Mothering a Disobliging Nation: Mother Annie, the Shouter (Spiritual) Baptists and Grenadian

MOTHERING A DISOBLIGING NATION: MOTHER ANNIE, THE SHOUTER (SPIRITUAL) BAPTISTS AND GRENADIAN “NATIONISS”

Caldwell Taylor

Is it not enough, Lord, that the worldhas intimidated us [women]so that wemay not do anything worthwhile for You in public?

-St Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), Way of Perfection

The women of Galilee were the first Christians.They came up to Jerusalem with Jesus and stayed with him in the bitter hours of his death.

-Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia(Harvard U. Press, 1996), .9

We have this church in the village. We have this church.
The walls make out of mud, the roof covered with carrat
leaves; a simple hut with no steeple or cross or acolytes
or white priests or Latin ceremonies. But is our own. Black
people own it...

–“Sister Eva”, in Earl Lovelace’s The Wine of Astonishment

(Heinemann, 1983), p. 32

[BIGDRUMNATION is working on a biographical sketch of Mother Annie (Catherine Vincent [1921-2010]) and will like to hear from anyone who knew the Spiritual Baptist cleric and seer; she forded the “Jordan River” forty days ago today.]

Mother Annie stuck to her “divine mission” for half a century, and during those many years she ministered to her congregation and to all of her “children” who came before her to be rid of their “troubles and afflictions”. Her woman-centered ministry was multi-faceted: she was counsellor, consoler, comforter, social worker, ‘nointer, nurturer, ritual specialist and healer (using traditional botanical knowledge)-all of these being crucially important roles in a society which is without psychologists, psychiatrists and other persons trained in the arts and sciences of healing injuries to the mind. Mother Annie’s work attracted both opprobrium and praise;happily she was showered with much more of the latter.

Those who hold what in our view is an improper understanding of the nature of her ministry, find it easy to dismiss Mother Annie as an “Obeah woman”. The rancid epithet bears witness to the many calumnies heaped upon the heads of women, who have dared to cross the boundaries of their sex into the public world which is reserved for men, according to the teachings of Aristotle and the Church Fathers. The Aristotelians and the “cloistered clerks in oratories” demonized all women, and especially the ones who refused to stay within the provinces legislated by gods that did the bidding of their real creators, the bearded potentates of the patriarchy. Talking about which, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s clearly understood how the writers of history, men, have been white-washed in their ‘seminal’ texts. “She” said:

By God, if women had but written stories
As have these clerks within their oratories
They would have written of men more wickedness
Than all the race of Adam could redress.

-Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales

History is written from the point of view of the writers of history; in the historian’s pen there resides the power to praise, to damn and to construct Otherness. Otherness, says Simone de Beauvoir, “ is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of duality-that of Self and Other”. As Other, Mother Annie becomes fit for vilification.

“Obeah woman”: This dog-eared tag is as persistent as the shadow of hatred; it won’t go away.But what anyway is Obeah? Is it anything more than the high science of the poor and lowly? And don’t we all understand why it is that the poor and downtrodden turn to psychic agents and agencies and to Marx’s “opiates” for relief? It should take very little vision to discern religion’s narcotic effects. But religion is hardly unique in this respect, for all beliefs systems provide therapeutic compensation; all belief systems, including Marxism, have very peculiar ways of going to a believer’s head.

“Obeah Woman”

They called her that because she filled her spiritual vessel with the contents of her social being.
Because she wrass’led with the spirits.Because she made a great emotional investment in the performance of her worship. Mother Annie and the Shouters put this writer in mind of the great German theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945). During a visit to the United States in the 1930s, Bonhoeffer was walking the streets of Harlem one day when he bumped into the spirit in the improvisational worship of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, ReverendAdam Clayton Powell, Sr., presiding. Bonheoeffer, who will die by hanging at the murderous hands of the NAZIS- saw the “spirit from below “in Harlem and week after week he returned to the Abyssinian to be filled by it.

