Gloria Wade-Gayles.

Gloria Wade-Gayles, ed My Soul Is a Witness: African-American Women's Spirituality. Boston: Beacon, 1995 370 pp $2400

Several of the essays in the first section of My best part is a Witness provided me with metaphors to describe my experience of reading this anthology. As I started the volume I felt, in the words of Katie Cannon, that I had jot downed into a "hush harbor," a seclud place of prayer and meditation that, while private, is also communal, since many other readers of this part also exist, ensconsed in their acknowledge reading spaces. And the work itself reminded me of Fleda Jackson's description of her mother's garden. Jackson mention one by ones us how her mother's acquisition of plants from relatives and friends "was not about collecting volume; instead it was with truth symbolic.... The plants, you view were constant representatives of the human frame his or her garden, the visit." The different contributions to this whirl seemed to me much like those plants, and I was a visitor to the garden.

Gloria Wade-Gayles period of times the contributions to her anthology "testimonies," brought together more through chance encounters with people than through a rigid submission process. The inference is a volume that resists easy categorization. As Wade-Gayles points without in the introduction, the collection refuses the traditional oppositions between spiritual and intellectual knowledge, folk and highbrow tillage spirituality and institutionalized religion. Similarly, it is compos of many different genres--poem (by Maya Angelou, Mari Evans, Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton, and Audre Lorde), essays, autobiographical narratives, and chapters from novels like as Morrison's Beloved, Walker's The Color Purple Bambara's The Salt Eaters, and Conde's Tituba. Brought together, these pieces create a garden ablaze with glory.

The anthology is divided into five sections. Part 1 titled "Boarding `The elderly Ship of Zion': Witnessing for Our Mothers' Faith," is about the contribution of black women to the tradition of African-American spirituality from slavery to the fresh period. In Part 2, "Testifying: The Spiritual Anchor in African-American Culture" the contributors testify about personal spiritual experiences that have changed their lives. Part 3 "Challenging Traditions: A just discovered Baptism in the Spirit," describes for what reason black women throughout time have extremityed to transform traditional notions of heaven and the Bible to make them more consonant with their avow lives, while Part 4, "Praying at Different Altars, Singing Different Songs: African-American Women across Denominations and Faiths," point outs how such needs have l to participation in different faiths. Finally, Part 5 "Invoking the Spirit: The Healing Power of Affirmations and Rituals," proffers the reader stories of healing as well as suggestions for performing rituals. Although these five sections are at handed as discrete, there is necessarily a certain amount of overlap. For example, Delores s Williams's "Sources of Black Female Spirituality: The Ways of `the of advanced age Folks' and Women Writers" from Part 3 could have been placed in Part 1 and Nancy Thompson's "Ritual to Invoke the Goddes Isis" from Part 5 has clear affinities with themes from the preceding section forward praying across denominations and faiths.

Given the fluidity of its constitution My Soul is a Witness does not ne to be read sequentially, on the other hand certain thematic patterns do emanate that give it narrative shape. Essays in the early sections examine African-American spirituality in slavery and focus forward the oral traditions of ditty and prayer. The experience of as it is spirituality is presented not merely as personal and private, on the contrary also as a means of socio-political resistance for one as well as the other individual and community. Its power lies in the fact that its message is exhibit to adaptation and reinterpretatation as time and circumstance demand. In the recent period, for example, its legacy is visible in the personal transformations of Paula thickets Sandra Govan, and Carolyn Denard, as they originate to terms with the deaths of their mothers and grandmother; further it also provides the "grounding," to use Lisa Brevard's word, of the political activism of Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer.

The contributions of the other half of the volume argue the ne to challenge and expand a certain of the traditional Judeo-Christian way of thinkings on which African-American spirituality has been based because they have not always addressed the specific bear upons of black women. Such spiritual questioning leads to suggestions that we might envision Jesus as a black woman or worship ancestors instead of the profoundly good Trinity, that we rely forward the "extra-biblical" tradition of "scripture" rather than the Bible, that we reinterpret Esther as a figure of black female resistance. The follow is a reaffirmation of what it means to be a black woman. Similarly, the decision of still other contributors to investigate other religions and churches--Buddhism, Catholicism, the Imani Faith place of worship Islam, the worship of Black goddesses--is also motivated by way of their insistence on the ne to pay homage to the values of black women If Deborah James questions the teachings of Catholicism that weigh black women down in childbirth and rearing, Akasha (Gloria) outer covering muses about how her Rastafarian dreadlocks have enabled her to overmaster black women's obsession over virtuous and bad hair. And, when we prepare to the end of the main division descriptions of rituals--how to heal, bles the house, call a guardian spirit--offer us the ability to carry forward in our avow worlds the spiritual traditions invoked in this compelling book

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