A 19th Century Black Mormon (feat. Quincy Newell)

Professor Quincy Newell (Hamilton College) joins me to talk about Jane Manning James, one of the first black Mormons in the 19th century. 

Transcript

A Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon 

Stephen Betts: Welcome to Scholars and Saints: The University of Virginia Mormon Studies podcast. I'm Stephen Betts.

Stephen Betts: Support for Scholars and Saints comes from the Mormon Studies program in the Religious Studies department at the University of Virginia. 
 
Music for this episode is provided by Ben Howington. To hear more, visit mormonguitar.com 

Stephen Betts: In the 1840s, Jane Manning, a young African American woman joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and traveled to the Mormon city of Nauvoo, Illinois. Despite being prevented from participating in the Church's most sacred rituals, Jane remained true to Mormonism for the rest of her life. Today, I talk with Quincy Newell about what Jane's experience reveals about Mormonism, gender, race, and America in the 19th century.

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Stephen Betts: Quincy Newell joins us today to talk about her book Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, A Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon   from Oxford University Press. Dr. Newell is Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College. She studies American religious history focusing on the construction of racial, gendered, and religious identities in the 19th century American west.

Stephen Betts: Thanks for being with us today. Quincy, 

Quincy Newell: Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. 

Stephen Betts: So Quincy, tell us a little bit about your academic background and what brings you to the study of Mormonism, and then Jane Manning James's life in particular. 

Quincy Newell: Well, when I trained as an academic, I was really interested in religion in the American west, and so Mormons are a huge part of that story, of course. And so they've always been sort of in the background for me, but when I was working on a different topic for my dissertation, one of my professors mentioned the fact that there had been a group of Native Americans who converted to Mormonism in the 1880s, the Catawbas. And I sort of did a double take and thought, I need to look more into that. It wasn't the topic of my dissertation, so I didn't have time to look at it at the time, but it became kind of a second project to look at how Native Americans, but also African Americans adopted Mormonism and what they made of it since, as people of color, they didn't quite fit into the cosmology in the same way that most white Mormons did. So, I was working on that topic and Jane James just kept popping up in my research. First I found her autobiography and a little bit of scholarship about her, and then she just kept appearing in Church meeting minutes, in newspapers, and in people's diaries, all sorts of things. And finally, I was just like, fine: I will write your biography if you will then leave me alone. So, I've written her biography. We'll see if she keeps her end of the bargain. 

Stephen Betts: Yeah. So you note in the book that she's kind of haunted you in this way. I love how you put that. So yeah. You know, your book is really the first academic book-length treatment of Jane James' life. And I'm sure that as you've researched Jane you've uncovered some really interesting details that we didn't know about before. So, what surprised you in this research process? 

Quincy Newell: You know, I think that the moment that surprised me the most was one of the things that I did as I was writing was to create a timeline and just try and slot in every single event that I had any information about and that helped me keep track of my sources and so on. But one of the things that I noticed was that Jane James was sealed as a servant to Joseph Smith in 1894 on May 18th. The next day, she went to a Retrenchment Society meeting and requested that her patriarchal blessing the read out loud to the entire group and that request was granted. And the next day her son died and having those three events occur one right after the other, the sort of chronological compactness of that was really surprising to me. And just sort of made me stop in my tracks for a minute. 

Stephen Betts: Yeah. I mean, her relationship with ritual is something that you really see throughout throughout the book. And I knew that she had been sealed as a servant, but what I didn't know was what you talk about in the book and we can get to this later about how Latter-day Saint leaders kind of innovate this ritual of servant-sealing, particularly for her because she, you know, she's appealed to them so many times and they're trying to sort of meet her in the middle, just this fascinating kind of religious creativity, religious adaptation.

And we'll definitely get into that later. So, in the introduction to the book, you talk about how, you say Jane's story is left out of books on African American history, American women's history, and the history of the American west. And this is, you know, a great contrast with people like Bridget Mason, who, despite the fact that, you know, Jane has left this much more extensive documentary record, that American religious historians don't talk about her and historians of the American West don't talk about her. So, talk a little bit about sort of the politics of representation that are at play here maybe, and why has the experience of a Mormon black woman been considered less valuable in the historiography? 

Quincy Newell: Well, my argument is essentially that Jane doesn't fit the stories that we want to tell about American women's history, about African American history, about the history of the American West, right? And Bridget Mason, or she's better known as “Biddy” Mason. She really does fit into those stories in a lot of ways. Her life traces a trajectory from slavery to freedom. She becomes a community builder. She's one of the founders of the first African American Episcopal Zion Church, I think in LA. And she is, I believe a nurse and a midwife. And so she's a kind of public figure; she's successful. And she fits into this trajectory of progress and enlarging civil rights that we really want to see as kind of the trajectory of American history. Jane James on the other hand, seems to do almost exactly the opposite. Like Biddy Mason, she goes west. She actually has more choice in the matter than Biddy Mason does because Biddy Mason is enslaved when she's taken to California. But Jane James decides to go west, but she decides to go west because she is a member of a church that is led by white men and that outsiders tend to see as repressive of women and certainly repressive of people of color, particularly people of African descent.