“Obeah woman:” With so many women in its hierarchy and within its congregations, it is no wonder that the Spiritual Baptist faith has been so persecuted and prosecuted over the years, the prosecutors and persecutors haughtily proclaiming their intent to stamp out” obeah, witchcraft and sorcery”. According to the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches [1486])“all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women, insatiable”. Such is the language of fundamentalism, whose biggest danger liesin its militant intolerance of scepticism. And this is serious matter, for it takes a radical scepticism (by far the most important of isms) to tame the many Hobbesian tenants which dwell within us.

St Vincent: 1912. The colonial state enacts the Shakerism Prohibition Ordinance;the lawcriminalizes the religious practices of the “Shakers” (“Shouters”).

Trinidad and Tobago. In November of 1917 the Great War (1914-1918) is raging bloodily and noisily in Europe and elsewhere, and in the name of peace and civilized good order Trinidad and Tobago’s colonial government enshrines an Ordinance to Render Illegal, Indulgence inthe Practice of the body known as the Shouters. Let’s recall that Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler (1897-1977) was locked up for the duration of World War 2 (1939-1945), the Trinidad authorities saying that the Grenadian –born trade unionist and leader of the British Empire Workers and Citizens Home Rule Party represented a dire security threat to the colonial state. Let also recall that Butler’s political meetings were always heavily larded with Shouter Baptist rites and ritual. In making Butler out to be “dangerous”, the authorities called attention to his religious ways, describing him as “a religious fanatic and as such a danger to the peace and good order of the colony”. Talking about Butlerand ShouterBaptism, it isalso worth recalling that the star has much symbolic heftfor Baptists; that Eric Gairy learned his politics while attending Butler meetings in Trinidad; that the star is the symbol of Eric Gairy’s Grenada United labour Party; that there are seven stars on Grenada’s national flag.

The anti-Shouter ordinance gave the Trinidad and Tobago police sweeping powers of arrest. Section 7 (1) of the law stated:

It shall be lawful for any party of members of the Constabulary Force, of whom one shall be a commissioned or non-commissionedofficer, without a warrant to enter at any time of the day or night any house, estate land, or place in or on which such commissioned or non-commissioned officer may have good ground to believe or suspect that a Shouters’ meeting is being held or where he may have good ground tobelieve or suspect that any person or persons is or are being kept for the purpose of initiation into the ceremonies of the Shouters

It will take almost four decades of fight to repeal this patently discriminatory and unjust law, and when repeal comes on March 30, 1951, a Grenadian by the name of Elton George Griffith (1913-1995) will be loudly proclaimed “Liberator of the Shouter Baptists” and custodian of the balance wheel. The balance wheel is the holiest of the Shouters’ icons. According to Louis Regis, “it symbolizes the equilibrium that Spiritual Baptists [Shouters] are encouraged to aspire to in their daily lives”. In a 1982 song, Rose, calypsonian and Spiritual Baptist, tells us something about the power which resides in the holder of the balance wheel. Rose sings:

I saw Eric [Williams] in me dream
Still holding the balance wheel
He say, Rose tell Chamber
Call election November
And tell Chambers I say
Give the Baptists a holiday
And tell the nation doh mourn
Ah gone!

St Vincent’s and Trinidad and Tobago’s anti- Shouter laws were enacted to enforce His Majesty’s peace; perhaps these laws also pursued the principle enunciated at Augsburg in 1555, namely, cuius regio, eius religio; a subject people ought to worship the God of its political masters (my translation).

The Shouters resisted. Indeed, their barefooted courage inspired Earl Lovelace’s great novel`` The Wine of Astonishment. The true sources of that courage are yet unknown and so too the real origins of the Shouters/ Spiritual Baptists. Where did they come from?

Some say they originated in Grenada. Were the members of the “Converted” sect made up of Grenadians who eventually headed down to Trinidad? Or were they Vincentians who fled first to Grenada to escape the Shaker law, then went on from Grenada to Trinidad?

