Questions at the Crossroads with Quincy D. Newell
A Conversation with Dr. Judith Weisenfeld

January 25, 2024

Judith Weisenfeld: 
This is Questions at the Crossroads. I am Judith Weisenfeld, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where I direct The Crossroads Project, which is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and Princeton University, with the aim of creating deeper understanding of Black religious histories, communities, and cultures past and present. Today, I'm speaking with Dr. Quincy D. Newell, 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. Today we will be speaking about 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.

Thank you for joining me for Questions at the Crossroads. Dr. Newell.

Quincy Newell:
I'm happy to be here. 

Judith Weisenfeld
I want to start by asking how you came to be interested in Jane Manning James, and in the topic of race and gender and Mormonism. After your first book on native Californians and Hispanic colonists in 18th and 19th century San Francisco, how does this work connect to, uh, and or depart from your earlier work?

Sure. So I went to graduate school to work on religion in the American west. That was my focus, and so the book on California obviously fits into that focus. I have always also been interested in the experiences of people at the margins, on the edges of whatever social group we're looking at.

And so when I finished my first book, I already had a new project in mind, because one of my professors had mentioned when I was in graduate school, the fact that the Catawba Indians in South Carolina had all converted to Mormonism in the 1880s. And I was just sort of flabbergasted by that.

How and why would that happen? But I already had a dissertation project, which became the first book. So I filed that away, and kept thinking about it. And then somebody mentioned to me at some point that Latter-day had taken slaves to Utah, which I also thought, what?

And so when I finished my first book, I started working on a second project about 19th century African American and American Indian Mormons, because I was interested in the experiences of people of color in the 19th century in a church that was trying so hard to be white.

So that was the project that I was working on. And during the course of that, I came across Jane James's autobiography and then she just kept popping up in my, you know, she would show up in people's diaries. She would show up in meeting minutes. She just kept sort of appearing.

And finally, I sort of made a deal with her that I would write her biography if. She would leave me alone because she kept threatening to take over this project. And I can't say that she's entirely upheld her end of the bargain. But that was sort of how I got to this biography, was that nobody had written a biography, even though it was clear to me that there was plenty of material out there.

I think that has a lot to do with Mormon studies’ focus on great white men, and to a lesser extent, the great white women of the early church. Jane is not as well documented as those folks are. And so I think in comparison, it looked like how could anyone possibly write a full biography about her?

Because there just isn't enough stuff. But because I was coming from a different background, having worked in graduate school on African American religious history and American Indian religious traditions, I was really comfortable with the idea that there just aren't a lot of documents, and that doesn't seem as insurmountable to me, I think as it does to folks who are used to very well documented subjects.

Judith Weisenfeld
I'm interested, actually, in then what it meant to write biography, how you felt in that genre.

Quincy Newell
It felt really different. We're trained to always have an argument, and I think biographies don't. Don't have a sort of inherent argumentative structure in the same way. And I really actually enjoyed it, because the structure, it was so much easier to work with, just a sort of chronological, like, okay, first this happened, and then this happened, and I'm. I'm kind of telling the story. The challenge for me was then to think about sort of teasing out threads, or themes or, sort of broader connections that weren't obvious from the sources, and how to combine

what I had from the documents, but to give it, I guess, some sort of psychological or emotional depth. To not just say, first this happened and then that happened, but to responsibly speculate about how that might have felt and what it might have meant. And in this book, I tried to, I think in all of my work, I use a lot of hedgewords, maybe this, perhaps that. But those were really important, I think, here to make clear sort of what I could prove and what I was speculating about. 

Judith Weisenfeld
So, tell us a little bit about the life of Jane James and what you want us to know about her having written this biography. 

Quincy Newell
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 and Joseph Smith's nephew standing in for him 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.

Yeah, 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.

Judith Weisenfeld
So you said that biographies don't have arguments really, but there is a kind of implicit argument there that is about, it sounds like, really the struggles to remain faithful as a Mormon in this period for her. And I've heard you talk in other contexts, and it sounds from what you just said that this is also of interest to you. What the church is figuring out kind of ritually in this period in terms of how to, or kind of, I guess, insider-outsider question. So she's an insider, but also an outsider in lots of ways. 

I think what you show in your work is how her presence and her insiderness and her commitment requires certain kinds of ritual and theological adjustments. 

Quincy Newell 
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. 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.

She also practices a kind of Mormonism that is very charismatic. It fits well with the early church. It does not fit well in the later church. And the kinds of practices that she has are really unfamiliar to a lot of contemporary Latter-day Saints now.