And so, because Jane is making these choices to affiliate herself with an organization that seems to be more and more conservative and more patriarchal, and therefore not fitting in with the kind of trajectory of American history and American progress that we really wanna focus on, I think she gets left out of those histories of American women, of African Americans, and of the American West, because she doesn't help us tell those larger narratives. And now to be clear, I think those larger narratives often require a kind of synthesis that means you leave out lots and lots of details. There were other African Americans in the west besides Biddy Mason and Jane James, but we can't talk about all of them, obviously. And so, you pick the ones that help you tell your story and if your story is about progress and enlarging civil rights, Biddy Mason is your person. If you wanna talk about something else, if you wanna talk about conservative women, for example, Jane James might be a better example, but that's not the general story that we usually tell in those cases. 

Stephen Betts: This is really a tension that you explore throughout the book. This tension of not only is Jane as a woman and, you know, certainly Mormon historians have really done a lot of work on recovering the stories of women in polygamy. But, but yeah, the fascinating thing about Jane James is that we have to ask the question, "What does she get out of her religious experience, her religious devotion when she seems to be the recipient of so much oppression, limitation, and that kind of thing?" One of the real challenges it seems like of 19th century African American history generally is sources. African American history in the 19th century is notorious for, you know, its difficulty in trying to reconstruct people's lives because you know, so many societal structures at this point are preventing literacy and written representation. So tell us a little bit about your sources and your method of reading against the grain. 

Quincy Newell: Sure. Well, as I mentioned, I did a lot of Native American history in grad school as well. And my first project was actually Native American history also. And so I've been trained in precisely that: in reading sources against the grain to try and find out what else is going on there that I might be able to extract from this source that isn't what it's ostensibly about. right? And this is a method that's really common in both Native American history and African American history because of the apparent lack of sources. But there have been so many wonderful scholars who have figured out that that "lack of sources" is actually just us looking at the sources, not in not helpful ways, right. And if we look at the sources differently, we can find all sorts of information. So Albert Raboteau who wrote Slave Religion that was published in, I think 1978 is sort of a pioneer in this field and is a kind of inspiration, but Jon Sensbach and Michael Angel Gomez and others who have worked particularly in African American religious history have really been models for me in terms of thinking about what I might be able to find from sources, but also how I might think about the sources differently.

So one of the examples might be the Christmas party at the Smith family home in Nauvoo in, I think 1843, where the Smiths are throwing a gigantic celebration for 50 couples, which is huge. And then just using your imagination, we can all imagine, okay, if I'm gonna throw a celebration for 50 couples, that's a hundred people. So I'm gonna have to plan a menu. I'm gonna have to get drinks and silverware and table settings. And I should probably do something about a band and so on and so forth, right? And, oh, I wanna have a party dress or I wanna have some nice clothes to wear. And so all of that planning and preparation goes into this party. None of it is written down anywhere as far as I can tell, but I know that Jane James is working as a servant in Joseph Smith and Emma Smith's home at the time. And so Jane James must have been involved in all of those preparations and cooking all that food and serving it and so on. And so just knowing about that party allows me to then start thinking about what's going on in the background of that scene and how might Jane James have been involved in this? I can't say for sure of course, that she did act, she prepared this dish or that she cleaned that napkin, but I can say these are the tasks that would've had to have been accomplished. And Jane James likely was involved given the fact that she was being  employed as a servant. And this is what servants tended to do in that time and place.

Stephen Betts: Yeah, that's something that I really enjoyed about the book and that a lot of your readers have enjoyed is your use of what we might call a kind of "hermeneutics of possibility" or maybe even just a kind of uncertainty and a willingness to engage those possibilities that aren't necessarily in the historical record, but are certainly implied as you read against the grain. And I think that really brings her to life. It adds a lot of depth to the picture that you paint of her. So, let's talk about Jane's life. Let's get into a little bit about her upbringing and how she becomes a Latter-day Saint. 

