'I'm Afraid That When the Devil Come Take My Master's Body, the Devil May Mistake and Get Mine:' Borders, Necro-Armor, and African American Death Practices

• In Event: Death, Religion, and Transnational Approaches (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Religion Section)

Abstract

Race was used to construct a rigid border privileging whites to burial rights while denying them to freed and bonded African Americans. White supremacist norms that created the border were developed from laws and recognized religious practices that were further compounded with personal property issues. This presentation pinpoints the 1701 Establishment of Religious Worship Act as the first law that drew a sharp border excluding African Americans from burial rights by not requiring colonial officials to document the burials of “negros and malattoes”. I interrogate the notion that although erected and enforced to extend racial customs of this life into the next, African Americans used necro-Armor to erect their own borders to eternally distance from what Angelika Krüger-Kahloula calls “spiritually contaminated” slaveholding whites. Through Necro-Armor, African Americans redefined, laid claim, and took ownership of these same borders for protection and privacy. It is the process whereby through this redefining, African Americans came to control the very border that was meant to confine and control them and even establish their own autonomous African American burial grounds for freedom. I extract meaning about African American death practices from slave narratives, asking just who is upholding the border.

Author

• Kami L Fletcher, Goucher College