the slave preacher became magician,
healer, preacher, politician and, sometimes, martyr. “There were black ministers before
there were black churches,” Dr. Stacy Williams declared in a 1980 lecture before Detroit’s
Council of Baptist Pastors. “…Some were even preaching to their slave masters. The
black minister had to sing, pray and preach under conditions which many times brought
lashes to his back. But his image as a leader and as God’s man had been established.
There developed a craving in the hearts of the Black-slave subjects for a meeting
place of their own where they could serve God according to the dictates of their consciences.”
However, joining an organized church was a large ambition for a slave. Organized religion
was a prize many slave owners kept locked up in their own kitchens, serving only thin,
carefully cut slices to religion-hungry servants. Some slaves went to church with
whites and sat in rear pews or balconies, listening to white preachers tell them that
whites were superior, that God sanctioned slavery and they’d go to heaven if they
obeyed their masters and mistresses and stopped stealing chickens. Others attended
their own churches, where trusted white observers watched the services and made sure
they stressed the joys of the afterlife and the need to accept one’s fate. Yet many
people feared that slave religion—like reading and writing—fueled rebellions. Nat
Turner, the Virginian whose band plundered plantations and beat, beheaded and killed
more than fifty white men, women and children in 1831, had been a preacher, claiming
biblical signs and omens urged him to strike. After Nat’s rebellion, all nighttime
religious meetings were prohibited and no blacks, free or slave, could hear colored
preachers or ministers. They could only listen to white preachers and only during
the daytime. Twenty-four-year-old Gabriel Prosser—who, like Smith, lived in Henrico
County, Virginia—had been hanged in 1800 for his plot to march on the city of Richmond,
seize the arsenal, strike down the whites and liberate slaves. He, too, had won followers
by predicting God would strengthen the hand of rebels.
So James Smith’s request to join any church, even the church his Richmond, Virginia,
area master attended, was no small matter. The church’s minister said he would have
to talk it over with “William Wright,” the name Smith coined for his master in his
newspaper interview. Smith’s master eventually gave him permission to join the church,
but Smith had to assure him that he would be a good and faithful servant and would
work harder, if possible. However, no one foresaw how seriously James Smith would
take his faith or how it would consume him.
He became a man who could stay up all night after sweating in fields all day, a man
who roamed his plantation telling other slaves to plead for light and beg for release
from the God who could free any spirit. Though he still worked as hard as ever, Smith’s
devotion troubled his master, who worried that his fervor might spread and disturb
the daily patterns of plantation life. To discourage Smith, his master sometimes kept
him tied up all day on Sundays or had him whipped until blood dripped down his back.
Yet he continued converting slaves. Finally, his owner sold James Smith to a slave
trader from Georgia, warning his new master of Smith’s passion for wading in religion
and urging other slaves to join him in its waters.
“I can soon break him of that practice when I have him staked down with his face to
the ground and his back striped and checked with the lash—with salt and red pepper
well rubbed into the gashes, he will give up and forget his religion,” his new master,
Mr. White, said, according to the story Smith told the Voice of the Fugitive.
As he bundled up his clothing for the last time and said good-bye to his wife and
two children, Smith felt