Some say the Shouters got started in Trinidad from a spiritual spark brought there by the African-Americans ex-soldiers (the so-called “Merikins”), who came to the Island in the wake of the Anglo –American War of 1812. These African-American ex-soldiers were transported out of the United States to Trinidad, for they had waged war on the side of the British (in exchange for their freedom) against the Americans cause. Trinidad, then a sparsely populated colony with less than twenty years in the British fold-took delivery of its first batch of Merikins in 1815; a few more came in 1816 and 1821, the latter group consisting of ex-soldiers who had opted for Nova Scotia in the immediate wake of the 1812 war. Papa Neezer (Ebenezer Elliot [1901-1969]),the Trinidadian Orisha leader and seer, who rose to prominence in the 1950s-was a descendant of the Merikens. (See Frances Henry’s He had The PowerLexicon, 2008, pp7-8). Papa Neezer won some negative attention in Sparrow‘s “Obeah Wedding” (Melda O[1966]). In “Obeah Wedding” Sparrow boasts that he is the grandson of Papa Neezer and therefore untouchable. Sparrow sings:

You doh seem to understand
Obeah can’t upset my plan
For Papa Neezer
Is me grandfather.
Ultimately, Shouterism is a Christianity rendered in African cadences. It is a bell-ringing Christianity, a turbaned Christianity under the balance wheel; a Christianity which disavows the West’s hermetic separation of good and evil, sacred and profane.

Being an African –inspired Christianity means that Shouterism is busy with diviners and seers, priestesses and priests, Mama do good and Papa do good: magic is a staple item in African concepts of religion.

Returning once more to origins, allow us to point out that Shouterism could also have come out of Africa itself-brought here by Africans ancestors who had been proselytized by Christian missionaries in Africa.

And why were they called Shouters? Consider this:

“In the New World the drums, upon which Africans had relied
to articulate their spiritual life, were lost; but a substitute was
improvised with polyrhythmic hand clapping and foot-stamping.
The slaves called the adaptation “shouting,” after the African
saut , meaning to walk or run around”.

Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside, University of Illinois press, 1984, p.160

The ancestors who came out of what is now Angola, for instance, had been exposed to Christian teachings for centuries. It is from the bowels of that people prophetess Kimpa Vita (1684-1706) came. Perhaps it is also worth saying that the Shouters’ mourning rites have much in common with ceremonies that initiate boys and girls into adulthood, the Sande and Poro of the Mende people, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, for example.

Catherine Vincent was both mother and daughter. Mother to her flock and spiritual daughter of Nzinga ( 1583- 1663), Queen of Ndongo and Matamba ( in modern day Angola), patron saint of anti-colonialism in Africa. She is daughter of Ma Femme (Mother of all Women),the Yoruba priestess who kept the drums blazing at Munich roughly one hundred years ago; she is the daughter of Sarah, the sweet-voiced and double-jointed African woman who plotted a revolt aboard a slave ship the Hudibras and was landed and sold in Grenada, in 1787. “When she went shore [in Grenada] she carried African traditions of dance, song and resistance with her” (The Slave Ship, Rediker, Viking, 2007, pp.19-20).

Turbaned in lavender, unshod and defiant, Mother Annie walked the stone –strewn path which led to the banks of the Jordan River; she was recently (December 27, 2010) elevated to the status of benevolent ancestor in a faith which seeks to make things out of its own lived experience.

The Shouters are modern-day Maroons in a place that delights in preening before the ex-landlord’s mirror: The balance wheel is the Shouters’ icon; the parrot is the emblem of the snivelling colony in the see-through mask.

We have much to learn from the Shouters- self respect, self-esteem and the independence of the Sister Evas ;Independence must commit us to a modicum of independent thinking, shouldn’t it?
I look to the banks of the Jordan and a flag flies proudly, on this flag the words of Vera Bell’s great poem are inscribed:

“Ancestor on the auction block
Across the years
I look
I see you sweating, toiling, suffering
Within your loins I see the seed
Of multitudes
From your labour
Grows roads, aqueducts, cultivation
A new country is born
Yours was a task to clear the ground
Mine be the task to build”

Ring the bell.

February 5, 2011