So she spoke in tongues at meetings. This was not uncommon at the time that she was doing it, but today it would be shocking for somebody to do that at a Latter-day Saint church service. She had visions and dreams. She received information directly from the Holy Spirit, and those charismatic experiences, I think, stood in for her in place of any kind of temple experience. So that becomes the kind of most important, the center of her faith, whereas for Latter-day saints, especially now, I think the temple is seen as kind of the central experience of the faith.

So in many ways, I think for Jane, she wanted those temple experiences because she wanted to be sealed to her family. And she wanted, especially as she was aging, she wanted to know that she would see her children and her family on the other side. But she wasn't looking for the temple experience as sort of a satisfying, just religious experience, if that makes sense.

Judith Weisenfeld
I'm getting a sense of what's at stake in the project for Mormon studies. And I know there's been a lot of workin the last decade or more. It goes back even earlier, within the field to to reclaim these histories of Black Mormons and think about diversity in the early Mormon experience. And the Century of Black Mormons project and other things have kind of continued that. But I wonder what you think about how this work, how your work on Jane James and the broader work to recover the stories of black Mormons fits within the broader field of African American religious history.

What kinds of contributions do you think this work makes? What might people in the field of African American religious history learn from engaging Jane's story or the broader landscape now of early black Mormons? 

Quincy Newell
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.

That's obviously something that you've shown brilliantly in your own work. 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.

Judith Weisenfeld

And your current project is comparative with African American Mormons and Native American Mormons, right. I mean, these are different, the church's posture towards these groups is different. And I wonder if you have thoughts about what happens when we bring Native Americans into the story of people in relation to African Americans in this predominantly white church.

Quincy Newell
Yes, it is implicitly comparative. The church saw Black people as descended from Cain and Canaan and therefore sort of at the bottom of the spiritual hierarchy, so to speak, whereas they saw American Indians as descendants of Lamanites, one of the groups of people who show up in the Book of Mormon. Lamanites are the bad guys, basically, in the Book of Mormon, but they are descendants of ancient Israelites, and they need to be converted in order to help bring about the second coming of Christ. So they are part of the original chosen people, and therefore they occupy a really different space in Mormon cosmology.

What I want to do in this project is to understand from both of those angles what the experience of Mormonism is like in the 19th century for people who are not white and I think it's helpful both to expand the source base, because there are maybe a few hundred Black Mormons. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of American Indian Mormons in the 19th century, but also to think about sort of those different experiences. Black people were not allowed to be ordained, to do most temple ceremonies. American Indian men were ordained, and they were allowed to go into the temple and be sealed and receive their endowments and so on. That I think, I hope will provide a better understanding of how Latter-day Saint leadership was thinking about in general and sort of triangulating, give us a better sense of how whiteness is shaping Mormonism in particular kinds of ways as well. 

Judith Weisenfeld
You said that you wanted, in doing this biography of Jane James, to make sure that some of the more uncomfortable aspects of her experience were on the table as people are crafting her memory more commonly now, or she's become more prominent. What has the reception been of the work? I know you won a prize from the Mormon History Association, but is there some pushback to that? 

Quincy Newell
Yeah, not a lot, I wouldn't say. My experience with Latter-day Saint audiences is that they are very eager to learn about Jane. They are very uncomfortable with the idea that the church sealed her as a servant to Joseph Smith and they don't tend to express a lot of that out loud. I think it helps that I'm a professional, I'm an outsider and I'm not coming at them personally.  I've got the receipts. I mean, they can't really be like, no, she wasn't sealed, and the first question almost always is, she was excluded from the temple during her lifetime, but in 1978, the policy changed. Have her temple ceremonies been done? Has her temple work been done? And the answer to that is yes, but I won't talk about that when I talk about Jane until we get to the question and answer period, because I want people to sit with the idea that from her death in 1908 until 1978, well, and during her lifetime, she was not allowed to have the temple ceremonies that white Mormons took for granted. And I think knowing that her temple work has now been done as she wished it to be done lets people off the hook in a certain kind of way. It's okay now, but it wasn't okay for 100 years or more. 

And I think that that is a discomfort that needs to be sat with in certain kinds of ways. I've gotten some pushback for the way I talk about Brigham Young, and I don't spend a lot of time in my scholarly life thinking about Brigham Young, so I haven't done lots of reading about him, so that may be justified. I may have painted with too broad a brush, but I'm kind of okay with that.

Judith Weisenfeld
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? 

Quincy Newell
I mean, 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. 

Judith Weisenfeld
That's great. Well, thank you so much. This is really fascinating, and I look forward to the new book when it's done. 

Quincy Newell
Thank you so much. This was really fun.