola region, there can be no doubt that many of these enslaved Africans shared familiarity with the Afro-Iberian customs previously introduced by the charter generations. As Joseph Miller has argued, upon their arrival in the Americas, these Central Afri cans came to live in intimate contact “with predecessors who had arrived in small numbers from backgrounds in slavery in late medieval Iberia”;

“particularly those coming through Kongo channels, must have had a use ful familiarity with Portuguese Christianity and used it to find places for themselves without relying on the more ‘African’ aspects of their origins.”17

In his seminal 1996 article on “Atlantic creoles,” Ira Berlin was among the first to emphasize the importance of the charter generations in the his tory of African American identity formation. Since these earliest enslaved communities often originated from coastal areas, where they had acquired a broad experience of the Atlantic world, they were fundamentally differ ent, he claims, from those rooted in areas further toward the interior of Africa who were brought to America in later centuries. Hence, his decision to label those first generations as “Atlantic creoles.”18 While there is much to criticize about Berlin’s article, in particular his controversial use of the concept “creole,” his approach was of great importance in drawing scholarly attention to the impact of cross-cultural contacts between Africans and Europeans along the west coast of Africa in the early modern era. Following Berlin, scholars increasingly came to perceive the entire Atlantic basin as an intercultural zone, marked by intra- and extra-African cultural mixtures to which not only Arab Islamic, but also European Christian predomi nantly Iberian Catholic cultural elements contributed substantially. In fact, Berlin acknowledged that no other European nation shaped intercultural contacts between Europeans and Africans in the early modern period more strongly than Portugal. He specified that the multilingual identity of Atlantic creoles “weighted strongly toward Portuguese” and that their reli gious identity was “usually Catholic.”19

However, Berlin ended his article on a pessimistic note, pointing out that the gradual transformation of mainland North America from “societieswith-slaves” into “slave societies” submerged the charter generations’ descendants “in a régime in which African descent was equated with slavery” and that, as a result of this, “Atlantic creoles were overwhelmed by the power of the plantation order.”20 Unlike Berlin, I do not believe that the importance of charter generations should be reduced to a fascinating though ultimately inconsequential chapter in the history of America’s Black culture and identity. Although I agree with Berlin that slave societies in America and the origins of enslaved Africans changed dramatically in the course of the eighteenth century, I do not consider these changes enough reason to assume that North America represents an exception compared to other parts of the Americas, where scholarly research has demonstrated a

continuous influence of the foundations led by charter generations. As Sidney Mintz and Richard Price pointed out in The Birth of AfricanAmerican Culture (1965), the earliest generations of enslaved Africans often had a major influence on how Black identity in the region was to evolve. They insisted that the “beginnings of African-American cultures must date from the earliest interactions of the enslaved men and women.”21

Another important source of inspiration to this book was Thornton’s articles “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the King dom of Kongo” (1984) and “On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas” (1988), which he later expanded into the monograph Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (1992). In his groundbreaking research, Thornton argued that “the conversion of Africans actually began in Africa” and that this acknowledgment is of crucial importance in understanding the history of Black Christianity. Al though “only a limited number of slaves were Christians before their ar rival in the New World,” the impact of “African Christians was much greater than their numbers.” For this reason, “we should consider the conversion of Africans as a continuous process, commencing in Africa and carrying over to the New World.”22

While Thornton’s studies mainly associate traces of African Catholicism in the Americas with Kongo, historical sources reveal that people who became Christian in other parts of Africa with a strong Portuguese influence, such as the Cape Verde islands or São Tomé, lived their Catho lic faith in similar ways. They did so in spite of the geographical distance between them and the enormous differences in their respective indigenous cultures, traditions, and cosmologies. This convinced me that the develop ment of Black Christianity in the Americas cannot be properly understood if started in Africa; rather, it should be seen as a process that began in late-medieval Portugal.

Speaking of Portuguese influence in Africa in the early modern era implies that all cultural or social elements were subject to religion. More than any other identity marker, religion was the key concept in Iberian society to distinguish between good and evil, friend and foe. The religion the Portuguese exported to Africa was a militant form of Catholicism, shaped by centuries of war. Not by accident, the caravels that brought Christianity to Africa featured the emblem of the Military Order of Christ on their sails. The Portuguese overseas expansion was a continuation of

the reconquista, marked by the ambition to find new resources and new allies in the ongoing struggle against the Islamic Empire.

