I Know It Was the Blood: Prophetic Initiation and Retributive Justice in the Narratives of John Marrant, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass

Abstract:This article emphasizes the generative impact of West African religious culture on early African American Christians by analyzing the use of two symbols, wilderness and blood, in the autobiographical accounts of John Marrant, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass. I use Theophus Smith's notion of conjure to reconstruct the hermeneutical lens through which early African Americans read and understood the Bible and to explain how the repetition of symbols evinces Africana religious consciousness. While the Bible provided these authors and narrators with a narrative model for storytelling, the structural patterns and thematic emphases repeated in their texts suggest that Africana spirituality, rather than the doctrines of Euro-American Protestantism, primarily informs the processes by which these narrators construct religious meaning. The repetition of the Bible's symbols, tropes, and themes establishes a written tradition of biblical interpretation—a midrash of the Black Church—a hitherto-unacknowledged phenomenon in African diaspora religious history.