Questions at the Crossroads with Dr. Quincy D. Newell

A Conversation with Dr. Judith Weisenfeld

[This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen the recording of the full conversation, which includes additional questions, below.]

Dr. Quincy D. Newell is the Walcott-Bartlett Professor of Humanistic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Hamilton College. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her work in American religious history focuses on the construction of racial, gender, and religious identities in the nineteenth-century American West. She is the author of Constructing Lives at Mission San Francisco: Native Californians and Hispanic Colonists, 1776- 1821, and the co-editor, with Eric Mason, of New Perspectives in Mormon Studies: Creating and Crossing Boundaries. Our conversation focused on her most recent book, Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon, which was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press and was awarded the Best Biography Book Award from the Mormon History Association.

Tell us a little bit about what you learned about the life of Jane James.

Jane was born, we think, in the early 1820s in Connecticut. She was born free. Her mother had been enslaved but was free by the time that she was born. Her family had some resources. It looks like they owned their own home. But she was, I think, bound out when she was about six, possibly indentured to a white family in a neighboring town, and grew up essentially working for them as a servant. When she was a young woman, she had a child out of wedlock. The father's identity was never known.

And then she joined the Congregational Church that her employers belonged to. Shortly thereafter, she heard Mormon missionaries preach, and she decided she was going to join that church. She brought the rest of her family into the church, it looks like. And then in 1843, they set out with an interracial group of Mormon converts from Connecticut, heading for Nauvoo, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi river where the church was based at the time. They got part of the way there.

It's unclear exactly where this happened, but the Black members of the group were not allowed to proceed with the white members. They were not allowed passage on the boat, probably, because they were Black. And so, they walked either from Buffalo or from someplace in Ohio all the way to Illinois. The white folks took boats for the rest of the time. So, you know, Jane and her family traveled for a few months. The other people in the group traveled for a few weeks. When they got to Nauvoo, Jane started working as a servant in Joseph Smith's home.

So she knew Joseph Smith. She knew Emma Smith, his wife, his first wife. And she later claimed that some of Joseph Smith's other wives whom he had married clandestinely, revealed the secret of polygamy to her well before it was known publicly in the church.

She met and married another Black convert while she was there. And when Joseph Smith died, she went to work for Brigham Young. She and her family went to Utah with the faction of the Mormon movement that became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that's based in Utah.

She remained a faithful Mormon for the rest of her life and died in 1908. She outlived almost all of her children. She had at least eight children and only two outlived her. Her husband divorced her in 1870 and he took off and went to Portland, Oregon. She married another Black man for a few years, but that relationship didn't last.

Because she was Black, she was not allowed to do most temple ceremonies. She was allowed to do baptisms for the dead, and she did that on at least three different occasions. But she kept telling the leaders of the church that Joseph Smith had offered her the option of being adopted to him as a child, which was something that a lot of white Mormons were asking for at the time as well. The idea was that they would go through a temple ceremony called sealing, and they would be attached to Joseph Smith's family tree, essentially, so that when they died, they would be with him in heaven.

That's the basic idea. Jane said that Joseph Smith had offered this to her as well, and the leadership of the church, I think, just could not wrap their heads around the idea of giving Joseph Smith a Black daughter in the afterlife. And so eventually they gave up and said, okay, fine, we will seal you to Joseph Smith, but we're going to seal you as a servant rather than as a child. And so that ceremony was performed in May of 1894.

Jane was not allowed to go to the Temple for that ceremony. It was performed by proxy for her, by a white woman, um, and Joseph Smith's nephew standing in for him, um, as a proxy. So she was aware that it happened. She wasn't present for the ceremony. I think it's unlikely that she knew exactly what promises were being made at the time. And she continued to petition the leadership of the church for permission to be sealed to justice Smith as a daughter. Afterwards, she was not satisfied with that.

It's the only example of a master-servant sealing that we have in LDS history. So I think the leadership of the church was probably not particularly satisfied with it either. But it's this really interesting moment of ritual innovation, trying to figure out what seems to be a problem for the church.

