Time Will Carry Us Away: Debt, Conversion, And Subjectivity Under Racial Capitalism In God Struck Me Dead

“Jesus called my attention to the clock.”^[1] This testimony comes from a series of interviews of former slaves conducted from 1927 to 1929 by Fisk University graduate student Andrew P. Watson, later published in God Struck Me Dead (1969). These narratives reflect on experiences of religious conversion and the material conditions of slavery. Throughout the collection, there is an emphasis on the coming of time. Several accounts describe hearing a voice saying: “I am a time-God.”^[2] A woman named Mary tells of a vision of hell where “people were rolling over and over and crying, ‘Got no time; Got no time.’”^[3] Conversion is an experience that comes “in due time,”^[4] “quicker than a flash,”^[5] “not ahead of time, not behind time, but just on time.”^[6] As one woman puts it: “It was time that brought us here, and time will carry us away.”^[7]

I am interested in how these conversion narratives unsettle the controlling grammars of racial capitalism. While the testimonies of God Struck Me Dead primarily reflect on past experiences of enslavement, they were recorded years later during the height of Tennessee sharecropping, a severely intensified system of credit and debt.^[8] My analysis brings the rhetoric of conversion together with critical theories of debt. That same decade, in a very different context, Walter Benjamin was writing on the connections between debt and progressive history.^[9] Benjamin invites us to “consider the demonic ambiguity” of the word Schuld, which can be translated as guilt or debt.^[10] He argues that capitalism’s production of guilt-debt might be interrupted by the coming of messianic time. This article asks: How do the conversion narratives of God Struck Me Dead theorize temporality, debt, and subjectivity under racial capitalism? And if it is true, as Benjamin writes, that “capitalism… creates guilt, not atonement,” then how might examining Christian proclamation emerging from the context of intensified indebtedness inform theological accounts of eschatological hope in the afterlives of slavery?^[11]

I turn to three narratives from God Struck Me Dead. First, in “I Am Blessed but You Are Damned,” Morte recalls a vision he had while plowing the field: “I looked at my hands and they were new.”^[12] After recovering his senses, Morte realized “the horse had run off with the plow and dragged down much of the corn.”^[13] For Morte, cosmic interruption begins to unravel the death-dealing permanency of racial capitalism. Following Benjamin’s claim that translation “keeps putting the hallowed growth of languages to the test,” I trace the untranslatability of language for atonement into the language of capitalism within Morte’s narrative.^[14] Second, in “Slavery Was Hell without Fires,” an unnamed woman remembers being haunted by the ghost of her master and recalls visions of trains carrying the dead. Following Ian Baucom’s claim that “the present is more than rhetorically haunted” by the slave trade, I take up this narrative’s troubling of unidirectional time.^[15] Third, Nora’s “Split Open from Head to Foot” describes a light that “split me open from my head to my feet.”^[16] In response to critiques that eschatological orientations toward the future too often risk circumventing contemporary anti-blackness, I show how Nora’s apocalyptic imagination avoids racial capitalism’s production of unified subjects and invites alternative ways to think the end of time.

My turn to the conversion narratives of God Struck Me Dead is motivated by critical theories of debt that (rightfully) criticize the theological symbolics underwriting certain defenses of capitalism, but neglect questions of religious praxis, thus flattening religious language’s capacity to critically counter indebted temporalities.^[17] My point here is not to posit theology as a corrective to critical theory, but to acknowledge “the dialectical influence between money and theology is ongoing,” as shown by Devin Singh.^[18] Therefore, this article explores of how the rhetoric of conversion might upend what Maurizio Lazzarato calls the “injunction to become an economic subject.”^[19] Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s provocation that “emancipation instituted indebtedness,” my analysis considers how conversion narratives frustrate indebted temporalities that bind one to the past.^[20] Moreover, building on Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago, my reading of God Struck Me Dead argues that indebted subjectivities are not universal, rather they are inseparable from “sexual, gender, racial, and locational difference, precisely because debt does not homogenize those differences, but rather exploits them.”^[21]

I Am Blessed but You Are Damned!