Quincy Newell: Sure. So we don't know exactly when Jane was born, but it was probably sometime in the early 1820s. She was born and grew up in Connecticut. Her family lived in a little town called Wilton, Connecticut, and we know that her mother had been enslaved, but was emancipated. Her grandmother, her maternal grandmother, remained enslaved. And so Jane knew both of those women when she was growing up, but she was bound out probably my guess is as an indentured servant when she was fairly young. And so she grew up working for a white family, the Fitches, in a town next to the one where her mother lived, her father disappeared. And that's probably why she ended up being indentured was because he wasn't around to support the family. And so she's living with this elderly white couple, the Fitches and Mr. Fitch dies when she's fairly young. So that throws things into a little bit of uncertainty and Jane then later has a child. As far as we can tell, she's not married to the father of her child. It's entirely unclear who the man was who fathered the child. And it's entirely unclear whether Jane was raped or whether this was a consensual relationship. My guess is that she was raped, but I don't think the evidence gives us, I don't think we have enough evidence to say for sure. She was adamantly silent about the whole thing and refused to say anything for essentially her entire life. At some point, shortly after her son was born, Jane joined the Congregational church in town. And the reason for that again is unclear. But that was the church that her employer belonged to and so it may have been a way to reassure her employer about her morals: to say, “You know, I know I had this child out of wedlock, but really I'm okay. And you can keep employing me.” It may have been a way to get some leverage, to bring church discipline against the man who fathered the child. It may have been because she was convinced by the message, but for whatever reason, she joined the church and then about a year and a half later, she went and listened to a Mormon missionary who came through town preaching. And she was convinced, and she was baptized. She went and convinced her birth family to be baptized and to join the church and they saved up, they sold their house which they owned and they went to Nauvoo.

So they arrived in Nauvoo in, I think, 1843. And Jane went to work for Joseph and Emma Smith as a servant. Everybody else in her family found jobs elsewhere in Nauvoo or in surrounding areas. And Jane then met and married Isaac James. And so, she already has a child. She meets and marries` Isaac James, who's a black convert from New Jersey. And they have eight children together over the course of their life together. But it's hard to say what exactly it was that Jane found in Mormonism that she didn't see in the Congregational church. But my guess is that there's, there's a sense of new possibility in Mormonism. Mormonism is promising to make the world new. And the Congregational church is promising the status quo. It was the church of how things, really, how things were at the time. And she could go to heaven and things would be different there, but the, the Mormon church is promising that things will be different in the here and now. And I think that might have been really attractive to her.

Stephen Betts: Yeah, I mean, certainly at this time, you know, their missionaries are not going to be advertising what modern Latter-day Saint missionaries would, which would be things like family togetherness in the afterlife, through temple rituals. Because at this point they're still constructing the Nauvoo temple. Joseph Smith is still working out his sort of family theology, his temple theology.[1] So yeah, at this point, the most prominent elements of Mormonism are things like the imminent apocalypse, the gathering and building of Zion. So yeah, it's this very rich possibility for newness, for change, for redemption. You could easily imagine how that could appeal. So, how does she, I mean, you talked about how she meets and works for Joseph Smith. Obviously not everyone is working for Joseph Smith and she, you know, it's in Joseph Smith's home where she learns about polygamy for the first time shortly after arriving. She only works for him for about a year, right?

Quincy Newell: Less than that. Eight months, maybe. 

Stephen Betts: So this is a very critical time in her life. So talk about her work for Joseph Smith and the importance of that time for her. 

Quincy Newell: Those few months were central to her entire religious life from then on as far as I can tell. So Jane dictates her autobiography in the late 1800s, maybe early 1900s and it's, I don't know, 6,000 words long or something it's relatively short and a good third of it, maybe more is concerned with the eight months that she spent in Joseph Smith's home. She's over 80 at that point. And so that becomes a kind of central touchstone for her. It's clear that Joseph Smith looms large in her religious imagination and it's entirely unclear how much time she actually spent with him, whether he was present very much when she was doing the household work seems unlikely. She probably had more interaction with Emma Smith, although Emma Smith doesn't show up very much in Jane’s reminiscences. And so in that sense, Joseph Smith sort of is this figure of imagination in many ways for her who it it's as if the Nauvoo period for Jane, it it's as if she's walking and talking almost with the servant of God, if not with God himself. But I wouldn't say that she worships Joseph Smith in the sense that she thinks of him as a deity, but she certainly thinks of him as having close connection with the divine and as being the best example of humanity that could possibly be offered. Now, I should say that the evidence for that impression comes from much later in Jane's life. From the way she talks about Joseph Smith in public fora and she has good reason to talk about Joseph Smith in those ways to other Latter-day Saints at that moment, because she's trying to build a case to get temple privileges. And she's trying to sort of cement a place for herself at the center of Latter-day Saint history and talking about Joseph Smith and her memories of Joseph Smith, because she is one of only a few people alive who actually interacted with him at that point, that's a good strategy for solidifying her position at that moment in history. 

