All Saints

Note: The following is a reader's response to Brenda Marie Osbey's All Saints, written for Professor Michael Pasquier's Reli 3010 (Religion in the Americas) class during the Spring 2010 semester. Date of creation: April 18, 2010. I was lucky enough to have taken a class with Osbey when she was a professor at LSU, while she was still the poet laureate of the state. I would be more than happy to answer any questions about her which I can in the comments section.

Brenda Marie Osbey's book of poems, All Saints, paints an interesting picture of the spiritual life of the African Americans of New Orleans in the wake of the captivity and diaspora of the American Antebellum era, and how, even after the Civil War, their lot failed to improve significantly for some time, and the role of Christianity, and especially Catholicism, in the reconstruction of a psyche of a people imprisoned. Aspects of Protestantism are made apparent, particularly the widespread saturation of "Lost Cause" sympathies and ideologies, but fail to take root as strongly as the ritualism of Catholicism, which, concerned as it was with veneration, appealed to the spiritual and animistic beliefs of the African homeland. Catholicism was further ingrained because its saint-oriented worship allowed for Christ to become a secondary figure in his religion, allowing common spiritual focus to shift to a more ancestor-oriented worldview; the idea of a delivering messiah who has already come unsurprisingly fails to inspire those who are still captive. The openness of Catholicism also left the door open for the dominance of othopraxy over orthodoxy, as canonization becomes the purview of the common man, if only unofficially.

Catholicism played a large role in the shaping of an African American culture in the wake of what historian Jon Butler called the "spiritual holocaust" of African belief during the American slave trade era--but only in small pockets. It is difficult to understand to what extent African Americans were Christianized by whites, but at the height of Revivalism (ca. 1830-1850), we do see African Americans participating in and contributing to their own services, and the relics of this melded religion retain remnants of ephemeral, irrational aspects of African spirituality. Intriguingly, Catholicism was largely unknown in the American colonies outside of minorities in Maryland (a small colony founded by Lord Baltimore under British orders as a haven for Catholics, which had long since converted due to Protestant pressure) and New Orleans, due to its Franco-Spanish history, and thus it is safe to assume that whatever spiritual instruction the slaves received, it was through a strictly Protestant lens. Illiterate slaves were given, at best, an incomplete education in Christian doctrine, omitting sections which, like the story of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, praised liberation, while Catholicism was the primary religion of free blacks living in New Orleans, as early as the 1710s, when the first suburb of New Orleans, Treme Faubourg, was founded entirely by free blacks (Osbey 127). Of the most notable slavery apologists who attempted to rationalize the trading of human beings, all were Protestants; the sectarianism which gave rise to the Southern Baptist Convention, emerging from the desire of southerners to refrain from speaking against slavery, does not appear to have occurred within Catholicism, implying that there was no such need for theological hoop-jumping. Whereas Lord Baltimore's colony was intended to be a haven, New Orleans became one naturally, for African Americans and Catholics.

Nevertheless, there are distinctly Protestant ideas which trickle into the cultural religion of New Orleans as presented by Osbey. Most notably, there are injections of what was previously seen in Walker Percy's Lanterns on the Levee as a kind of "manners as morals" philosophy: "wear the memory of the dead plainly/so anyone looking will see/how the decent do not forget" (25). New Orleans' distinct flavor of Catholicism was not left untouched by the (then) Protestant majority, as following the Civil War and the rise of the "Lost Cause" theology in the erstwhile Confederacy, there emerged distinctly Catholic-like statuary honoring the fallen "heroes" of the South, notably within Lee Circle in New Orleans. The vaguely pantheistic nature of Catholicism, with its canon saints, probably allowed for greater acceptance within New Orleans of the Lost Cause's rhetoric, which, though Judeo-Christian in origin, largely left Jesus himself unmentioned (in the entirety of "live among your dead whom you have every right to love," there is not a single mention of Christ). There must have been aspects of this idea of a "Christ haunted" rather than "Christ centered" canon which they found compelling, and which appealed to those ephemeral aspects of African spirituality which survived, "like a stone inside your organs/alone for all the rituals" (21). Osbey writes "i sit at my desk/facing out on the slave-bricked street below" (24); for her, there is no part of the city which does not betray its origins in "cults of destitution," a "whole city of slaves" (118), "free from the indigo the brick factory [...] but oh [...] the church" (119). Butler's use of the term "holocaust" is astute: the cataclysmic disruption of family and spiritual ties, with its accompanying unspoken iconoclasm (i.e., how could the gods let this happen to us) left the free blacks of New Orleans open to ideas which had previously seemed alien.

