Abstract
Rebecca Cox Jackson, a younger contemporary of Jarena Lee, was born in 1795 near Philadelphia. Initially, she was affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Her older brother Joseph Cox was a local preacher and held several offices for the AME denomination including that of elder. Joseph, along with Rebecca’s husband Samuel Jackson who was also AME, figures prominently in her journal writings. Jackson’s diary entries are edited by Jean McMahon Humez and published as Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress. In these entries, Jackson relates experiences and encounters that point to a dispositional propensity toward religious concepts and elements that in some ways parallel aspects of a West African ethos or common orientation cited in the works of Martin and Hayes. The first indication of this phenomenon occurs in Jackson’s description of her religious conversion that takes place in 1830 when Jackson is 35 years old. Similar to other Protestant Christian conversion narratives Jackson experiences a spiritual awakening of the soul that is initiated by an acute emotional and spiritual crisis. This crisis erupts when Jackson is confronted by one of her deepest fears—her fear of lightning. When a lightning storm would strike she would take to her bed ill. On this particular occasion, Jackson prays mightily to alleviate the attack. In her journal she describes what happens next.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Rebbeca Jackson, Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, Illustrated ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 72.
Katherine Clay Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 22.
Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1983), 85.
Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Yvonne Patricia Chireau, “The Uses of the Supernatural: Toward a History of Black Women’s Magical Practices,” in A Mighty Baptism: Race and Gender, in the Creation of American Protestantism, ed. Susan Juster and Lisa MacFarlane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 171.
Yvonne Patricia Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 172. Theophus Smith argues that magic remained an important technology even in Puritan America. He contends that the construction and perpetuation of an “unambiguous representation” of a “Puritan American worldview founded by God’s Manifest Destiny” constitutes a magical performance. Smith adds that African Americans and Native Americans recognized this as a conjured notion. See Smith, Conjuring Culture Biblical Formations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press), 70–76.
Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 21.
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (New York; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 235.
Dianne Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), xv.
Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 165.
William Wainwright, Mysticism: A Study of its Nature, Cognitive Value and Moral Implications (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), xiii.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor, 1958), 352.
See, for example, Steven T. Katz, ed., Mysticism and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Howard Thurman, Mysticism and the Experience of Love (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1961), 10.
William Ernest Hocking, “The Mystical Spirit and Protestantism,” in Understanding Mysticism, ed. R. Woods (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1980), 20.
See Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).
See Renee Harrison’s discussion of literacy, education, and power, in Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 212–220.
Elizabeth Abbott, A History of Celibacy (New York: Scribner, 2000), p 19.
Hyun Kyung Chung, Struggle to Be the Sun Again: Introducing Asian Women’s Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 77.
Paula J. Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2007), 60.
Deborah Gray White, Aren’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Revised ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 151. White includes stories of spousal abuse such as how Jim hit his wife Rachel on the head with a poker, and how Demps hit his wife Hetty and locked her in a room to keep her from going to a New Year’s party on another plantation.
Copyright information
© 2013 Joy R. Bostic
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bostic, J.R. (2013). Look at What You Have Done: Sacred Power and Reimagining the Divine. In: African American Female Mysticism. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375056_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375056_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47676-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-37505-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)