In Morte’s conversion narrative “I Am Blessed but You Are Damned,” he hears a voice while plowing the field: “Morte! Morte!” it cried.^[22] Morte jumps, fearing the voice belongs to his master who is coming to scold and whip him. But he is alone in the field. Morte then hears a great roar, loses his sight, and falls to the ground. When the moment passes, Morte finds a new world. He sees plants, animals, and a body of water. When Morte stoops down to take a drink, the plants, animals, and even the water condemn him, crying: “I am blessed but you are damned! I am blessed but you are damned!”^[23] The cosmos proclaims Morte’s damnation.

It is tempting here to argue for Morte’s innocence. Surely—one might think—it is the master, not Morte, who is damned! However, innocence is not Morte’s primary concern.^[24] I read Morte’s narrative as a critique of linear time. His testimony targets the activity of racial capitalism: the enslaved laborer working in the field.^[25] Morte’s intensified sense of guilt interrupts the site that a) conditions the exchange of Black bodies as commodities, and b) extracts labor from those bodies. For Benjamin, “Every world-historical moment is indebted and indebting.”^[26] Capitalism produces a chain of events that binds the past, present, and future in a linear chronology of cause and effect, debt and payment, guilt and retribution. Morte’s narrative fleshes out the material stakes of such indebted temporalities. The plantation captures his body into cycles of production that, in the words of Lazzarato, “neutralize time” and “ward off every potential ‘deviation’” in the future.^[27] Counterintuitively, Morte’s narrative of temporal rupture—including his heightened sense of guilt—disrupts the continuity of his oppression.

Alarmed by this vision, Morte begins to pray, “Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!”^[28] Morte goes on: “As I prayed an angel came and touched me, and I looked new. I looked at my hands and they were new; I looked at my feet and they were new.”^[29] Conversion momentarily suspends the patterns of racial capitalism that marked Morte’s hands and feet with calluses and scars. It eliminates traces of bondage and transforms Morte’s body into something new—something temporally discontinuous from slavery. His new hands and new feet do not necessarily indicate restoration to a previous state; there is no return to a before here. Rather, Morte’s narrative insists on a radical temporal break between this world and the next.

Morte hears the voice again: “You are this day made alive and freed from hell. You are a chosen vessel unto the Lord.”^[30] Given the objectification of Black bodies in chattel slavery, Morte’s uplift at being likened to an object (a vessel) is surprising.^[31] However, as Stephano Harney and Fred Moten show, the desire “to think as objects” makes one “unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood.”^[32] Freedom from hell, for Morte, does not reorder things so that he might move through the world as a free agent like his master—an agent that embraces the “regulatory forces” that constituted Morte’s subjection. Morte’s freedom contrasts the freedom of emancipation, which Hartman argues “instituted indebtedness” that “bind[s] one to the past.”^[33] For Morte, his freedom is grounded in being a chosen vessel—an object unfit for subjection.

After this vision, Morte recovers his senses and realizes “the horse had run off with the plow and dragged down much of the corn.”^[34] Here, the cycles of capitalist production begin to unravel. Morte’s intensified sense of guilt before God leads not only to his repentance, but literally drags down the corn. When his master “roughly” asks why he has plowed up the corn, lost the horse and plow, and failed to complete his tasks, Morte says: “it was God who had plowed up the corn.”^[35] By blaming (or praising?) God for this destruction, Morte further undermines his subjective agency. Then Morte began to preach to his master and “fell for shouting.”^[36] Throughout the narratives of God Struck Me Dead, shouting indicates ecstatic praise.^[37] Morte says, “words seemed to flow from my lips,” and he “no longer dreaded the whipping I knew I would get.”^[38] In response to the master’s demands for self-discipline that maximizes productivity, Morte is converted into an object-vessel that shouts. Morte continues, “master looked at me and seemed to tremble.”^[39]

The master then instructs Morte to retrieve the horse and meet him in the barn. On his way, Morte “became dazed again and fell to the ground.”^[40] Morte has a second vision. This repetition points to both the unpredictability of the cosmic interruption and the ongoing reality of “ever-approaching judgment.”^[41] The angel Gabriel tells Morte: “Behold your sins as a great mountain. But they shall be rolled away.”^[42] Gabriel rolls Morte’s sins into “a great pit.”^[43] But Satan and his host of angels hop out and “began to stick out their tongues at me and make motions as if to lay hands on me and drag me back into the pit.”^[44] Alarmed, Morte prays, “Save me, Lord!”^[45] Then, “like a flash there gathered around me a host of angels.”^[46] Interruption, figured in the angels appearing “like a flash,” is what saves Morte from Satan dragging him into the pit. An angel steps toward the pit, and Morte sees Satan retreat “growling with anger and trembling with fear.”^[47] The master’s earlier trembling in response to Morte’s shout is echoed here in Satan’s trembling and subsequent retreat. Morte’s cosmic struggle against sin and evil is tangled with his struggle against the material conditions of slavery.

