Black Bride of Christ

Baltasar Fra-Molinero, Sue E. Houchins

Description

Teresa de Santo Domingo, born with the name Chicaba, was a slave captured in the territory known to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese navigators and slave traffickers as La Mina Baja del Oro, the part of West Africa that extends through present-day eastern Ghana, Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria. Upon the death of her Spanish master, Chicaba was freed to enter a convent. The Dominicans of La Penitencia in Salamanca accepted her after she had been rejected by several other monasteries because of her skin color. Even in her own religious community, race put her at a disadvantage in the highly stratified social hierarchy of monastic houses of the era. Her life story is known to us through a document entitled Compendio de la vida ejemplar de la Venerable Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo, which is the foundational documentary evidence in the case for beatification of this nun, and as such it is the most significant and comprehensive source of information about her.

This volume, the first English translation of the Compendio, is a hagiography, an example of a biographical genre that recounts the lives and describes the spiritual practices of saints officially canonized by the Church, respected ecclesiastical leaders, or holy people informally recognized by local devotees. The effort to have Chicaba canonized continues today, as Fra-Molinero and Houchins explore in their introduction to the volume.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Black Studies
• Philosophie et théologie
• Literature
• Africana studies
• Christian Church
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 27 novembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826521057
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Black Bride of Christ
Black Bride of Christ
Chicaba, An African Nun in Eighteenth-Century Spain
Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by
SUE E. HOUCHINS AND BALTASAR FRA-MOLINERO
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
NASHVILLE
© 2018 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2018
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Design and composition: Dariel Mayer
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file LC control number 2015044913 LC classification number BX4705.T457 P3613 2016 Dewey class number 271/.97202 B
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2015044913
ISBN 978-0-8265-2103-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2104-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2105-7 (ebook)
According to family lore, my maternal great-grandparents, Logan and Mary Lea, absconded from slavery shortly before Emancipation. They must have envisioned the hardscrabble life ahead of them, so, as the story goes, they did not leave empty-handed. These two skilled workers—a carpenter and a dressmaker—appropriated the tools essential to the trades they had plied in bondage and would continue to practice in freedom. My mother, whom they reared, told me that they believed the mark of true maturity was producing offspring whom they nurtured, sheltered, and educated. They built houses for each of their children and sent each to school at least through the secondary level; some made it through college and beyond. But my great-grandparents never learned to read and write. This was a great disappointment for them both, and in the light of this “failure,” they deemed themselves in some sense “unsuccessful.” They were convinced that the narratives of their endurance and resistance through slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow were worthy subjects for books that had gone unwritten .
This book is for them .
—Sue E. Houchins
I dedicate this book, and all the work I put into its production, to my husband Charles I. Nero, the love of my life and my companion in the adventure that is the recovery of our histories. We have discussed Teresa Chicaba at the dinner table, in the kitchen, and while traveling with Carlos and Bernardo, our two beautiful sons. They are the daily blessing of our union. Together my family is the inspiration in my study of the African diaspora .
I also dedicate the book to the memory of my parents. Baltasar Fra was an intelligent boy whose teacher told my grandmother, la señora Farruca, that he should get an education if she could afford it. He had to leave for a Jesuit vocational school in Madrid, because back at home the public high school was not meant for the son of an illiterate peasant widow. Many evenings I used to go to the church of the Black Madonna of La Encina with my mother and carry her rosary and her veil. Pilar Molinero was an attentive reader of St. Teresa of Ávila, and she was one of those quietly brave Catholic women who stopped using the veil to go to church .
—Baltasar Fra-Molinero
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface: This English Translation and Its Introduction
Introduction
SECTION 1: Context and Exposition of the Vida
SECTION 2: Discussion of the Vida by Chapters
Gallery of Figures
Translation of the Vida
Appendixes
APPENDIX 1: Carta de Pago (Letter of Payment)
APPENDIX 2: Act of Profession
APPENDIX 3: Obituary of Sor Teresa Chicaba contained in the Acts of the Chapter of Toro
APPENDIX 4: Last Will and Testament of Juliana Teresa Portocarrero, Marchioness of Mancera
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
