Mourning Benches in Sumter County, Alabama

Topic: Early Versions
Emancipation instantly terminated plantation communities, and left Freedmen to create their replacement.  While African-American Baptist churches were evolving as an alternative, individuals were stranded between two worlds.

Hester Frye was living with the son of her mother’s owner when Ruby Pickens Tartt met her in the 1930s near Tishabee, across the Tombigbee river in Marengo County, Alabama. [1]  She said her “mammy come out here with Marsa Bob from Charleston, South Carolina, and I was born here, right here in this here yard” [2] around 1870. [3]

Frye lived among whites who “thought religion was a lot of trash” and Robert Hawkins “didn’t allow none of his colored folks to go to church.” [4]  She confessed:

“I used to try to pray sometime when I’d get right lonesome.  I used to shut the door and put my head down in the washpot so it could catch the sound, then pray easy so Mr. Charlie wouldn’t hear me.  I reckon if I had a prayed out loud I might of got religion, but it’s too late now.  Look like I just don’t believe somehow.” [5]

She added she wasn’t going to the barbeque that evening at the local Baptist church [6] because “I ain’t never had no belief and no experience, and you can’t join without you got religion.” [7]

Tom Moore was born the year before Fyre “somewhere in Alabama.”  [8]  While his wife was a member of New Prospect Baptist Church, he told Tartt “I call myself tryin to pray.  I thought once I had religion but I doubted myself; I believe, though, but just ain’t joined.  I just ain’t ’solidated in my mind.” [9]

He shared Frye’s belief that one couldn’t enter a church if one hadn’t had a religious experience.  It was no different than what William Francis Allen heard on Saint Helena Island during the Civil War when a woman told him she wasn’t going to a ring shout because they “wouldn’t let me in—hain’t foun’ dat ting yet—hain’t been on my knees in de swamp.” [10]

As mentioned in the post for 20 March 2019, ring shouts on the South Carolina island were local adaptions of Mende culture to plantation life.  The ritual [11] didn’t transfer with people like Frye’s mother, but the underlying set of values did.

Church revivals developed as the alternative to Mende initiation rites.  Instead of a group of adolescents withdrawing into the wilderness to be prepared for adulthood, individuals withdrew from their routine activities.

Moore’s great-granddaughter, Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine, was born in Bellamy in 1956. [12]  She recalled “In the area of Sumter County where I lived, Revival season usually ran from the first week of August through the last week of September.  During this time, there was no playing, no watching television, no listening to the radio and certainly no dancing.” [13]

The timing coincided with Igbo funereal rituals, which occurred when there was no agricultural activity.  As mentioned in the post for 29 November 2020, a church in nearby Whitfield began its two-week revival at the end of July with a service “for all members who had died during the previous twelve months.” [14]

DeLaine recalled the first week was devoted to “prayer service,” and the second to “preaching.”  She added, “you had to go to your praying ground during the day until it was time to go to church for Revival Services.” [15]

Rosa Little, who was born in 1919, had similar memories of the “old timey revival” near Sumterville.  She said “a mourner or a sinner would have to seek JESUS.  The way you did this was to go to your praying ground or get on the mourners bench at the church.” [16]

Both Allen and Margaret Washington noted “seeking” was the term used in South Carolina to describe the period when individuals were preparing for a religious experience. [17]  Washington said the term was introduced by Methodist preachers. [18]

Calvinism emphasizes single individuals who are preselected by God for salvation, rather than groups.  As such it was at odds with Mende ideas, but was synchronous with Igbo culture that posited spirits bargained with personal gods (chi) to define the conditions under which they would be reborn. [19]  Thus, while Langston Hughes’ church in Joplin, Missouri, mentioned in the post for 3 January 2021, wished to welcome a group, conversion was an individual decision in Sumter County.