Stephen Betts: Yeah I love how you're thinking about her relationship with Joseph Smith, because in some ways, even for those later who and many of whom have fond memories and respectful memories of him as both a person and a prophet, this seems to be a really unique way of relating to Joseph almost as a symbol, rather than as a person or a prophet. It's almost like his absence in a certain way is what Jane is interacting with as opposed to, as opposed to his nearness. That's a really fascinating idea. So, you talk about this fascinating moment while she's working for Smith, where she's doing the laundry and she comes across his ritual temple clothing, and this seems to play again, this really important role in her later, you know, religious subjectivity, religious imagination. So talk a little bit about that.

Quincy Newell: Right, so this is one of the first tasks that Jane performs as a servant in the Smith home. She's doing the laundry and she says that she didn't know what this clothing was and she almost falls into a trance. And she says that the Spirit tells her that “They have to do with the new name that is given to the Saints that the world knows not of,” which is a clear reference to temple rituals. And there's this sense that she is getting information directly from God. And she's telling the story again, towards the end of her life in the early twentieth century. And when she's not telling this story, she's petitioning for temple rituals. And it's almost as if she's saying, you know, “God tells me what goes on in temples. You can't keep me out in a sense,” right? “If God would tell me about endowment rituals, why won't you let me do them?” And so there's this kind of back and forth between these memories of Nauvoo and this present effort to make her way into the temple and to get the endowment and to get the sealings that she believes she has been promised and that she believes she needs in order to reach the highest levels of exaltation.

Stephen Betts: Yeah, especially in late 1843, right, or early 1844?

Quincy Newell: Right. 

Stephen Betts: So late 1843, you know, these kinds of rituals are extremely limited to a very small group of people at Joseph Smith's personal invitation. And so yeah, the idea that she would be initiated into this directly from God gives her almost this kind of prophetic status that goes beyond just an involvement in Joseph Smith's inner circle and yeah this is a really fascinating tension. Again, you know, ritual is going to play a very unique role for her and a very central role for the rest of her life. So let's talk a little bit about, you know, she has a close relationship, well, at least she a close proximity, we'll say, to many of the central leadership, leading figures of the Church, particularly in Utah, both female and male. She works for Brigham Young for many years and she lives on part of his property. So talk a little bit about the importance of ritual and how she kind of negotiates the tension between being denied and also this kind of special status that she seems to enjoy. 

Quincy Newell: Right. So she, as I said, she keeps telling these stories about her proximity to Joseph Smith and her proximity to the Smith family in general. But she also works in Utah as a laundress, she's doing laundry for many of the leading families, I think in Utah. She works for Brigham Young in particular for a while. And so does her husband, so do her children apparently in the 1850s, Utah, and then later she maintains relationships with really prominent women. So Zina Diana Huntington Young is one of the women who writes letters on her behalf, for example, And she knows several of Brigham Young's wives, several of whom had been Joseph Smith's wives before. And she shows up in their diaries. She is a regular participant in Relief Society meetings, and Retrenchment Society meetings. And it's in those meetings that she quite regularly speaks in tongues, which is something the Latter-day Saints don't do a whole lot of anymore. But when we're talking about speaking in tongues in the 19th century, what we mean is that she is she and others (she's not the only one doing this) they're experiencing an episode of what's called glossolalia. They're speaking in a language that they don't know that may or may not be a recognized human language Latter-day Saints at the time, understood it to be the language of Adam and of God. And so it is speaking basically through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and often another person in the meeting would be given the gift of interpretation so that the message that's coming through this person, speaking in tongues in a language that nobody understood could then be made intelligible to the audience and that those spiritual gifts were understood precisely as that as spiritual gifts. And they were meant to be for comfort and for encouragement. They were not meant to decide new doctrine, for example, and I think it's important to understand that Jane James is having all of these experiences, these chances and visions and speaking in tongues, but all of it stays within the bounds of reinforcing Church authority rather than potentially undermining it.

So she never uses a vision or an experience of the divine in a way that that could be seen as questioning Joseph Smith's authority or questioning the authority of the president of the Church, whoever he may be at the time. She will engage in exegesis, in scriptural exegesis, and try to convince Church authorities that they should give her the temple privileges that she's asking for. But she'll never say, “Well, God told me that you should do that.” She'll say, “Yeah, but God promised Abraham that through his seed, all the nations of the, the earth shall be blessed. And isn't it time?” “Is there no blessing for me?” is the famous line from her letter. And so that kind of scriptural interpretation is a safe pathway for her to try and question Church authorities judgment perhaps, but she's never going to defy it or try to set herself up as an independent authority about what God wants to have happening, on earth. 