When Morte comes out of this trance, he shouts “Holy! Holy! Holy is the Lord!” for the next hour.^[48] He fails to return the horse and plow, then goes to preach to his master, saying: “I felt burdened down and that preaching was my only relief.”^[49] The master began to cry, saying: “Morte, I believe you are a real preacher.”^[50] Morte is invited to preach to “the big house” next Sunday. He says, “I told them that they must be born again and that their souls must be freed from the shackles of hell.”^[51] Conversion here brings proclamations of coming judgment.

Read through the lens of translation, Morte’s testimony highlights how theories of debt and temporality might operate in conversion rhetoric. Benjamin writes,

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of pure language, he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language.^[52]

In other words, Benjamin argues that the task of the translator is to create something new—to allow one’s mother tongue to be transformed by the foreign in order to break down the barriers within one’s own language. Likewise, Morte’s salvation cannot be easily translated into the pre-established grammars of racial capitalism. This untranslatability of language for atonement into the language of racial capitalism begins to break down the plantation system. His redemption is translated as slavery’s destruction. By releasing that pure language (eschatological language), Morte carves out a new landscape in which “the word of God shines forth.”^[53] Morte ends his conversion narrative saying, “Ever since that day I have been preaching the gospel and am not a bit tired. I can tell anyone about God in the darkest hour of midnight.”^[54] Throughout Morte’s life, the temporal rupture of conversion continues to transcend even the darkest hours, unraveling the chain of events that binds him to the past.

Slavery Was Hell without Fires

In “Slavery Was Hell without Fires,” an unnamed woman invokes eschatological language to narrate her experiences of slavery. She says, “I was just in hell all the time.”^[55] She describes how, when she was little, her mistress often hit her on the head with a poker and threatened to kill her when the stairs creaked.^[56] She says, “Hardly a day passed that she didn’t beat me for something.”^[57] Hell was an everyday experience for this author, who says she was “knocked around so much that my head and back stayed sore all the time.”^[58] She goes on to describe a neighboring master: “He had a lot of slaves, and he was a devil on earth. I never saw as many dead babies in all my life as I did on his farm.”^[59] She narrates how infanticide, forced miscarriages, and rape were regular occurrences for enslaved women and girls: “Yes, in them days it was hell without fires.”^[60]

For this author, the material conditions of slavery and the demonic powers of hell are inseparable. Hell seeps into this realm “all the time” through the practices of racial-terror.^[61] She describes masters as “the devil on earth” and the habits of slavery as “devilment.”^[62] Her testimony points to what Eboni Marshall Turman’s work on African American eschatologies calls “hell as historical happening.”^[63] Hell, in this narrative, is not merely reserved to the hereafter (though it is certainly that too). Hell regulates the material conditions of everyday life and demands the continuity of Black suffering. This relationship between hell and history is reflected in testimonies throughout God Struck Me Dead. As one man puts it: “After the war, times got worse for a time. The K.K.K. were raising the devil on every hand.”^[64] There is no distinction between the hell-to-come and the hell of racial-terror; the only difference is “slavery was hell without fires.”^[65]

As if slavery was not hellish enough, the author also “used to see haunts.”^[66] As a young girl, she saw the ghost of her master: “It was exactly like him, standing leaning against the side of the door with his red handkerchief around his neck and his legs crossed.”^[67] On another occasion, the author saw “Mars’ Bill, a great, tall man nearly as tall as a tree.”^[68] She says, “He was all dressed up… but he didn’t have no head. His hat was on his neck.”^[69] The master’s body is enlarged and distorted over time. Rather than taking comfort in his death, the author is increasingly disturbed by him. Ian Baucom has argued that “the present is more than rhetorically haunted” by the middle passage.^[70] He posits that the conditions of possibility that catalyzed the slave trade do not haunt our present in a ghost-like, immaterial form. Rather, those conditions fundamentally structure our present. For Baucom—and for the author of this conversion narrative—the atrocities of the past “have not waned but intensified.”^[71] I read this narrative as describing how the specters of slavery regenerate Black death. The ghosts “nearly scared me to death,” she says.^[72] Despite the fact Mars’ Bill was long gone, his haunt continues to capture her future.

