Rebecca Jackson and the Archive
In a June 22, 2022, episode of the podcast Stuff You Missed in History Class, hosts Tracy Wilson and Holly Frey discuss Mother Rebecca Jackson, a Black Shaker Eldress who founded a primarily Black Shaker community in Philadelphia in the 1850s. For the primary source material, Wilson and Frey reference what they call variously “her journals,” “her writings,” and “her autobiography.” On a June 6, 2024, episode of PBS program In the Margins about Jackson, host Harini Bhat states that what we know about Jackson “are from Jackson’s published diaries.” In a June 2024 episode of the podcast Hoodoo and Chill, host Papa Seer describes Jackson’s writings as “an autobiography entitled Gifts of Power.” What these descriptions share is that they all rely on a collection of Jackson’s life writing compiled and—crucially—edited by Jean McMahon Humez (1981). As importantly, these episodes do not discuss Humez’s editorial process.
Surely this lack of attention to Humez’s editing is due to a commitment to increasing public knowledge of little-known Black religious women, without getting stuck in the weeds of academic publication history. And the result is compelling and often well-researched public history at its best. These podcast and show episodes share with academic scholars a sense of urgency about getting Jackson’s words into the world. Scholars working with Jackson’s visionary writing also almost exclusively use Humez’s edited volume, and similarly focus on Jackson herself, rather than dwelling on how the edited volume was created and how it relates to the archival materials.*
Without Humez’s tireless research, Jackson’s visions may have disappeared in the archives. At the same time, Humez’s editing fundamentally changed Jackson’s work, including regularizing spelling and punctuation, adding section breaks, and perhaps most meaningfully publishing all of Jackson’s disparate works in a single volume. Jackson’s writings, as compiled by Humez, give us an opportunity to productively pause and consider how the editing of archival materials may limit our understanding of Black religious figures. As importantly, the reception and use of Humez’s volume may reveal contemporary desires for cohesive and usable historical narratives, particularly in light of archival absences related to Black religious women.
I would like to spend this talk considering the stakes of reading and editing archival materials. To do so I’d like to work through one example from Jackson’s writings and compare Humez’s edited version with the archival version. In the process I’d like to offer some thoughts about how we might approach Jackson’s life writing, and the stakes of academic and public encounters with archival materials, particularly as they relate to histories of Black religious women. Let me begin, though, by introducing you to Rebecca Jackson and her edited works.
Rebecca Jackson and Her Life writing
Rebecca Jackson was born around 1795, but the earliest archival material is a description of her conversion experience 35 years later, in July of 1830. There is little known about the first 35 years of her life. What we do know is that this conversion was not her first encounter with religion. She spent many years in Philadelphia’s famed Bethel AME Church. But not until conversion did Jackson feel infused with and empowered by God. Years later, she would read this conversion as her first step towards the Shakers. Jackson joined the Shakers in 1840, about a decade after her conversion, but her writings identify Shaker commitments much earlier, and she frames much of her early life as leading to the Shakers.
Jackson’s conversion narrative is part of a longer spiritual autobiography that Jackson seems to have arranged and intended for publication in the mid-1840s. This spiritual autobiography was first prepared for publication in 1878, seven years after Jackson’s death, by Shaker Alonzo G. Hollister. With the support of Jackson’s Philadelphia Shaker community, including her closest companion Rebecca Perot, Hollister put together a manuscript to circulate amongst the United Society of Believers.
Jackson’s life writings weren’t published broadly until 1981. For the first half of her edited volume, Humez consulted Jackson’s handwritten and seemingly incomplete draft of the manuscript (the only piece of this spiritual autobiography remaining in Jackson’s hand), supplementing it with additional material from Hollister’s later version. Whereas the first half of Humez’s collection consists of Jackson’s spiritual autobiography (itself not singular), the second half “consist[s] almost entirely of Shaker-edited, shorter materials, arranged in chronological order” (Humez 46). These writings are not a single unified text, are not written in Jackson’s hand, and were not arranged chronologically until Humez did so.
I’d like to now return to her spiritual autobiography, and spend some time with her handwritten version, considering the stakes of the editing process on the level of the sentence, paragraph, and section.
* Two notable exceptions to this are Richard J. Douglass-Chin and Humez herself. See Douglass-Chin in Preacher Woman Sings the Blues, pp. 94-119; and Humez’s “A Note on the Text.”
Bibliography
Bassard, Katherine Clay. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing. Princeton UP, 1999.
Bostic, Joy. African American Female Mysticism: Nineteenth-Century Religious Activism. Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.
Douglass-Chin, Richard J. Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Evangelists. U of Missouri P, 2001.
Haynes, Rosetta R. Radical Spiritual Motherhood: Autobiography and Empowerment in Nineteenth-Century African American Women. Louisiana State UP, 2011.
“How Two Free Black Women Upended the Religious Establishment.” In the Margins from PBS, 6 June 2024, https://www.pbs.org/video/how-two-free-black-women-upended-the-religiou…
Humez, Jean McMahone. “A Note on the Text,” in Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress. U of Massachusetts P, 1981.
Jackson, Rebecca. Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress. ed. Jean McMahon Humez. U of Massachusetts P, 1981.
“Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson.” Stuff You Missed in History Class from iHeartRadio, 22 June 2022, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-missed-in-histor-21124503/
“Rebecca Cox Jackson: Spiritualist, Medium, Lesbian?” Hoodoo and Chill from Hoodoo Conjure Rootwork, 24 July 2024, https://hoodooconjurerootwork.com/podcast
Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose. 1983. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2004.
In 1981, Jean Humez published the first widely available volume of the life writing of Rebecca Jackson, a 19th-century Black Shaker Eldress. Since then, public and academic scholars have written thoughtfully on Jackson’s visionary writing on race and gender. All (that I found) use Humez’s edited volume for their analysis; almost none attend to Humez’s editorial process. Surely this lack of attention to editing indicates a commitment to increasing public knowledge of Black religious women, without getting distracted by publication history. But Humez’s editing fundamentally changed Jackson’s work, changing spelling and punctuation, adding section breaks, and arranging disparate works in a single volume. In this talk, I ask how the editing of archival materials impacts our understanding of Black religious figures. Further, I ask how the reception and use of Humez’s volume reveals contemporary desires for cohesive historical narratives, and the stakes of this for histories of Black religious women.