Stephen Betts: I'm glad you brought that up because at this point, particularly after what, 1847, there is a very racial dimension to claiming these kinds of charismatic gifts because you have William McCary who you talk about in the book, you know, William McCary who is presenting himself as this kind of prophetic figure. And he organizes his own sealing ceremony and ritual and he ends up leaving the church and sort of gaining a following. And it sounds like particularly among African American Saints, although maybe correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know who all was in his group.

Quincy Newell: I think that group was actually mostly white folks. 

Stephen Betts: Oh really?

Quincy Newell: Yeah. He presented himself as a Native American prophet and there was this sort of constant tension about his racial identity. Was he really Native American? Was he African American? He passed as Native American, although we think that probably he was mostly African American, it brings into clear relief the ways that racial identities are actually these constructions that we live into and that we perform. And they are ascribed to us and adopted by us on the basis of how convincing our performances are in many ways. And he's trying to be that Lamanite prophet that because Native Americanness has this cultural cache within Mormonism, right. That Lamanites are supposed to be kind of the original Mormons in a way. And so he's trying to do that. He doesn't attract very many African American converts there to be fair. There aren't very many African American converts to attract at this particular moment in Church history. But the concern is largely that he's doing the sealing ceremony, right. Which seems to have a sexual dimension to it, which is sketchy enough as it is, but the fact that it's interracial sex just sort of puts Church authorities over the edge. And they, they do their best to kinda shut it down and they excommunicate him and people who follow him and some of them later come back to the Church and some of them don't.

Stephen Betts: Changing gears here, but getting back to this idea of ritual, one of the things I neglected to bring up was that before she leaves Nauvoo, Emma Smith comes to Jane and offers her adoption into Joseph Smith's family. And this is really intriguing because it's not Joseph doing it. Of course in many cases, Joseph Smith works through intermediaries when he's propositioning women for polygamy. Talk a little bit about what does this adoption entail and how does she receive it? I think that's a really key thing to understanding what happens later in Salt Lake.

Quincy Newell: Well, so it's entirely unclear, honestly, what the adoption would've entailed at the time. As far as I know, and I think I've got the research right on this, adoptions as they're understood in the LDS church now weren't really a thing in 1843 or 1844. Ritual sealings of children to parents weren't being done during Joseph Smith's lifetime. The ritual sealings that were being done were marriage sealings. And so what Emma Smith may have meant about Jane being adopted into the Smith family is really, truly unclear. Whether Jane remembers this episode correctly, whether this actually happened is I think an open question. I think Jane was trying, was telling the truth as she remembered it, but whether her memory was accurate, I'm not sure. We don't have any other corroborating evidence to say that Emma Smith made this offer or that she meant anything like adoption, as it later developed in the LDS church, which would be as this kind of ritual adoption through a sealing ceremony that would connect people so that they would be together in the afterlife. And that you would enjoy the benefits of those family connections. But that all that said, later on, Jane really tries to change her mind. So she rejects Emma's offer when it is made, she says she thinks about her for a while and she decides, “No, I don't wanna be adopted to Joseph Smith and Emma Smith as a child.” She, at that point is a young adult. She has a child of her own, she is unmarried, but that doesn't seem to be an issue for her. And she will go on after Joseph Smith dies to marry Isaac James, with whom she had a long marriage until their divorce in 1870. And so later on in the 1880s and later Jane keeps going to church officials and saying, you know, “Emma Smith made me this offer. And I said, no at the time, but I would really like to change my mind. And if I could do that, that would be really great. So can I please be adopted to Joseph Smith as he offered to me when I was, when he was alive through his wife, Emma,” and that becomes a kind of constant refrain. She keeps telling this story, and it seems again to be one of those moments where she's saying, “Look, Joseph Smith wanted to adopt me as a child. Why won't you let me have, and why won't you let him have what he clearly wanted?” But Church officials are really uncomfortable with that idea. The idea of giving Joseph Smith a black daughter in the eternities is, I think a bridge too far for them. We do know that many, many white Saints are being adopted to Joseph Smith as children during this time when she's trying to get that same privilege. So I think race is making a really big difference in the reception of this story that she's telling. And in the response to it.

Stephen Betts: I mean, this brings up the really interesting question, you know, in American  history, we often talk about in the 19th century, especially we talk about the kinds of the various ways that white Americans in particular racialize and mark race. And here we have something that is rather unique in that they're willing to accept Jane but the way that they mark race is in this ritual way. So talk a little bit about how this gets resolved in terms of her relationship with the leaders of the Church and this ritual of adoption-as-a-servant that they create as a solution to this. 

