Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community.

Katie Geneva Cannon. New York: Continuum, 1995. 191 pp. $19.95.

Reviewed by

La Vinia D. Jennings University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Strongly recommended by James H. Cone as essential reading for "every theologian, student and lay person . . . to measure the breadth and depth of their theological commitment," Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community is a provocative blend of moral and black liberation ethics, Black women's literary history, African American history and culture, and biblical interpretation. Its author, the Reverend Doctor Katie Geneva Cannon, Associate Professor of Religion at Temple University and the first African American woman to be ordained to the ministry in the United Presbyterian Church in the United States (1974), anthologizes her "canon," fourteen interconnected essays that originally appeared between 1984 and 1993 in publications as wide-ranging as the Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, Zora Neale Hurston Forum, and Victoria Byerly's Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South.

As a continuous whole, the essays successfully accomplish their mission of chronicling the process by which blacks were divested of moral status through dehumanizing slavery and white Christian ideologies yet persevered against attacks on their personhood and humanity. In particular, black women as moral agents, drawing upon survivalist techniques and strategies that assisted them in humanizing their environment, rejected teachings that attempted to reconcile slavery with the teachings of Jesus Christ, white supremacy, and male superiority. Enlisting an unconventional, Christian, and secular ethics methodology, Cannon turns to black women's literary tradition to interpret and explain the black community's ethical values. "I have found," states Cannon, "that this literary tradition is the nexus between the real-lived texture of Black life and the oral-aural cultural values implicitly passed on and received from one generation to the next."

The essays begin by exposing the role that the transoceanic abduction and enslavement of Africans played in excluding black people from every normal human consideration and prerogative defined by American culture. Branded like cattle with the slave company's mark and held in corral-like pens, robbed of familiar social ties, and exploited for whites' profit and pleasure, black people under the grip of chattel slavery and its corollaries - white supremacy and racial bigotry - were denied "any sort of social recognition . . . as thinking, religious, and moral beings." Only under rigidly controlled conditions was worship allowed, while preaching, assembly together, and literacy - including reading the gospel - were forbidden.

As a liberation ethicist, Cannon deftly unmasks the hermeneutical distortions of the majority of white Christians, North and South, who passively and unquestioningly accepted slavocracy. The rank and file white church membership, she points out, identified with and copied rationales, rituals, and values of slaveholders, making slave ideology and Christian life inseparable. Protestant churches never legislated against slavery; at most, some "gently" apologized for the "peculiar institution." These distortions asserted that Americans of African descent were innately and permanently inferior - "Baboons on two legs gifted with speech" - whose perpetual servitude was sanctioned by Genesis 9:25-27 (the story of Ham). Slave apologists such as George Fitzhugh, Thomas R. Dew, and William A. Smith argued that blacks were designed for subjugation and obedience and that slavery was divinely ordained.

In chapters four through eight, chapters literary scholars will find of particular interest, Cannon refutes the Christian ethical amorality and immorality of blacks and identifies the writings of black women as repositories for understanding the ethical values and moral wisdom of the black community. The Bible, she maintains, is the highest source of authority for most black women, and the Black Church and Black Religion have been their principal sustaining forces. Historically guided, the literary canon of black women reflects collective values, not individual ones. Moreover, since their writings emphasize life within the community and not conflicts with outside forces, their novels, poetry, and short stories mirror the realities of black existence. Three "pressing concerns that these texts compel womanist scholars to bring to the table of ethical discourse" are "colorism," "moving beyond a single vision of vaginas" (validating the womanhood of black women), and what critic Mae Henderson terms "black women's bodies as texts." Mary Helen Washington's collection Black-Eyed Susans and the novels of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison deal with these issues.

Cannon regards Zora Neale Hurston as exemplary of the woman writer who contributed concrete depictions of black female life structured on moral agency. In Jonah's Gourd Vine and Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston looked to black experience exclusively. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, protagonist Janie Crawford creates a new code of values to meet her needs, and in Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hebrew and African American experience intersect.

Observing that Hurston's work, like the work of numerous black women writers, contains full-length sermons, prayers, and other allusions to religion, Cannon stresses the need for womanist critiques of homiletics that challenge conventional biblical interpretations that characterize African American women as" 'sin bringing Eve,"wilderness-whimpering Hagar,"henpecking Jezebel,"whoring Gomer,"prostituting Mary-Magdalene,' and 'conspiring Sapphira.'" Given that issues of misogyny, androcentricity, and patriarchy affect sacred rhetoric, these critiques analyze how sermonic texts participate "in creating or sustaining oppressive theoethical values and sociopolitical practices."

In sum, Katie's Canon is a stimulating amalgam of oppositions. It references the particularity of private experience to illuminate the universality of public practice. It synthesizes theory and practice and transgresses disciplinary boundaries. Calling for theoretical reform, it exposes the interpretive and rhetorical hypocrisy and oppression in the Black and White Churches, and it indicts ethical studies' topical omission of black women and the intersection of race, class, and gender. In its treatment of sacred rhetoric, it complements the discussion begun in critical works such as Dolan Hubbard's The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination.