No Cross, No Crown: Black Nuns in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans.

By Sister Mary Bernard Deggs. Edited by Virginia Meacham Gould and Charles E. Nolan. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xxxviii], 226. $44.95, ISBN 0-253-33630-9.)

"We are not to be played with...." declared Sister Mary Bernard Deggs in the closing pages of a journal she kept from 1894 to 1896 (p. 191). Her words capture the indomitable spirit that inspired the Sisters of the Holy Family, a community of black nuns in New Orleans, to overcome innumerable obstacles in their efforts to minister to the spiritual, educational, and physical well-being of black New Orleanians. Deggs's unique journal, written in her halting English (she spoke and thought in French) and painstakingly edited by Virginia Meacham Gould and Charles E. Nolan, recounts the early history of the Sisters of the Holy Family between 1842 and 1896. Deggs's journal is not an easy read, however: it is part primary source (Deggs was probably a student of the Sisters of the Holy Family in the 1850s before her entry into the community at age twenty-six), part biography, part faith-filled chronicle in the medieval tradition, and part West African tale in its cyclical storytelling.

Deggs recounted the sisters' story through five biographical sketches that inadvertently reveal an arc of social change from the antebellum free women of color who founded the religious community--Henriette Delille (acknowledged as the principal foundress), Juliette Gaudin, and Josephine Charles--to Mother Mary Austin Jones, the first English-speaking mother general, who assumed office amid an emerging system of Jim Crow and whose election to office reflected growing diversity among the once exclusively Francophone sisterhood. Deggs interpreted her religious community's struggles as evidence of God's providential workings amid the world's sufferings, and she viewed suffering as an avenue to salvation--hence her words, "no cross, no crown" (p. 8). Central to the identity of Deggs and her fellow sisters was a conscious identification with the suffering Jesus through the poor of their race, both slave and free--"our people" (p. 37)--for whom the Holy Family sisters established asylums, orphanages, and schools. Remarkably, the sisters managed to fashion a measure of autonomy, tenuous and fragile though it was, within the boundaries of a male-dominated, often racist church. (White priests served as spiritual directors of the sisters and were sources of both encouragement and frustration.)

Editors Gould and Nolan provide an excellent historical introduction that draws on Gould and Emily Clark's recent article on the "feminine face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans" (William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 59 [April 2002], 409-48) to link the Sisters of the Holy Family to an earlier tradition of female (black and white) evangelization in the city. Short introductory essays (the first two being the strongest) also precede each biographical sketch, thus providing religious, social, and political background, though the last tends to be thin. The explanatory notes that identify people and events as well as scriptural references are helpful and thorough. Though sometimes repetitive and hagiographic, the journal gives voice to previously obscure women of color in New Orleans and provides a unique if often sketchy glimpse into the personalities, struggles, achievements, and even foibles of the women who led the Sisters of the Holy Family. Its publication is a welcome addition to the growing literature on both free women of color and religious women that challenges stereotypes and gives us a better understanding of the remarkable role such women played in church and society.

STEPHEN J. OCHS
Georgetown Preparatory School