In 1967, DeLaine remembered:

“It was during the first week that I had been on the mourner’s bench praying and seeking JESUS.  Finally on that Friday, I made up my mind and went into an earnest and sincere prayer for salvation.  At the end of the prayer, I asked GOD to let me feel his Holy Spirit if he was truly going to save my soul.  As soon as I finished praying, the LORD granted my request.  The Holy Spirit showered down upon me and I started running to find my mother to share the good news with her. [20]

Charles Finney used what he called the “anxious seat” to attack individuals until they fell into despair and begged for forgiveness. [21]  Marian Wright Edelman, mentioned in the post for 3 January 2021, attributed conversions to sermons that “scared us to death about the wages of sin” [22] in a church in the cotton-growing region of South Carolina.

Eldridge Taylor said he “got religion at Mary’s Chapel under Reverend Johnson from Union Town, Alabama.  And buddy when that old preacher started preaching, the Holy Spirit got on me and I felt like I got as wide as my front door, I tell you I couldn’t stay on that bench, I had to get up from there.” [23]

Taylor was raised as a Baptist in Coatopa, [24] but Mary’s Chapel is affiliated with the AME Zion church. [25]  The ones who attended the Christian Valley Baptist Church did not mention the mourner’s bench as a place of mortification, but as a means for contacting the world of the spirits.

Alma Edwards Towns, who was born in “1919 on the Patton Place in Coatopa,” [26] recalled she was the one who was making the effort at her praying ground:

“Well, I just kept on praying and praying cause I wanted to be sure.  So I asked GOD to let me see a spot of cloud melt and it did and then seem like something got on me and I had to run and tell it.  Well I ran upon my Grandma Rachel and I started telling her about how I met JESUS and she said this here is a GOD sent child.” [27]

Everyone’s first response was to tell someone: DeLaine went to her mother, Towns to her grandmother.  Washington found that in Africa during their time in isolation, “boys and girls conversed with the spirits and related these conversations to the altar parent, who interpreted them.” [29]

In 1846, a Methodist minister complained a Black “seeker” ignored his preacher and selected a mentor who would “teach him how to conduct himself, and particularly how to pray.  He is also ‘an interpreter of visions’ to whom the seeker relates all his ‘travel’.” [30]

Calvinists have always demanded individuals describe their experiences before their neighbors.  Finney converted this into a form of peer pressure.  African Americans in Sumter County transformed it back into a way of joining the community of saved.

Towns recalled “I just kept on running and telling my religion and all the while the sun was in front of me and it just seemed to shout up and down right in front of me.” [31]  Taylor remembered “the next day I got up and I went every where and all over Dug Hill telling my religion.” [32]

DeLaine wrote “during my childhood days, it was customary that you go from house to house sharing your testimony of salvation.” [33]  She most wanted to tell her great-grandmother, who owned a mule name Mary that jealously guarded her pastures from intruders.  She remembered all the times she had chased her when she went to visit Mama Alice.

“I was determined to share my testimony.  It was at this juncture that I decided no more running!  As Mary charged toward me, I held my right handout in front of me and exclaimed in a loud and commanding voice, “Stop in the name of JESUS!”  And just like that, Old Mary came to an abrupt and complete stop.” [34]

This was so typical of something a teenage girl would have done who had seen The Supremes use the same hand gesture when they sang “Stop!  In the Name of Love.” [35]  What was special was her explanation that “I have always believed that Mary stopped running after me because she recognized the Holy Spirit that was upon me.” [36]

In the 1920s, a man in Columbus, Mississippi, to the northwest of Sumter County, told Newbell Niles Puckett “when a mule balks a ghost is stopping him.” [37]

End Notes
1.  Tishabee and other places mentioned in this post appear on the map posted on 20 September 2020.

2.  Hester Frye.  Quoted by Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Earthy-Ann.”  Southwest Review 397–405:Spring 1944.  87–93 in Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  90.