There is a strange parallel to the subjects of Zora Neale Hurston in her Mules and Men present in Osbey's work. Most of what is known about black worship in the South comes via the memoirs of slaveholders and religious figures, and is to be expected, virtually entirely Protestant; further, the writings of missionaries was subject to those evangelists' own desires to refrain from undermining the masculine authority of the slaveholders, in the attempt to solidify a symbiotic relationship between the church and the state. While Hurston's "liars" were handing down an oral tradition, full of animal fables and folk religion, Osbey presents Catholicism's pervasiveness as reflected in the unvoiced acceptance and practice of Catholic-style ritual, an unspoken lesson. The grassy areas which divide opposing lanes of traffic are known in New Orleans not as "medians," but as "neutral grounds." This is not simply a dialectical ideosyncracy, but the remnant of an era in the city where these areas represented the intermediary zone between the French and Spanish holdings. Osbey seems to maintain that this deference to the past bespeaks a larger cultural significance.

In a lecture, Osbey once noted that the confusing syntax of the often-heard New Orleanian phrase "make groceries" (that is, to purchase goods) was actually a relic of French grammatical construction for the term "make market," a cultural oddity that is so entrenched that it is used by citizens who have no knowledge of its significance or origins. This is not something which is taught, but comes casually and without instruction. It is less "learned" than it is "absorbed" from culture, and is similiar to the presentation of the "untaught lesson" as evinced by Percy. Contrast this with the repetition of folk tales and oral history from Hurston, her storytellers having long since been unable to define where the mythology of Christianity and their own apocryphal but obviously Christian-derived folk religion lies. In New Orleans, a similar idea emerges, as Catholicism's interest in sainthood resonates with the African American community, and, just as the defeated Confederate "patriots" had undergone a kind of apotheosis in the South, devotionalism plays a large role in the shaping of the New Orleanian religion, including the unauthorized illegitimate canonization of saints which went unrecognized by the church as a whole. It is not difficult to see how a city so entrenched in the past, from streets paved with bricks made by slaves to statuary of fallen heroes and villains alike, that veneration of the dead would come naturally, even without the Catholic interest in and obsession with the lives of the saints.

Among the profane saints, of particular note are Mother Catherine and Expedite. In the title of her work, All Saints, Osbey is being playful. The title refers to the bizarre application of the term "saint" to such obviously extra-Christian personifications as Papa Legba, a bastardized version of the avatar of justice of Yorba beliefs, alluding to the inclusion of many non-traditional and seemingly antithetical ideas of the New Orleanian religion, while alternately talking about those that Osbey views as saints, those who are saints to her only in that they are dead and presumably in heaven. Mother Catherine has the advantage of Expedite, in that she, at least, was apparently based upon a real person, while he is an entirely fictional creation; supposedly, a statue meant to be part of the crucifixion scene which was separated from the others and delayed, and the stamped word "expedite" was mistaken for a name (the irony of the adoration of the statue of a man intended to be set up as Christ's eternal agitator--and the adulation of the South for men who had led them into a futile and devastating war in the name of unrepentant ethnocentrism and values which can only be described as repulsive--is palpable).

The constant capture and liberation of the Hebrews as presented in the Old Testament was obviously inspirational to the African Americans who toiled under institutionalized slavery, and to the virtually enslaved "free" blacks who were forced to once again become the backbone of the Southern economy in the wake of the Civil War. Osbey writes of women who wallowed in their own menstrual blood and induced abortion for fear of losing their meager paychecks (15). As noted, the actual figure of Christ remains strangely uninvolved in the practice of Christianity among these African Americans, and one can see why: the Old Testament, which cited liberation as a gift from God, utilized language which spoke of a Promised Land ("the language of Canaan"), and promised a coming deliverer were concepts which appealed to a people with no agency. With the New Testament came the idea that Christ had already come and freedom already given, a worldview incompatible with that of the still utterly disenfranchised African American. Protestant, and especially Puritan ideas, aside from those which managed to infiltrate the religion of New Orleans, were rejected outright because of their obvious conflict with the experience and worldview of the free black and the slave. Osbey writes "if you live right/if you live right/if you live right/but what has living done for you?" (58); to the black citizens of New Orleans, Puritanism offers only an "if," with no apparent "then." "If you live right," then what; what follows that could possibly rationalize the African American experience? "[H]eaven did not come to me either" (59).


Works Cited:

"(Multiple Essays)." Religion and American Culture. ed. David G. Hackett. Routledge, 1995. Print.

Hurst, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. 12th ed. Harper Perennial, 1990. Print.

Osbey, Brenda Marie. All Saints: New and Selected Poems. 2nd ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Print.