We each encountered Sor Teresa Chicaba before we met one another. Back in 1994, a colleague who knew of Baltasar’s work on texts produced by and representing members of the African diaspora wrote to tell him about a Black nun who had lived in Spain during the eighteenth century. Enclosed in this letter was a prayer card, a booklet that depicted the saint, briefly related her biography, and recorded a short invocation to her. Around the same time, while attending a party to celebrate her entering the Baltimore Carmelite Monastery, Sue came across a postcard of a Black nun in prayer that was affixed to a hostess’s refrigerator. The caption printed on the back simply read, “Sor Teresa Chikaba, Salamanca.” This became her party favor and eventually found its way into her breviary. Both of us wish to thank these benefactors and to apologize for no longer remembering their names, for they launched us on the researches that years later have culminated in this volume.
The note prompted Baltasar to embark upon a traditional course of scholarly investigation. Early in his project, he met John Hope Franklin; in a conversation at the Bates College Multicultural Center, the late historian encouraged him to translate and publish Sor Teresa Chicaba’s Vida , the biography extolling her holiness. From that time on, the then-director of that center, Czerny Brasuell, became a constant source of inspiration and encouragement in furthering the production of this book about the saint toward the goal of creating a study appropriate for scholars and students. Baltasar visited the convent of Las Dueñas in Salamanca where Chicaba’s body is interred, and he combed through censuses and wills in various Spanish archives.
In the meantime, from her workroom in Carmel, Sue made informal inquiries of two sources: First, she contacted Sister Luisa Santa Cruz, OCD, a Spanish Carmelite, who asked the Dominicans in Salamanca to send information about Sor Teresa to Baltimore. The bundle from Spain contained a note requesting suggestions for how to put Chicaba’s name before Catholics in America and a stack of the same prayer cards that had inspired her coeditor. Second, she made inquiries about Chicaba of her friends, the nuns of Saint Dominic’s monastery, then in Washington, DC. At that time, Sister Mary Paul, OP, knew little about the African nun, but she answered questions about Dominican traditions and their contemplative Third Orders in the United States. Sue’s first speaking engagement after she left the monastery was at the invitation of Olga Barrios, a professor at the University of Salamanca, to deliver a paper at her institution. During that conference, fellow presenter María Frías Rudolphi, Lecturer in English Philology at the University of A Coruña, introduced a small group of African American scholars—Frances Smith Foster, an emerita professor from Emory University, who writes about nineteenth-century Black American women; Richard Yarborough, professor of African American literature at UCLA, and Sue, who researches and teaches about literatures and religions of the African diaspora—to the nuns at the convent of Las Dueñas. Sue’s friends encouraged her to do further research on Chicaba.
Sue and Baltasar met on a cold evening in 2003 at a restaurant in Lewiston, Maine. An interdisciplinary search committee was interviewing Sue for a position in the African American Studies and Women and Gender Studies programs at Bates. When the atmosphere shifted from interrogation to conversation, the group began to discuss their current projects. Baltasar spoke about his recent interest in a Black nun who lived in Spain in the eighteenth century. “You are speaking about Chicaba, perhaps?” was the response from Sue. By the end of that dinner, we had sealed an agreement to translate Sor Teresa’s hagiography and to pool the results of our research.
The Dominican nuns of Las Dueñas in Salamanca not only provided us with a photocopy of Chicaba’s saint’s life, Compendio de la vida exemplar , but they also shared and granted permissions for our use of other documents from their archives that shone light on her time as a religious. When we began our relationship with the community, Sor María Eugenia Maeso, OP, the author of the prayer booklet (ca. 1990) that originally captured our attentions, was in the process of publishing a modern hagiography, Sor Teresa Chikaba. Princesa, esclava y monja . This nun became our informant. She was the quintessential example of intellectual integrity and openness, if ever there was one, so that ideological differences expressed during our visits were never an obstacle to a cordial two-way exchange of information and viewpoints. Indeed, the inordinate amounts of sweet amargillos and almendrados that she pressed upon us at the end of each visit betokened the pleasantness and generosity of our colloquy. She has maintained contact with us through the entire project, by letter until email recently replaced her elegant cursive.
Two other Spanish archives deserve our recognition. The director of the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Salamanca, Luis Miguel Rodríguez Alfajeme, promptly helped us locate and copy the important carta de pago (letter of payment) that contracted Teresa Chicaba’s relationship to the convent of La Penitencia in Salamanca. Equally, the staff at the Archivo Histórico de Protocolos Notariales in Madrid, located near the Prado Museum, graciously allowed us to reproduce the last will and testament of the Marchioness of Mancera, who, upon her death, emancipated Chicaba. They also alerted us to other useful documents related to the lives of women slaves in Madrid in the late seventeenth century as well as to the Manceras’ purchases of slaves—Christian and Muslim—some of whom, no doubt, lived with Teresa Chicaba during her sojourn in Madrid.
We also wish to thank the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—particularly Steve Fulwood for his assistance in securing a copy of the manuscript poem on Sor Teresa Chicaba that is housed in their collection. There is no record of how this manuscript reached the NYPL; however, we conjecture that the founder of the collection acquired it while abroad. Arturo Schomburg, an Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile, travelled extensively in the early part of the twentieth century. During that time he delved into th