3.  Brown and Owens.  160.  They noted Tartt didn’t use Frye’s name when she published her portrait.  They added she was not the Earthy Ann Coleman mentioned in the post for 6 December 2020.

4.  Frye.  Quoted by Tartt, Earthy-Ann.  92.

5.  Frye.  Quoted by Tartt, Earthy-Ann.  92.  Robert’s son was Charles Darwin Hawkins.  Fyre lamented.  “I feels the need to be baptized.  It’ll soon be time for me to ride on the Jordan tide, and I ain’t ready, and what is I goin to do.” [38]

6.  Tartt, Eathy-Ann.  91.
7.  Frye.  Quoted by Tartt, Earthy-Ann.  92.

8.  Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine.  The Moore Place Community.  Gordo, Alabama: Southeast Media, 2015.  8.  She published a photograph of Moore and his family, including Safronia Beville and Jerry, the son mentioned in the post for 6 December 2020.  She also reproduced a photograph of herself.

9.  Tom Moore.  “Tom Moore and His Death Money.”  Transcribed by Tart.  77–79 in Brown and Owens.  77.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [39]

10.  Bristol.  Quoted by William Francis Allen.  “Introduction.”  The Slave Songs of the United States.  Edited by Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison.  New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867.  xii.

11.  I’m not sure we know exactly what people were doing with their “iron pots,” so I don’t know what older rituals were being reenacted.  There’s general agreement though that ring shouts like those among Gullah-speakers on the South Carolina coast were limited to that area.

12.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  i.
13.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  28.

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

15.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  28.  Emphasis added.

16.  Rosa Little.  Interviewed by Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine in Hamner, Alabama, on 29 October 2011.  13–15 in  Back Then.  Edited by Tammy Jackson Montgomery and DeLaine.  University of Western Alabama website. 14.  Emphasis added.  It includes her photograph.

17.  See the post for 20 March 2019 for more details.

18.  Margaret Washington Creel.  “A Peculiar People.”  New York: New York University Press, 1988.  285.

19.  Richard N. Henderson.  The King in Every Man.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972
2003 edition.  110.

20.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  28–29.  Emphasis added.  Kurt Carr used the expression “shower down on me” in his version of “Kumbaya” discussed in the post for 26 August 2017.

21.  Finney was discussed in the post for 12 August 2017.

22.  Marian Wright Edelman.  “Give Children the Richness of Their Heritage.”  U. S. Catholic.  February 1997.  The post for 3 January 2020 has a more complete excerpt.

23.  Eldridge Taylor.  Interviewed by Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine in Lilita, Alabama, on  6 June 62011. 19–22 in Back Then.  20.  Emphasis added.  It includes his photograph.

24.  Taylor.  20.

25.  James Pate identified the church in his “Survey of Black Churches in Sumter County Alabama 1980-1981.”  University of Western Alabama website.

26.  Alma Edwards Towns.  Interviewed by Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine in Demopolis, Alabama, on 22 July 2011.  23–25 in Back Then.  23.  It includes her photograph.

27.  Towns.  24.  Emphasis added.

29.  Washington Creel.  288–289.  The post for 20 March 2019 has a more complete quotation.

30.  Southern Christian Advocate.  30 October 1846 and 30 October 1847.  Quoted by Washington.  286.  Emphasis in original.  The post for 20 March 2019 has a more complete quotation.

31.  Towns.  24.
32.  Taylor.  20.
33.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  29.
34.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  29.

35.  The Supremes.  “Stop!  In The Name Of Love.”  Motown MT 1074.  8 February 1965.  45 rpm. [Discogs entry]  “They performed the song on an episode of the ABC variety program Shindig!” in 1965. [40]

36.  DeLaine, Moore Place.  30.

37.  Ben Rice.  Quoted by Newbell Niles Puckett.  Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926.  114.

38.  Frye.  Quoted by Tartt, Earthy-Ann.  92.
39.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.
40.  Wikipedia.  “Stop! In the Name of Love.”