1Beginning on the shores of West Africa in the sixteenth century and ending in the U.S. Lower South on the eve of the Civil War, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh traces a bold history of the interior lives of bondwomen as they carved out an existence for themselves and their families amid the horrors of
American slavery. With particular attention to maternity, sex, and other gendered aspects of women's lives, she documents how bondwomen crafted female-centered cultures that shaped the religious consciousness and practices of entire enslaved communities. Indeed, gender as well as race co-constituted
the Black religious subject, she argues-requiring a shift away from understandings of slave religion as a gender-amorphous category. Women responded on many levels-ethically, ritually, and communally-to southern slavery. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how they
remembered, reconfigured, and innovated beliefs and practices circulating between Africa and the Americas. In this way, she redresses the exclusion of enslaved women from the American religious narrative. Challenging conventional institutional histories, this book opens a rare window onto the
spiritual strivings of one of the most remarkable and elusive groups in the American experience.