Sumter County, Alabama, Religious Rituals

Topic: Early Versions
Rituals for baptisms and death are the African-American religious rites of passage best known to outsiders.  After the Civil War, Walter Fleming wrote in Alabama:

“Baptizings were as popular as the opera among the whites to-day.  That ceremony took place at the river or creek side.  Thousands were sometimes assembled, and the air was electric with emotion.  The negro was then as near Paradise as he ever came in his life.  The Baptist ceremony of immersion was preferred, because, as one of them remarked, ‘It looks more the business.’  Shouting they went into the water and shouting they came out.” [1]

In Sumter County, Oliver Bell remembered “us got baptized in the river back of Horn’s Bridge, but that wasn’t till after the Surrender.” [2]

Margaret Washington connected baptisms among Gullah-speakers in South Carolina with Mende initiation rituals. [3]  The Julia Tutwiler Library has photographs of one on the banks of the Tombigbee that match those described by Washington.  In one picture, five men, dressed in white, are standing in the water with a pastor clothed in black.  In another, a large group is assembled on the bank.  Most are wearing white.  The skirt styles and hem lengths suggest the photo was taken just before or after World War I. [4]

Most descriptions of Sumter County baptisms, however, are as simple as Bell’s.  Amy Chapman told Ruby Pickens Tartt: “I was baptized in Jones Creek, and Dr. Edmonds, a white preacher, joined me to the Jones Creek Baptist church long before the war.” [5]

Similarly, Lewis Brown told Charles Octavius Boothe, he “was baptized by a Mr. Edmonds into the fellowship of the Jones’ Creek Church.” [6]

Alma Edwards Towns was born in 1919.  She told an interviewer in 2011: “I was baptized by Reverend L. S. Partridge from Demopolis, Alabama in the Jim Matthews pond in Coatopa, Alabama.” [7]

These people remember two things: the body of water, and the name of the person who did the initiation.  These perfunctory comments might suggest the long-lasting fear of white vigilantes who disrupt public ceremonies, [8] but I suspect they indicate a different cultural heritage than that of the Mende.

As mentioned in the posts for 8 September 2019, many of the slaves in Sumter County came from Igbo areas of modern-day Nigeria through Virginia and North Carolina.  Their most important initiation ceremony occurs soon after birth when the parents seek the identity of the ancestor who has been reincarnated in their child. [9]

Chapman may have been alluding to this ritual when she told Ruby Pickens Tartt “I would admire to stay on a little longer.  There is a baby comin on the Johnson place soon, and don’t nobody know about the signs like I do.” [10]  Her mother came from Petersburg, Virginia, and her father from Richmond, Virginia. [11]

Igbo traditions also may have influenced funereal traditions.  Richard Henderson says Igbo mortuary ceremonies involve two stages: “burial and lamentation.” [12]  In 1866, a Clarke County, Alabama, newspaper reported “black preachers travel about and preach funerals of persons who died many years ago.” [13]  In the 1930s, Tartt noted:

“Among the Negro people of Sumter County the actual internment is referred to as the ‘burying.’  The funeral is preached later on a Sunday chosen by the family, sometimes after a year has elapsed.” [14]

This was an easy tradition for Igbo to perpetuate on Southern plantations where sacred time was limited during certain seasons of the agricultural cycle.  Angie Garrett remembered “If any us died in them days, buried us quick as they could and got out there and got to work.” [15]

More important, Henderson said the the postponed part of the Igbo ritual occurs during the dry season after the harvest is complete. [16]  Ida Gayle said at the Black Bluff Missionary Baptist Church near Whitfield “the fourth Sunday of each July was the beginning of two-week revival services.  On this day funerals would be preached for all members who had died during the previous twelve months.  When a member died, they were buried the same day.” [17]

Tom Moore’s son was killed by a careless driver in the late 1930s.  He told Tartt “it all happened on Saturday and us had to hurry and get the grave dug and bury Jerry before dust on Sunday ’cause we knowed it naturally won’t do to carry him over in the house on Sunday or some of the rest would be gone before this year is up.” [18]

Moore indicates burials were done quickly to lay spirits to rest.  Among the Igbo, Henderson said “when a person dies, the elemental ghostly components of the personal god ordinarily return to the land of the dead, whence they may be born again through a compact with another personal god.” [19]  They are key to maintaining the cycle of reincarnation that is part of the post-natal rituals.