Equally important, however, is the realization that the Portuguese introduced Christianity in Africa before the foundation of the Society of Jesus and the Counter-Reformation. Part of the reason why Portuguese religious influence in Africa has often been underestimated or misunder stood is that scholars have tended to look at it from a post-Tridentine perspective, ignoring that the borders between traditional beliefs and Christianity were still blurred in early modern Iberia. As George Brooks has rightly argued, at that time in history Portuguese and Africans “shared similar beliefs concerning the causes and cures of disease, and in the effi cacy of amulets.”23 Early modern Portuguese Catholicism was not only a recognizable religion to Africans, but also allowed the creation of what Cécile Fromont has labeled “spaces of correlation” where African and Eu ropean thoughts and rituals met and mutually influenced each other, lead ing to the development of African variants of Catholicism, so typical for the syncretic processes and cross-cultural contacts that characterized the early modern Atlantic world.24

Fromont’s concept also helps to avoid the pitfall of Eurocentrism. Studies on the globalization of Iberian cultural elements have a long history of sustaining the myth that Spain and Portugal have a glorious colonial history, devoid of oppression and racism. António Brásio, for instance, whose fifteen-volume anthology Monumenta missionária Africana (1952–1988) represents an indispensable tool in understanding the historical Portuguese influence in Africa, wrote in the year before the 1974 Carnation Revolution that “whenever he had the privilege of touching a piece of soil that belonged to Portugal’s Empire,” he felt growing deeply inside him “an inexplicable feeling of intense historical awareness about the greatness, glory, and pride of being Portuguese.”25 Such rhetoric was actively encour aged during the Portuguese dictatorship in an attempt to legitimize the nation’s colonial wars in Africa. What it failed to acknowledge was that the globalization of Iberian elements had been anything but the expression of a humanitarian form of colonialism. Rather, this process took place under extremely hostile circumstances, marked by violence, exploitation, and enslavement, for which none other than these Iberian powers bore responsi bility. The adoption of Iberian cultural elements by Africans, as such, should be understood not as a sign of friendship, but rather as a conviction

that siding with the powerful created new opportunities, increased one’s prestige, and made one less vulnerable in a world where only the strongest survived.

Moreover, the African adoption of Iberian elements necessarily im plied a process of reinterpretation and reinvention, whereby Catholicism came to be adjusted to local customs and subsequently acquired new mean ings. The focus of this study will, therefore, not be on the transmission process of Iberian religious elements as such, but on the new variant(s) that developed out of them. Building on Fromont’s conviction that the dissemi nation of Catholicism in the Kongo region “had an impact well beyond the confines of the central African kingdom where it emerged” since “it trav eled to the American continent” and, thus, had an influence that “reso nated across the early modern Atlantic,” I decided to adopt the term AfroAtlantic Catholics in reference to those Africans who in early modern times embraced Iberian Catholicism, yet adjusted and reinterpreted in accor dance with their traditional beliefs and traditions.26

This book intends to tell their history: how their Catholic identity was formed in Africa and further developed in the Americas, how they expressed their faith, and what remains of their legacy in North America. Combining the analysis of historical sources with data from anthropological and linguistic studies, I will pay particular attention to “popular” or “folk” Catholicism, with a focus on rituals (baptism, marriage, burial), saint devotion (prayers, cures, ex-votos, vows), social structures (brother hoods, confraternities), and procession culture. The reason is that Afro-Atlantic Catholics largely lived their faith at the margins of society. Theirs is a Catholic history that was never fully recognized as such. The Church failed to understand their songs and dances as genuine expressions of Christian faith and has a long history of rejecting Afro-Catholic rituals as noise, immorality, and superstitious attempts to corrupt Catholicism with indigenous African elements.

Due to the paucity of sources, any study dealing with African American cultural and religious identity formation is speculative to a certain degree. This is no different in this book. In order to deal with this challenge, I made use of a comparative methodology, placing North America in a broader Atlantic context and comparing North American sources about social, cul tural, and religious practices among members of enslaved communities to sources from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. I did so in the con-

viction that early Black identity formation in North America followed an Atlantic pattern. By questioning the traditional assumption that Black cul ture developed in fundamentally different ways in the predominantly Protestant North as compared to the predominantly Catholic South of the Americas, I also felt required to correct an Anglo-Saxon bias in the domi nant narrative on the development of African American religious history.