The author’s account of the past structuring the present is made most clear in her regret that she never learned to read: “I can’t read a line of either scripture or any other kind of writing.”^[73] She recalls fearing the consequences of being caught with a book in her hand as a slave. She says, “I often wish I did know how to read, but… didn’t have the chance to learn.”^[74] It is important to note that throughout her broader narration, the author describes being repeatedly beat in the head as a child. She links this violence to her experience of illiteracy: “sometimes my head was beat so I thought I was foolish.”^[75] She calls herself “a fool” who “know[s] nothing about the world nor its ways.”^[76] For whatever reason—disability, fear, or access—she never learns to read, even in her later life.^[77] Her story is echoed in Hartman’s work on “the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death.”^[78] The narrator shows how past violence produces a present where she “didn’t have the chance to learn.”^[79]

In response to the temporal continuity of slavery and its afterlives, the author hopes for the coming of time. She explains how the chronology that binds her present to her past is a death-dealing invention. But God “looked down through time before time.”^[80] On a grammatical level, “time before time” seems previous and thus complicit in progressive logics. However, linear history is subordinate to this “time before time,” which does not work on a continuum.^[81] Rather, “time before time” is unpredictable. She says, “It was time that brought us here, and time will carry us away.”^[82]

She illustrates this dynamic in her recollection of a past vision: “It seemed to me that I was standing at a railroad station.”^[83] She recounts seeing “a train come out of the west.”^[84] Presumably this train is destined for hell because it “was loaded with people, red-eyed, wild, and excited, and such scrambling and cutting up I never saw.”^[85] The author watches the train go by and wonders what she is waiting for. Then, she says, “I saw a pretty white train coming like lightning.”^[86] The train’s lightning speed suggests interruption. As Rocío Zambrana writes, such “subversive interruption can be a form of historical reckoning.” ^[87] While the train bound for hell was fixed to a unidirectional track, reflecting the continuity of Black suffering, the train bound for heaven fractures linear time. Kathryn Tanner emphasizes the interruptive quality of conversion in her most recent book: “To be saved [means] to lead a fundamentally disrupted life… in hopes of a future that will be nothing like one’s experience of the past.”^[88] This conversion narrative shows how “past and future… cannot be joined in any continuous fashion.”^[89] Rather, the author does not know how she got on the train, but she was on it. God’s grace, here, is an unpredictable force. Conversion interrupts the connections between past, present, and future—between slavery, its afterlives, and what this author calls the “time [that] will carry us away.”^[90]

Split Open from Head to Foot

While the previous testimonies offer fuller autobiographical narratives, Nora’s “Split Open from Head to Foot” is a more focused account of conversion. She married young, and she says her husband “aggravated and worried me all the time.”^[91] Nora’s husband pressures her to dance with him at picnic, and she acquiesces despite having promised her father on his deathbed that she “wouldn’t dance no more” so that they could be “candidates together in heaven.”^[92] Yet, under the influence of her aggravating husband, Nora breaks this promise and “went on to the picnic and danced against my will.”^[93] Consequently, Nora becomes very sick. She narrates, “I got heavy one day and began to die. For days I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep; even the water I drank seemed to swell in my mouth.”^[94]

Nora’s narrative is one of many examples in God Struck Me Dead that describe conversion as a kind of death. Other narrators hear mysterious voices saying “You must die”^[95] or “go to hell this day.”^[96] Some describe visions of themselves “on a cooling board”^[97] or “killed dead [by] the devil.”^[98] Others feature kinesthetic experiences: “[death] started in my feet and came on up over my body”^[99] or “my jaws were locked and my limbs were stiff.”^[100] These encounters with finitude are terrifying but also salvific. Because one can only die once, conversion-death protects one from the ongoing social death of anti-Black violence. As one woman puts it: “I have been killed dead and made alive again and am fireproof.”^[101] Another testimony states: “I am not hell-scared or devil-dodging, for I know that I have died and don’t have to die anymore.”^[102] Nora’s narrative fits into broader understandings of conversion-death as part of the cosmic struggle against evil.

