Black Childhood, Black Religion, and the Oral Archive of Slavery and Religion

This paper utilizes oral histories like Goodwater’s narrative to demonstrate children—as ideas and as living beings—shaped the development of Black Southern religious cultures from the antebellum period through the beginning of the twentieth century. Focused on nineteenth and early twentieth-century South Carolina, this paper argues Black communities often interpreted childhood as a period of heightened proximity to the more-than-human realm. The paper zooms into two distinct manifestations of this history. In the first section, I examine how Black elders, particularly women, drew on African-descended ritual systems when interpreting the distinctive markings and birth circumstances of certain children, which they viewed as indicative of metaphysical wisdom that was instructive for the entire community. In the next section, I highlight how Black community members carefully mediated children’s distance between the spirit world and the physical realm through ritual performance