Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson

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      The book is divided into three parts. In “Defining,” the chapters explore the overlapping spaces in the puritan Atlantic. The first chapter follows Bermuda’s Atlantic connections to the Caribbean and to Africa in order to begin telling the full story of the definition of bodies on the island. The first African and indigenous Caribbean inhabitants of Bermuda shaped the land and coast, entreated other-than-human persons, and began to make place out of uninhabited space. The next two chapters map the contours and characteristics of Algonquian communities in southern New England and of the puritan body of Christ in Bermuda and New England. Part 2, “Performing,” considers an array of religious practices that in some way challenged English puritan conceptions of the body of Christ. It begins with the uncertain welcome the English gave Natives and Africans into the body of Christ as they debated the parameters of that body. Chapters 5 and 6 examine two groups, English Quakers and Irish Catholics, whose ritual performances and embodied existence interrupted any sharp and easy one-to-one mapping of racial and religious boundaries. Christian communities formed by people of color are the focus of the next two chapters. “Praying Indians” in New England reminded the English that “Christian” was not limited to “English” or even “European.” References to religious instruction in indenture contracts for African and Native children offer a window onto their efforts to gain entry to the body of Christ, a membership that, in English eyes, grew more conditional as the association between darker skin color and servitude strengthened. The third section, “Disciplining,” focuses on three aspects of legal performance that regulated sex in the body of Christ. Unlawful sex was a key vector of ideas about race, religion, and the boundary between insider and outsider. Chapter 9 surveys concepts of, and language about, sinfulness and uncleanness in English and European references to interracial sex. This language was based in religious attitudes about all sex outside marriage, not interracial sex in particular. Substantial Bermudian case law, the focus of chapter 10, revealed a shift in the status of women of color. Through the seventeenth century, women of color were sinners whose sexual activity fell under the purview of community regulation, but by the beginning of the eighteenth century their disappearance from unlawful sex cases signaled their primary definition as property. The appearance of race and specific religious affiliation in English colonial laws regulating sex was irregular. The last chapter focuses on the lesser-known and later appearance of racial language in sex law in Massachusetts and Bermuda, moving beyond Virginia’s more frequently discussed 1662 and 1691 statutes. The 1662 Virginia statute doubled the fine for fornication between “any Christian” and “a negro man or woman,” while the 1691 statute outlawed interracial marriage. Massachusetts divided potential offenders into “Christian” and “Negro or other slaves” in a 1705 law but had less focus on an inherited Christianity than Virginia. Bermuda’s 1723 law did not use religious categories and confined its differentiation to racial labels. The redirected efforts to discipline the body of Christ altered its lineaments to exclude people of color, configuring space so as to give them little place in the community of sinners.

      A Note on Terminology and Editorial Process

      Choosing racial labels and terminology is a fraught process that has no perfect solution. When referring to Native peoples of southern New England, I use specific tribal/sachemship affiliations when possible, and Native and Indian interchangeably when discussing Native peoples as a group or English ideas about Native peoples. Tribe can be problematic because of its association with consigning Natives to a distant past, but it is also important for many Natives today in their ongoing efforts for governmental and public recognition as distinct political entities and so I use it advisedly. I use English for both colonists in New England and in England as many colonists maintained strong ties and traveled across the Atlantic with relative frequency.

      Michael Jarvis argues that the English colonists in Bermuda, linked by dense patterns of trade, family, and settlement and largely free of interference from the proprietary Somers Islands Company, came to depend on each other and by the 1630s experienced an “ethnogenesis of sorts” in which they thought of themselves as “wee Bermoodians” first and foremost. He suggests that the same may have been true even for the earliest African and Indian slaves imported in the 1610s, who gave their island-born children English names. White Bermudian seems appropriate to describe English-descended Bermudians, given that most often that group was marked by its lack of a racial identifier and the word white appeared at least occasionally in records by 1679.⁴³ Using black Bermudian in reference to African- and Indian-descended Bermudians is more problematic. The term contains within itself what James Sweet termed “the quiet violence of ethnogenesis,” the implicit fact that the creative forces marshalled by Africans in the Atlantic world were necessary in the first place because of the destructiveness of the transatlantic slave trade. Subsuming Indians—most of whom were of indigenous Caribbean origin for much of the seventeenth century although Natives from the North American mainland were also present—into the category of black Bermudian elides the direct and indirect ways that European diseases and invasions decimated many Indian peoples of the Americas. Indians reached their largest percentage of the enslaved population listed in probate inventories in the first decade of the eighteenth century, when they made up a fifth of all slaves listed.

      It is true that people identified as Indian and African in Bermuda were in broadly similar situations: the island had never had an indigenous population, so neither Indians nor Africans were in territory to which they had more than a few generations of connection. There was no sustained indication, beyond concerns over one particular shipment in the mid-1640s, that white Bermudians were unsure about enslaving Indians. But Bermuda was not completely isolated. The difference between Indian and African mattered as part of ongoing debates over the meaning of race as a way to classify humanity into hierarchical categories based on sets of characteristics marked by skin color.⁴⁴ I have chosen to use black and Indian when the Bermudian records use specific identifiers of “Negro” and “Indian,” but the somewhat ahistorical Bermudians of color when referring to Africans and Indians as a group in Bermuda specifically.

      For ease of reading quotations of primary sources, I have silently substituted th for the thorn (y), expanded abbreviations, and switched u and v, i and j to conform with modern usage. As a reminder that the words were recorded in a very different time, however, I have reproduced irregularities in spelling and syntax.

      Part 1. Defining

      1. “One Indian and a Negroe, the first thes Ilands ever had”

      In August 1616, the English ship Edwin returned to Bermuda after a voyage to the Caribbean. In addition to “plantans, suger canes, figges, pines, and the like,” it carried two individuals whose arrival marked an important event in Bermudian history and in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. Disembarked on the twenty-one-square-mile island were “one Indian and a Negroe, the first thes Ilands ever had.” In having these first non-European inhabitants brought to Bermuda, Governor Daniel Tucker had acted on the Somers Islands Company directives to send a ship to the Bahamas to trade for “sundrye things . . . for the Plantacion, as Cattle Cassadoe Sugar Canes, negroes to dive for pearles, and what other plants are there to be had.” The English were hoping that Bermuda’s formidable reefs would yield riches in the form of pearls, and they took steps to secure skilled African and Indian experts from Spanish colonies in the Caribbean.¹

      The arrival of the two pearl divers brought in the Edwin was significant in several respects. It began the multicontinental habitation of an Atlantic island: Bermuda was one of the few places Europeans settled that did not have an indigenous population. The instructions from the colony’s proprietary company to seek out an enslaved African and an Indian showed English eagerness to learn from Iberian colonization techniques, as the divers’ arrival was made possible by sixteenth-century English privateering raids on Spanish and Portuguese ships and colonies. The disembarkation of the two men marked the earliest introduction of enslaved labor to an English colony in the Americas, three years before the São João Bautista СКАЧАТЬ