The Abundant Life Prevails: Religious Traditions of Saint Helena Island. (Book Reviews).

The Abundant Life Prevails: Religious Traditions of Saint Helena Island. By Michael C. Wolfe (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, c. 2000. Pp. viii, 184. $24.95, ISBN 0-918954-73-8.)

While most recent Sea Island scholarship emphasizes Gullah folklore and linguistics, Wolfe argues for a renewed attention to religion in order to understand the people of Saint Helena Island. He identifies Gullah religious traditions, a product of Christian and African beliefs and practices, as the source of St. Helena's community unity and survival. He also examines the force of religious faith in the work of the missionaries who came to the island and founded its Penn School in 1862, which later achieved renown as a community and civil rights center.

Wolfe deals only briefly with the antebellum roots of Gullah religion and then recounts the familiar story of the 1862 Port Royal experiment that brought northern abolitionist teachers and missionaries to educate and Christianize the Gullah people in the New England way. When the war and the experiment ended, Ellen Murray and Laura Towne stayed on, expanding Penn School and funding it with their inheritances. The islanders sent their children to the school while continuing to maintain their syncretic religious practices.

Wolfe chose his book title fittingly; he makes his most significant contribution in his treatment of the "abundant life" movement (roughly 1900-1950), through which Penn School became a small part in a worldwide missionary effort to "save the world in our generation" (p. 62). Using personal papers and the speeches and writings of Penn School's new leaders, Rossa Cooley and Grace House, Wolfe portrays them as the twentieth-century counterparts of Towne and Murray: dedicated women steeped in the mission spirit and the teachings of the Social Gospel. They worked with islanders to bring about the "abundant life" in its material as well as spiritual components, and the island women enthusiastically attended classes on health and home management and actively worked to decrease infant mortality. Penn School teachers also promoted scientific farming methods and spearheaded the formation of agricultural cooperatives by initially skeptical farmers, encouraged by their Baptist preachers. As a result, outmigration declined compared to other Sea Islands, a measure of success for the Saint Helena community.

Penn School closed in 1948, but the renamed Penn Community Center played a significant role in the civil rights movement; with its Social Gospel and YMCA connections, it was one of the few places in the South where biracial groups could meet in the 1950s and 1960s. Septima Clark and Myles Horton conducted Highlander citizenship schools, and members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, including Martin Luther King Jr., held retreats and planning meetings at Penn Center.

Since Wolfe argues for the centrality of religion in St. Helena's community building, he should have devoted more attention to the roots of that religion in the antebellum era. Although he correctly states that by 1860 "[s]outhern blacks knew how to operate their own congregations and how to pastor their own people" (p. 8), it is unclear from this book where the Gullah people's knowledge and establishment of Christianity came from, how they practiced their religion, and how they interacted with white practitioners of religion before the Port Royal missionaries came. Wolfe failed to take full advantage of the literature on these topics, which would have strengthened his argument for religion's enduring roots on Saint Helena Island. However, his thorough and valuable treatment of the little-known, early-twentieth-century period of Penn Center's history adds this book to the essential works on the people of the Sea Islands.

JANET D. CORNELIUS
Penfield, Ill.