As Nora grows heavy with death, something remarkable happens: “A light seemed to come down from heaven, and it looked like it just split me open from my head to my feet.”^[103] She goes on, “A voice said to me, ‘ye are freed and free indeed. My son set you free. Behold I give you everlasting life.’”^[104] This occurrence is not merely a vision or dream; it impacts her whole body. Nora says, “During all this time I was just dumb. I couldn’t speak or move.”^[105] Here, we see something like Morte’s experience as an object-vessel made “unfit for subjection.”^[106] Her conversion is embodied in her failure to self-manage her speech or movement. Instead, split open from head to foot, Nora is the antithesis of what Hartman calls “liberal individuality with the dominated, regulated, and disciplined embodiment of blackness.”^[107]

While split open, Nora hears “moaning sounds” that tell her “[f]ollow me, my little one.”^[108] At this invitation, Nora is able to move again: “I got up, it seems, and started to traveling.”^[109] She journeys to a sea of glass and fire, where she believes she will perish. But a path leads her through the fire and to “a green pasture” where she hears a thunderous voice: “I will drive all fears away. Go, and I go with you. You have a deed to your name, and you shall never perish.”^[110] Beyond the theological significance of being “buried with Christ,”^[111] I am interested in how Nora’s narrative rejects what Axelle Karera calls the “disturbing biopolitical function of life.”^[112] Nora’s apocalypticism is a significant departure from the apocalypticism of dominant Anthropocene ethics, which, as Karera shows, minimize racial antagonisms for the greater good of resolving ecological precarity as “an undifferentiated whole.”^[113]

Counter to much contemporary apocalyptic discourse that circumvents “slain black bodies” in the name of wholeness, Nora’s apocalyptic imagination offers no unified subjectivity.^[114] Instead of downplaying antagonisms, she resignifies “abject images” (i.e., Black death).^[115] As such, she poses a powerful critique of political demands for “the integrity of the citizen-subject” and “self-possession of the liberal individual,” following Hartman.^[116] In other words, Nora’s conversion narrative imagines an apocalyptic future without the fantasy of wholeness.

We see a similar disavowal of unified subjectivity in the testimony “Fly Open for My Bride,” narrated by an anonymous author. She describes her conversion saying, “As it [death] crept over me it looked like I was coming unjointed.”^[117] This figuration of conversion as a body coming unjointed disrupts progressive temporalities “of indebtedness [that] bind one to the past.”^[118] Throughout the conversion narratives of God Struck Me Dead, the authors’ pasts, presents, and futures come unjointed. I am interested in the radical discontinuity presented in these testimonies. Even as authors account for something like slavery’s afterlives, time is always fractured by cosmic interruption. In his reflections on the work of history, Stephen Best writes: “In the archive, we discover not who we are but how ‘we’ are not.”^[119] He challenges historical disciplines’ linear chronologies, critiquing scholars’ tendency to over-identify the present with the past. Beyond disrupting indebted temporalities, I posit that the unjointed conversion narratives of God Struck Me Dead press scholars to find new ways to narrate history, wherein the present is not tightly bound (or indebted) to the past and wherein a continuous future cannot be easily imagined.

Conclusion

As I named in the introduction, my turn to God Struck Me Dead was initially motivated by critical theories of debt that attend to the theological logics operative in certain defenses of racial capitalism, but neglect to consider how Christian language might critically counter the ways that indebted temporalities capture one’s future. For example, Lazzarato’s The Making of the Indebted Man analogizes the extension of credit to God’s creation ex nihilo, finance capitalism to the holy trinity, debt payment to ancestor worship, and so on. Through the repetition of each of these analogies, religious and theological language is reduced to capitalism’s untoward outworkings. There is a very similar treatment of religion throughout David Graber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years, wherein the author frequently uses the phrase “theology of debt” to describe debtor-creditor relations. My point is not that Christian theology is above critique. Rather, I cite these examples to point to the need for sustained scholarly work on the problem of debt and theological language. The onus is on scholars of religion to disambiguate God from creditor, sin from debt, atonement from liquidation, and salvation history from racial capitalism’s attempts to bind one to the past, as well as to trace the imbrications of theological and economic language. My hope is that by pointing to the conversion narratives of God Struck Me Dead—to their theorizations of temporality, capitalism, and the afterlives of slavery—I have highlighted one resource that can help religion scholars to continue to do this work.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Rocío Zambrana, Ted Smith, Catherine Keller, Wendy Mallette, and Ella Meyer for their support and suggestions during the many phases of this project.