Jane is remembered pretty well in the church now as an early example of an African American member of the movement. There’s a lot of her history that is sanitized, I think, to make it less uncomfortable for members. And so part of what I wanted to do with the book was to bring out the less comfortable aspects of her history so that folks could wrestle with all of it.

What is important for readers to know from your biography of Jane James in Your Sister in the Gospel?

Jane is an interesting figure in part because as a woman, she's not allowed to hold the priesthood during the 19th century. So in some ways, for the 20th century church, she's an easier person to remember as an example of the church being sort of always already diverse than some of the Black men who were members of the church during the 19th century. There's a man named Elijah Abel who becomes a member of the church fairly early on, receives ordination with the full knowledge of Joseph Smith, serves as a missionary for the church, serves in some of the higher leadership bodies in the church. And, as the 19th century wears on, the church becomes more restrictive about sort of racial qualifications for full membership, essentially.

And Elijah Abel is harder to talk about, I think, in the 20th century and 21st century church because you have to wrestle with that priesthood piece, whereas for Jane, you don't have to wrestle with the priesthood piece because she was never allowed to have priesthood anyway because women weren't allowed to have priesthood.

There's some arguments about that in the LDS church and what that means. But the sealing ceremony, I think, is particularly difficult and what's interesting about Jane to me is that she knows all these church presidents intimately. And she works for Joseph Smith, she works for Brigham. She like calls on Wilford Woodruff and John Taylor and just goes and has a chat with them. And in some ways I think there's a way in which, when Brigham young tells her no or John Taylor tells her no, she can just sort of be like, whatever, he's a human being, there will be another one, and that allows her a sort of different perspective than some of the later converts.

What is at stake in this project?  What might people in the field of African American religious history learn from engaging Jane's story or the broader landscape of early Black Mormons?

So two things, I think. One is that Jane's story serves as kind of a microcosm in some ways, or a case study to think about how racial identity and religious experience shape one another. And thinking about Mormonism, which feels like such a white religion, then looking at the experiences of Black people or people of color in that religion sort of throws the influence of race into sharp relief, I think, because it's so easy to see how race is constituting that person's experience in a different way from the standard story.

The other thing that I think Jane shows us and that work on Black Mormons in general show us, is that when we think about Black religion or African American religion, we really have to take into account even predominantly white religious institutions and think about what the experiences of people of color in those spaces might look like as well, and how that helps us think more broadly about the diversity of Black religion.

Do you have thoughts about kind of future directions in the field of African American religious history generally, things you're interested in or things that are still kind of lingering with you about Black Mormon history?

 I think the field as a whole is in fantastic shape. There's so much great work out there, and I always can't wait to see what's coming next. People are thinking so creatively about Black and African American religions and about what they can teach us both about those topics specifically but also more broadly about American religion, about religious history, about religion in general.

I still think that there is a lot of the sort of basic research to do, the kind of documenting of people's lives. One of the things that I've been doing as I work on this project about Black and American Indian Mormons in the 19th century is going through periodicals for the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the sort of smaller –they called themselves Josephites sometimes because they were led by Joseph Smith III, as opposed to Brigham Young. We don't have a good accounting of the Black people who were a part of that movement, but they were ordaining Black men.

Just the other day I ran across a Branch that was organized in 1870, and the man gave the names of all of the people who were in that branch. They were all Black people, one was ordained as a deacon, I think, and one was ordained as a teacher. So lower levels of priesthood, but still, this is a piece that we just don't know about.

In every book project, I think there is a piece where you think, why hasn't somebody done this yet? Because I don't really want to do this. And I think this might be that piece for me, just sort of going through and creating the database of folks, to the extent that we can, of the black people who are involved with this aspect of the movement. Obviously, there is lots to do outside of Mormon studies as well, but these are the examples that I'm familiar with right now.

Posted January 25, 2024