Quincy Newell: Right. So Jane just keeps pestering Church authorities. And so she writes letters to Church presidents. She stops in and visits them. She calls on apostles. She gets friends to write letters. She does everything that she can think of to get somebody to say “Yes, yes, you can be adopted to Joseph Smith.” She's already gotten permission to do baptisms in the temple for her dead. So that's not the issue. The real issue is endowments and sealings for her. And I think she's taking her cue from the widow in the New Testament and Jesus’s parable, right? She'll just keep bothering the judge until the judge gives her justice and she does. And finally the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, I think they're just fed up and they're just tired of having to say no to her. And so they get together and they decide, well, you know, I'm putting a lot of words in their head. So with that caveat I'm imagining a lot of what's going on. I think they're really deeply uncomfortable with the idea of giving Joseph Smith a black daughter in eternity. So they want her to stop bothering them. And so they say, “Okay, fine. Let's, let's sort of build with what we've got. Maybe we can find something that looks like a compromise.” And I think that they are looking at what is now [Doctrine & Covenants] 132 which talks about ministering angels. They create a sealing ceremony for Jane James in which she is adopted to Joseph Smith's family as a what's called a “servitor.” I think what they're using that box of ministering angels as kind of servants to the people who are exalted and they slot her into that box. So they create the ceremony, but she's still not allowed to go into the temple. And so there is a proxy who stands in for her. Joseph F. Smith stands in for his uncle, Joseph Smith and Zina D.H. Young stands in as proxy for Jane James, even though Jane James is alive and well and lives only a few blocks from the temple and the ceremony is performed on May 18th, 1894. And Jane is sealed to Joseph Smith as a servant for eternity. So she will no longer be single and alone in the eternities. Which would have been her fate had this not been done because she couldn't be sealed to her husband. She wasn't sealed to her children because that wasn't allowed, she couldn't be sealed in the temple at all. Her husband couldn't hold the priesthood. And so they didn't have access to those priesthood blessings. So now she's sealed to Joseph Smith as a servant. So she essentially gets her Nauvoo life back for the rest of eternity, which maybe is an improvement. But the minutes of a Quorum of the Twelve apostles meeting in 1902 say that they sealed her as a servant. But she wasn't satisfied with that and kept petitioning to be sealed as a child. And so in that sense, she may have seen it as one step forward but not enough progress, really to accomplish her goals. 

Stephen Betts: So one thing that has happened a number of times in in Latter-day Saint history is usually with disaffected members, particularly if they're in Church leadership is, you know, they get authority or blessings, rights to temple, restored posthumously. Are you aware of anything like that happening later on where, you know, Latter-day Saint Church leaders will say “You know, actually she is gonna get sealed as a daughter.” 

Quincy Newell: I believe that that has happened. I know that after 1978, after the priesthood restriction was lifted, that she was sealed to her husband and her child, I believe her children as well. And I believe that she was also sealed to Joseph Smith as a daughter at that point or shortly thereafter. I'm not positive about that, but, yeah.

Stephen Betts: Fascinating. One of the other things that I found really interesting about Jane's time in Salt Lake is the way that she has to negotiate her identity as a woman and her kind of the ways that she performs her femininity by making various claims about her relationships. And so she's married multiple times during her time there but she doesn't always, even when she's either separated or divorced, she'll sometimes describe herself as married, or even a widow at one point, right?

Quincy Newell: Right. 

Stephen Betts: So talk a little bit about that. Why is she doing this? Why is this important and how does this fit into the way that gender is being constructed in this Mormon community? 

Quincy Newell: Sure. So gender for Mormon women, gender was constructed largely in the same way that gender was constructed for Victorian Protestant women at the time. So purity, piety, domesticity are all really valued. And I would say the one key difference for Utah women is a sense that industry is really key. People have to be productive and able to sort of be self-sufficient or help the community be self-sufficient in a way that just wasn't a thing for Eastern Protestant women. And being married was really a huge thing, being married and being a mother. And so in her autobiography, for example, Jane talks a lot about her children. She had eight children and they've all grown up in the Church and she doesn't go into the fact that some of them have been excommunicated that some of them have left the Church that many of them died before she did. And so there's this kind of tragic layer that she leaves out because she wants to pre present herself as a successful mother. And therefore as successfully fitting into the mold of femininity that she needs to fit, she also doesn't talk about her divorce at all. So she and Isaac James divorced in 1870, and he eventually left Utah. He shows up in the 1880 census working as a janitor in Portland, Oregon, and she later forms a relationship with a man named Frank Perkins but that only lasts a couple of years. And it's unclear the nature of that relationship, exactly. Although they are permitted to do baptisms for the dead in the endowment house, which suggests that there is some kind of Church sanction on this relationship. So probably they're married. although we don't have records of it. But again, that relationship doesn't last for more than a couple of years and then she is alone. Again, she starts describing herself. She uses Frank Perkins' surname for a few years. But then goes back to the James surname and she starts describing herself as a widow even though neither of the men that she has been married to are actually dead. Isaac James actually comes back in 1890 to Salt Lake and he lives with Jane James. We don't know if they get married again, and then he dies in 1891. And so at that point, she's got some cause to describe herself as a widow, even though Frank Perkins is still alive, but being divorced was not a way to fit into that model of successful femininity, being a widow is a perfectly legitimate way of being a Mormon woman who is unfortunately bereaved. And so in that sense, I think she's using these terminologies to try to fit into the boxes that are available to her. She can't go to the temple. She can't do a lot of the rituals that are expected for Mormon women, but she can take care of her children. She can try to have a successful marriage she can produce things like clothing for her family. She can do laundry. She can do all the sort of industry that is expected of more and women. And she was very active, as I said in the Retrenchment and Relief Societies. And so she's participating in those efforts and fulfilling that expectation as well.

