Chapter 3 - Freedom’s Conduit

Summary

Turning from communities of free people of color in Louisiana to New York City, Chapter 3, “Freedom’s Conduit: Spiritual Justice in ‘Theresa, A Haytien Tale’,” examines early African-American print culture, particularly the first African American short story, the anonymously authored “Theresa, A Haytean Tale” (1828). While Haitian Revolutionary histories in the US have often centered on Toussaint Louverture, “Theresa” follows the travails of a young woman and her all-female family in their struggle for Haitian independence. A cross-dressing spy against the French, Theresa frequently experiences visitations, possessions, and visions from God. Theresa’s political and spiritual labor forms a complex network of spiritual cosmologies and Haitian Revolutionary iconographies that help expand colonized understandings of gender and sexuality. In doing so, the tale reroutes the energy systems of both colonial plantation violence and early African-American domesticity by imagining a prophetic form of female futurity tied to Haitian independence, not biological reproduction. Ultimately, I argue, “Theresa” transforms the cult of Mary, showing how the female body serves as an instrument of divine energies in which the final product is not a child but instead political sovereignty.