Henderson noted things are more serious when a “bad death” occurs, that is one that doesn’t have a natural cause.  Then, “the ghostly components become attached to the shrine of that spirit and are not reincarnated but remain dangerous to the living.” [20]

When Stephen Renfroe killed Frank Sledge and Caesar Davis in 1869, [21] Oliver Bell remembered the freedmen “went down there that night and got them, and they buried” them. [22]

Tartt attended AmyChapman’s burial in 1938. [23]  She said that after the grave was filled and a mound had been shaped over it, saplings were “placed in the soft earth at its head and foot to mark it.”  Then, “each worker rested his spade against the mound’s side, iron point in the earth and handle pointing toward the sky.” [24]

Next, the preacher asked for flowers.  Following the protocols of white supremacy still governing social relations, Tartt went first “with my bowl of zinnias.”  When the others followed, they “made small hollows in the earth in which they placed their bouquets so that they stood upright.” [25]

When she later asked Chapman’s family about the shovels, they brushed Tartt off with “it is custom.” [26]  The saplings that Tartt took for granted may have come from the Kongo who planted trees on graves as “a sign of spirit, on its way to the other world.” [27]

Chapman was “buried on the plantation where she was born.”  The grave was “beside her Aunt Mary’s and near her sister’s.  A few steps down the hillside were other, unmarked graves, members of her family who had gone before.” [28]

Separate African-American cemeteries with headstones don’t appear in Sumter County until the 1890s [29] when a cash economy had been introduced around Cuba, and individuals and groups could accumulate money to buy land for churches. [30]

That did not mean individuals didn’t know where their parents and grandparents were buried.  It may be the reason people returned to their old masters after the war. [31]  The fact whites believed some freedmen were being loyal or rewarding good people may have been a convenient fiction to which Blacks acquiesced to protect what was sacred to them.

In the late 1930s, Oliver Bell remembered they buried Sledge and Frank “up there in the old Travis graveyard right there on that place.  My mammy and daddy buried there too.” [27]

People carried a map of the unseen in their heads.

End Notes
1.  Walter L. Fleming.  Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905.  273.  His sources were Huntsville newspapers, denomination histories, and “conversations with various negroes and whites.”

2.  Oliver Bell.  “That Tree Was My Nurse.”  Transcribed by Ruby Higgins Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [33]  134–137 in Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  134.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [34]

3.  Margaret Washington Creel.  “A Peculiar People.”  New York: New York University Press, 1988.  293–295.

4.  M. J. Turpentine.  “Negro Baptising ‘Big B’ river, Gainesville, Ala.” and another unlabeled photograph.  Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama.  Reprinted by Alan Brown.  Sumter County.  Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2015.  29.

5.  Amy Chapman.  “The Masters Good but Overseers Mean.”  Transcribed by Tartt.  128–129 in Brown and Owens.  129.  I’ve found nothing about Edmonds.

6.  Charles Octavius Boothe.  The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama.  Birmingham: Alabama Publishing Company, 1895.  117.

7.  Alma Edwards Towns.  Interviewed by Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine in Demopolis, Alabama, on 22 July 2011.  23–25 in Back Then.  Edited by Tammy Jackson Montgomery and DeLaine.  University of Western Alabama website.  24.  Jno. Matthews owned 152 slaves in Sumter County in 1860. [35]

8.  The post for 6 September 2020 has a description of an African-American frolic being disrupted by a man “with a white sheet round him.”