So she tries to finesse the purity requirement basically, right. She hits the piety requirement just fine. She's doing all of the religious things that are expected of Mormon women. She doesn't have the question of priesthood hanging over her. She doesn't have to hold the priesthood in order to fulfill her gender role the way Mormon men do and so in that sense, she's kind of off the hook a little bit. She's keeping house, she owns her own place. And so she is able to do domesticity and industry pretty well as well. So the way she presents herself in her various autobiographies and in the interviews she gives is a pretty naked attempt, I would say, to try to fit into the boxes that Mormonism has for women. She is able to do the purity piece, sort of, she finesses that in the ways that she talks about her marriage or she doesn't talk about her marriage. She is easily able to do the piety piece. She goes to church, she goes to Relief Society meetings. She goes to Retrenchment Society meetings. She prays, she speaks in tongues. She has visions and so on. She owns her own place. So, so her domesticity is not in question. She's able to keep a good house and because she's working as a laundress, so she's, she's doing the kind of industry piece as well. But she's always trying to fit into the expectations for Mormon women, for women.

Stephen Betts: One of the things that I think is really fascinating about this book is the possibilities that it opens up. You know, we've talked about, you know, race and gender and the roles that the construction of race and gender played in Jane's life. And one of the things that I like to just briefly go over with you before we go is to talk a little bit about how these sorts of things fit into broader 19th century America and what that might reveal about America. So let's talk a little bit about, maybe give us a little bit of a of a sketch in terms of religious experience. What was religious life like for for black Americans during this period, and what kinds of cultural expectations and limits were there for black women?

Quincy Newell: Sure. I mean, obviously there are people who know a lot more about this than I do. But briefly I think one of the things that is important to know is that the Second Great Awakening, which is the religious movement out of which Mormonism is born is also really one of the first times where African Americans are Christianizing in large numbers. And so independent black churches are starting to pop up right around the time that Jane is born. And they're not very far from her for the most part at least as the crow flies, although she grows up in this tiny little town that is largely isolated from New York city and Philadelphia, where there are critical masses of black people to support the African Methodist Episcopal and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches, for example. So in that sense, Jane is largely separated from the larger developments in African American life at the time. But for the most part in the early 19th century, the movement is towards broader Christianization and specifically Protestantization. That said, I think what's interesting about Jane's story is that it reveals to us the other possibilities the roads not taken, right? And so Jane shows us the ways that African Americans might Christianize but take it in a really different direction. Sojourner Truth is another good example. She follows a man known as the prophet Matthias for a while, for example. And so we get these sort of alternative religious experiences that Jane's story and other stories help us be alive to, be aware of. For black women in the 19th century north, this is true for black men as well, there's a push towards respectability. And I think Protestantization is a part of that. In some ways the church becomes a really important cultural institution. It's where African Americans can get education. It's where they can find financial security, because a lot of them form cooperative societies, for example. It's where they can express themselves freely and find a sort of public space that is not under the thumb of white society. And that is true for black women, as much as it is for black men. And so, in that sense, black churches, they're the primary black institution at the time. And Jane doesn't have access to that, which I think is a really interesting piece. So her story sort of helps us think more in some ways about what it's like to be an African American, who is not in one of those cultural and population centers but who is instead where they might not be able to get access to those really important cultural institutions.

Stephen Betts: Yeah, I think this really complicates, or at least nuances, sort of the idea of the respectability politics of what it means to join a religion for an African American in the in the 19th century to Protestantize because obviously, Jane can't have this, or at least maybe, maybe she does, but its very improbable that she has the expectation that joining Mormons is going to improve her social respectability because they're on the fringe, right? Like, they're in fact, at this point they're most obviously on the fringe, because they've already been, you know, chased out of Missouri and Ohio. They just continue to move west because they're so unacceptable to everyone else. So, yeah, I think this really gives us a different view on and sort of complicates that respectability thesis. 

