Read an Excerpt
This Far by Faith
Stories from the African American Religious Experience
Chapter One
"God Has a Hand in It"
The God of Bethel heard her cries,
He let his power be seen;
He stopped the proud oppressor's frown,
And proved himself a king.
-- Richard Allen Charleston, South Carolina, today is a coastal city best known for its colonial past. The city is filled with exquisite homes built in the 1700s for wealthy plantation owners, shipbuilders, and importers. Tourists come to Charleston to see these grand houses, with their large, leafy gardens, elegant fountains, and porches with grand white pillars, which hint at the fabulous society life that once thrived here. All around the city are churches established before America was a nation. And at the center of the city is the Slave Market, which is now part museum and part crafts fair. But that slave market was the economic lifeblood of Charleston in the 1700s. It is the place where three-quarters of all slaves entering the United States first set their feet in America.
In the late 1700s so many slaves were arriving that Charleston was a densely populated, mostly black city. Aristocratic whites were a small population who ruled over the black slaves, both on the enormous plantations toward the coast, which were the foundation of Charleston's economy, and in the heart of the city. Rice and cotton, the region's key cash crops, were labor-intensive and thus required a large number of field hands. So low country planters had been ignoring the 1808 United States ban on the international slave trade for years, and they continued to import Africans, whom they felt were familiar with rice cultivation or better suited for the backbreaking labor of cotton picking. From 1810 until 1900, South Carolina had a black majority, with its black population reaching nearly 60 percent on the eve of the Civil War. And in 1822, in the heart of this South Carolinian city, in a small home not far from the Slave Market that still exists, a group of thirty men huddled near the hearth, as one drew diagrams on the dirt floor, plotting a rebellion in urgent, hushed tones.
The room was hot and stuffy, and it had the thick smell of too many people who had been crowded in the humid summer heat for too long, bringing the sweat of their day's labor with them. The fear was palpable. Eyes darted around the room, someone stood by the door, and a lookout outside kept a close watch for inquisitive whites. One of the men, the governor's most trusted servant, had already offered to kill the governor and his family as they slept. Someone else was coordinating the distribution of weapons in the days before the uprising. The two men closest to the light, their faces dancing with shadows, were the leaders of the rebellion. The man next to the fire was Denmark Vesey, a class leader at the nearby church and the most outspoken black man in the city. And standing just behind him was the most powerful religious leader in Charleston's rural slave plantations, Gullah Jack Pritchard.
Vesey was over fifty-five: a life span longer than most blacks in South Carolina could expect. He was a tall, dark-skinned man with graying hair and missing teeth. His hands were leathery from a life of work as a carpenter. His strong physical presence, as well as his stature as a leader in Charleston's black church community, led many white people to label him a rabble-rouser who was best avoided. In fact, Vesey was known for refusing to yield the right-of-way to any white man as he walked on Charleston's narrow sidewalks. He even refrained from bowing to the white aristocracy. These small acts of defiance were just outward signs of Vesey's conviction that, regardless of his skin color, he was not to be treated as anything less than equal to any man in God's sight.
Denmark Vesey had had to live by his wits from a young age; his faith in God and his mind were all he had to steady him in the face of oppression and abuse. At age fourteen, he was sold to a sugar plantation in Haiti where enslaved Africans were expected to chop cane from sunup to sundown. To avoid work, the boy spent the bulk of his time sprawled on the ground, claiming to be a victim of epileptic seizures. White doctors in the town confirmed the boy's illness, and when the captain of Vesey's slave ship returned to Haiti three months later, he refunded the plantation owner's money and took custody of this sick slave boy. The captain assigned Vesey to be his personal assistant. Perhaps it was Divine Providence, or perhaps it was the sea air that miraculously cured Vesey of his ailments, but Denmark Vesey never again displayed signs of epilepsy.
The African Church was built after blacks withdrew from the biggest Methodist church in the city. In the early nineteenth century, African religions were an important thread in South Carolina's religious tapestry, particularly on the coast, the so-called low country. With new slaves arriving regularly, there was a constant source of renewal for these traditions. The relative isolation of rural plantations and the large slave populations enabled enslaved Africans to keep their own beliefs alive, and the potent spiritual powers that so many of them believed in stood as testaments to the resilience of African religious traditions. With so many religions available to them, blacks tended to borrow bits and pieces from various traditions, creating a religion unique to them. Even Christianity was a part of their fusion of faiths, and it was common for Charleston-area blacks in the 1820s to belong to one or more local faith communities.
It was in 1794 that the first independent black Methodist church came into being ...
This Far by Faith
Stories from the African American Religious Experience. Copyright © by Juan Williams. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