9.   Igbo initiation into adulthood is an individual affair that is a prerequisite for marriage. [36]

10.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Amy Chapman’s Funeral.”  79–83 in Brown and Owens.  79–80.  Tartt simply noted: “the superstitions connected with a baby’s birth were important to Amy.” [37]

11.  Chapman.  128.

12.  Richard N. Henderson.  The King in Every Man.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.  400.  The Igbo source also is mentioned by Newbell Niles Puckett. [38]

13.  Clarke County Journal.  18 October 1866.  Cited by Peter Kolchin.  First Freedom. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972.  118.

14.  Tartt, Funeral.  81.

15.  Angie Garrett.  “Turned Lose without Nothin.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  140–142 in Brown and Owens.  141.

16.  Henderson.  385.

17.  Ida Gayle.  “Black Bluff Missionary Baptist Church.”  1982.  Jud K. Arrington collection, Tutwiler Library.  44 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama.  Edited by Charles Walker.  Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.

18.  Tom Moore.  “Tom Moore and His Death Money.”  Transcribed by Tart.  77–79 in Brown and Owens.  78.

19.  Henderson.  122.
20.  Henderson.  122.
21.  The deaths of Sledge and Davis are described in the post for 13 September 2020.
22.  Bell.  135.

23.  Brown and Owens.  “Appendix: Biographies of Sumter County Singers and Storytellers.”  156.

24.  Tartt, Funeral.  82.
25.  Tartt, Funeral.  82–83.

26.  Tartt, Funeral.  82.  In Columbus, Mississippi, to the northwest of Sumter County, Puckett was told “the tools used in digging a grave are left on the site for a day or so after burial. [39]  In Calhoun, Alabama, they were “laid across the grave.” [40]

27.  Fu-Kiau Bunseki.  Interview, 9 October 1977.  Quoted by Robert Faris Thompson.  Flash of the Spirit.  New York: Vintage Books, 1984.  139.  Bunseki was the Belgian Congo-born scholar who articulated the Kongo cosmology. [41]

28.  Tartt, Funeral.  81.

29.  The earliest date for an African-American cemetery in a list published by The University of Alabama, is 1890 in the Jones Creek Baptist Church. [42]  Jenkins seemed to think few white graves had headstones because of the difficulty of transporting them by steamer and dirt road. [43]  This overlooks the fact part of the county was limestone bluffs.  The raw material was present, but apparently no settler had the skills to make headstones or to train slaves to do the work.  This probably was a consequence of the county’s hostility to skilled tradesmen, especially those from Europe.

30.  The economic renaissance in southwestern Sumter County is discussed in the post for 20 September 2020.

31.  Gwendolyn Midlo Hall believed Igbo women where especially attached “to the land where their first child was born.” [44]

32.  Bell.  135.  The Travis cemetery was a white family graveyard begun for Enoch Travis, who died in 1841.  Travis’ daughter married Ed Bell. [45]  It’s also known as the Bells Cemetery. [46]

33.  For more information on Tartt and the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

34.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.

35.  Tom Blake.  “Sumter County, Alabama: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census.”  Ancestry website.

36.  Vincent De Paul U. Mbah.  “Igbo Child Initiation and Christian Baptism: A Case Study in Inculturation.”  PhD dissertation.  Universidad De Navarra, 1993.

37.  Tartt, Funeral.  80.

38.  Newbell Niles Puckett.  Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926.  91.  His source was Arthur Glyn Leonard.  The Lower Niger and Its Tribes.  London: Macmillan and Company, 1906.  154.

39.  Puckett.  94–95.  His source was Rena Franks.
40.  Puckett.  95.  His source was Qeither Y. Stanfield.

41.  Wyatt MacGaffey.  “Constructing a Kongo Identity: Scholarship and Mythopoesis.”  Comparative Studies in Society and History 58:159–180:2016.  165.

42.  List of Sumter County Cemeteries.  The University of Alabama, Department of Geography Alabama Maps website.

43.  Jenkins.  164–165.

44.  Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.  Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.  142.

45.  Jenkins.  165.
46.  University of Alabama.