The last thing I'd like to go over with you is sort of the role, you had talked in the end of the book about the role that, that Jane has played in Latter-day Saint memory, and also the ways that she continues to be used as a symbol. So talk a little bit about that. 

Quincy Newell: Right. I'm really inspired in this thinking by Nell Painter's biography of Sojourner Truth, where she talks about Sojourner Truth as a symbol in so many different ways. She becomes this kind of empty signifier. And I think that happens for Jane James with the LDS church as well. So Jane's story becomes a way for disaffected Mormons, for example, and anti-Mormons to talk about how racist the church is: “Look, they sealed her to Joseph Smith as a servant. Can you imagine something more racist?” Right. But she also becomes a symbol for Latter-day Saints themselves to talk about their church as a multicultural institution that is welcoming of diversity. There's a lot of talk about James James within the LDS church that starts around the year 2000. And I think my read of that is that it's in preparation for the bicentennial of Joseph Smith’s birth. James becomes a way to talk about Joseph Smith as a multicultural prophet; as a prophet who welcomes people of all races. And the church becomes, sort of always already multicultural; as always already diverse. They don't have to discover diversity in the 21st century because they've already been diverse all the way back to the beginning. And so in that sense, she becomes this symbol of welcome and inclusivity even though I guess she sort of experienced that, but that I wouldn't characterize her experience as an open embrace. She was kept out of a lot of the most important rituals of the LDS church during her lifetime. Even more specifically she becomes a symbol for some Latter-day Saints of this kind of perseverance for civil rights. For other Latter-day Saints, she becomes this symbol of patient giving motherhood. So she gets different aspects of her life get picked up and emphasized in ways that help paint her into a kind of let's say a black and white sort of symbol, no pun intended, right. But maybe a little. And so she becomes this malleable figure who can be filled with any kind of meaning that you want to give her and deployed to promote any kind of cause that you wanna promote because she's convenient, she's available. And because the sources are relatively limited. And so there's not a lot to disprove any kind of story about her there. There's only a little bit to prove a few stories. And there's a lot of gaps to fill in with speculation. 

Stephen Betts: Yeah. I love how you've characterized this and I wonder how much this owes to, you know, Latter-day Saint adaptive practices, memory work, that they did over the course of the 20th century with pioneers where, you know, you have Sara Patterson, for instance, who does this really brilliantly in her book Pioneers in the Attic, where she talks about this spiritualization of the pioneer, right? Or what Eric Eliason will call the “pioneerification” of the Mormon past. And so, yeah, Latter-day Saints deploy the pioneer as this increasingly kind of universal way of relating to the past, of learning its lessons, of identifying communally and even internationally, interestingly enough, with the founding events of Utah Mormonism, right? So it almost seems like this sort of interpretive practice, which I think is actually learned from the ways that Latter-day Saints read scripture is being used for Jane James. I mean that's very, very fascinating. Thanks for sharing that. 

This has been just a great conversation today, Quincy, I'm really glad that you were able to join us. Before we go, what books are you reading right now in Mormon Studies or Religious Studies that you would recommend to our listeners. 

Quincy Newell: Well, right now I'm teaching and it feels a little bit like drinking out of a fire hose. So I'm not reading a lot, but the things that I have read recently, or I'm looking forward to I can tell you Sara Patterson's book that you just mentioned Pioneers in the Attic I've read and really, truly enjoyed. I know that Amanda Hendrix-Komoto has a book forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press about missionaries in the Pacific and I'm really looking forward to that one as well. And I've just made our library buy Taylor Petrey's book, Tabernacles of Clay. And I'm looking forward to checking that one out also. 

Stephen Betts: Awesome. Yeah, we're gonna have Sara Patterson on the show with us in just a couple of weeks. So look forward to that. What projects are you working on right now, if any, I know that pandemic life as an academic is fraught and very busy, but are you working on anything right now that we can anticipate hearing from you in the future? 

Quincy Newell: Well, theoretically at least I'm going back to that project that James James's biography distracted me from about 19th century, African American and Native American Mormons. So sometime in the next few years, maybe I'll have a manuscript done on that. 

Stephen Betts: Thanks for joining us today. Quincy, this has been fun. 

Quincy Newell: Thanks so much for having me. 

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SB: Thanks for listening. Next time on Scholars and Saints, join me and guest host Kathleen Flake as we talk with Professor David Campbell of the University of Notre Dame in a special episode about Mormonism, American politics and the 2020 [U.S.] presidential election 

*Transcript  edited for clarity

[1] That is, during the period when Jane James joined the Church in Connecticut. Joseph Smith first introduced the Nauvoo endowment rituals in the spring of 1842.