This book is divided into four chapters. Since the Portuguese introduced Catholicism in Africa before the Council of Trent (1545–1563), it begins with an overview of the main characteristics of late-medieval Ca tholicism in Portugal. In this chapter I also pay attention to the policy of the Portuguese authorities with regard to enslaved Africans and to the importance of confraternities in understanding the singularities of Black Iberian Catholicism.

In the second chapter I argue that the pattern thus set in Lisbon was to a large degree followed on the Atlantic islands of Cape Verde and São Tomé, yet with the difference that Portuguese settlers constituted only a small minority of the population. I, therefore, study the development of Catholicism in a broader social and racial context, with a focus on the in fluential role of Luso-Africans in spreading their own interpretations of Portuguese cultural, social, and religious customs on the islands and along the nearby African coastal areas. I then shift my attention to Kongo, where a different situation existed in the sense that Catholicism was introduced in a nation controlled by Africans who shared a common language, cul ture, and set of beliefs. I reject claims that Catholicism in Kongo only reached upper classes and had little effect on indigenous customs. Rather, I argue that the variant of Catholicism that developed in Kongo became a crucial element of Kongolese identity.

The third chapter presents an analysis of how African variants of Ca tholicism transited to the Americas in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. I do so with a focus on the sixteenth century, when the vast majority of Black people came directly from the Iberian Peninsula or via the Portuguese-controlled Atlantic islands; and the late sixteenth to midseventeenth century, when the region of Kongo-Angola was the domi nant source of America-bound Africans. I show how these enslaved Africans brought a variety of Afro-Iberian elements with them to the Americas and how brotherhoods, in particular, became key institutions in the dis semination and transmission of these elements in Black communities.

While such claims have previously been made about Iberian slave societ ies, where confraternities flourished with the approval or, at least, the con nivance of the Catholic authorities, I demonstrate that church institutions were not always necessary for Africans and their descendants to build mu tual-aid societies modeled upon Iberian brotherhoods and that similar fraternal societies also existed in territories under English, French, Dutch, and Danish colonial rule.

The book’s final chapter deals specifically with North America and in vestigates the long-term influence of Afro-Atlantic Catholics on the devel opment of both African American fraternal traditions and evangelical churches. It calls for a revision of the traditional narrative by beginning the history of African American Christianity with a focus on Afro-Atlantic Catholic members in America’s seventeenth-century charter generations and argues that the social structures of mutual support established by the latter had a profound impact on the way African American communities would later organize the earliest Baptist and Methodist congregations. It claims that the genesis of Black evangelical churches should not be reduced to a mixture of White Protestant and indigenous African elements. Rather, it highlights the importance of a third source of influence, namely that of fraternal practices rooted in ancient Afro-Atlantic Catholic traditions.

In the classic study The Catholic Church and the American Negro (1928), John Gillard’s pioneering analysis of Black Christianity from a Catholic per spective paralleled some of the theories presented in this book with regard to the importance of social support in the form of brotherhoods. For instance, when trying to explain the popularity of Baptist churches in the Black community, Gillard pointed out that, there, “the church is the center of social life and intercourse,” whereas “it cannot be said that there is anything in the Catholic Church as such which favors the demands of the Negro for a social religion.” Gillard, of course, was well aware of the histori cal importance of confraternities in the Catholic Church but realized that such organizations had long lost their splendor. Despite this sharp insight into a fundamental aspect of Black Christianity, Gillard failed to under stand the reasons behind this desire for a “social religion” and lost himself in painful speculations about the “nature” of Black people.27

In The History of Black Catholics in the United States (1990), Cyprian Davis distanced himself from such speculations but followed Gillard in pointing out the crucial importance of confraternities for the understand-

ing of what he called “Afro-Latin spirituality.”28 Davis was also aware that “the black confraternities are an aspect of black Catholicism that needs further study” and expressed confidence that “more extensive research in this area of black Catholicism will no doubt reveal much more about lay initiative than was formerly known.”29 The same can be said with regard to Black Protestantism, where John Giggie observed in 2011 that the “ex plicit intersections between fraternal orders and religion [have] been left largely unexplored.”30

This study not only confirms these statements but also goes beyond them by arguing that the importance of confraternities for the development of Black Christianity should be understood as a process that began in the fifteenth century on the Iberian Peninsula and the African Atlantic is lands. This focus on Black brotherhoods will allow me to demonstrate how elements of Iberian Catholicism came to affect the daily lives of people in Africa and how Afro-Atlantic Catholics introduced their own interpreta tions of them in the Americas, where they were to influence Black religious, social, and, cultural identity formation in the centuries to come.