Ahmad Greene-Hayes. Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva

Greene-Hayes: For me, surveillance and policing are so important because I think we sometimes don’t realize the full magnitude of what slavery was and what it did as an institution, as an ideological orientation, as a theological enterprise. Slavery quite literally structured the world as we know it. And so with that, insofar as there are these legal changes that take place—the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, the Emancipation Proclamation—all of these are important legal moments, codifications, but a lot remains the same for Black people’s social, material, economic, and political conditions. You see this when you pay attention to what Black people are saying, whether they be the formerly enslaved or those who are no longer slaves in name but slaves in practice—you have those who are on the chain gang, sharecroppers, domestics, people who are still living on plantations in Louisiana—these are the people in the book. Or they’re moving from plantations into urban centers in the South, such as New Orleans or Atlanta. People start moving about. But the plantation is right there for them. The master class is right there.

Readers will notice that I try to trace who the planters (plantation owners) were and who their descendants were. For instance, a number of the members of the Louisiana Folklore Society that was founded in New Orleans at Tulane University had parents who were planters or slave owners. This is just a generation removed. These members were the people documenting Black religious life and innovation. So, part of what I wanted to think about was that kind of inheritance—not just in terms of land and property—but an ideological, a theological, a philosophical inheritance that structures a social scientific enterprise. Quite literally, slavery structures the study of Black religion in the early 20th century. People like Curtis Evans gesture here. I think Jamil Drake gestures here with his work on “folk religion” in the South. Kathryn Lofton argues about the “perpetual primitive” in African American religious historiography. And that’s something that, for me, is very much here. The police, the social scientists, the white person you encounter on the street—they’re all working in the service of the state at this moment. All eyes are on Black people at this moment. And so even in the spaces where seemingly there are only Black people, that space is not just Black space. That is part of what I’m getting at. That actually, there’s the white intrusion into that space because Black people are always trying to circumnavigate violence and domination.

A clear example of this is that, for all of the practitioners in the book—wherever they fell on the spectrum of religious practice and belief—the (Ku Klux) Klan and the lynch mob were always waiting for them. Regardless of how you identify religiously—whether you go to a Black Baptist church, a Pentecostal church, whether you are in the Nation of Islam, whether you’re in the Universal Negro Improvement Association—the Klan doesn’t care about your religious affiliation. In fact, there is no way for Black people to be legitimate Christians at this moment either. There’s no sense that Black people’s Christianity is authentic Christianity. We have to deal with this legacy because it’s still very much a part of the field of religious studies.

Bulletin: Your approach to religious studies involves a thorough reading of a wide range of archival materials. In the third chapter, you discuss the Temple of Innocent Blood, a spiritual community in New Orleans led by Mother Catherine Seals. As you dive deeper into your discussion about this community, you provided a detailed description of the architecture of the Temple of Innocent Blood, as recorded by a member of the Louisiana Writers Project. In part, it reads: “These crude buildings erected with one end in view, utility, straggled without location, plan, or grace of architectural design. This experiment in miracles was in outward semblance twin to experiment in some new industrial enterprise” (105). I’m curious about this description and the relationship of the individuals in this spiritual community to the built environment around them.

Greene-Hayes: Mother Catherine Seals founded her temple in 1920. She moved to the Lower Ninth Ward, which is close to the industrial canal. So she’s not far from the water. It’s like marshland, swampy. It’s not a place that’s necessarily desirable for city elites. At this point in the 1920s, there are a lot of poor people who frequent the area, those who are houseless as well as sex workers. It’s a desolate location. Mother Catherine looks beyond the desolation and wildlife as well as the unkept landscape, and she sees potential. She sees an opportunity to build this industrial masterpiece, as one writer observes. I think there’s something about this that serves as a metaphor for her theology. Her heart was towards the displaced, the discarded, those who were overlooked because they didn’t fit the part or they didn’t neatly mesh within elite society.

I find it fascinating that she goes there and is able to purchase the land because of her white followers who have money. We can even think here about reparations and what it means for white people to be accomplices towards Black social reform movements. I think we see an early example of that. They believed in her mission and put their money where their mouths were and didn’t block her or police her or circumscribe her to a particular plan. They allowed her to map out her own blueprint for the community.

And they revered her. She was a Reverend Mother. She was spiritually gifted. She was prophetic. She was the healer. She was their mother. And the discarded had a place to come to because Mother Catherine and her community of followers built it.

Bulletin: You include photographs of Mother Catherine, alongside images of various religious and civic leaders as well as locations. As I saw these images, I was reminded of comments that Saidiya Hartman makes about the use of photography among social reformers in the early twentieth-century in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Here, photography functions not only as a means to document information but also a way to tell a story. In Underworld Work, your use of photography appears to highlight a specific narrative about Black life after slavery. Could you tell us more about the story that you narrated through these images? What were some of your considerations as you selected photographs to include in your book?

Greene-Hayes: Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautfiul Experiments was a kind of methodological North Star for me—just to think about how we can work through sources and try to recover to the best of our ability what Black people were studying, what they were thinking, or emoting, or feeling, as they were on the receiving end of policing and surveillance. Hartman is a wonderful exemplar of that. Then also Tina Camp’s Listening to Images—this notion that photos emit haptic energy: if we really pay attention to what is in the photograph, we cannot so much as speculate—we can actually hear what the people are saying back to us. I really take that seriously. A lot of method here involved communing with images, looking at them, trying to get a sense of what house churches looked like in New Orleans in the 1930s, for instance. What did the alleys look like? What are shotgun houses? What do cemeteries in New Orleans look like, when the dead are buried above ground? For instance, that photo of Mother Catherine—she’s quite literally standing in the industrial canal. You can see it in the backdrop. But if you pay attention to her, what is on her body, how does she adorn herself? It’s interesting to me that the people who are part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), these social scientists—they’re largely disinterested in these questions when they’re interviewing. They’re not paying attention fully, I think, to what people were wearing, how they were adorning themselves, what choices they were making stylistically for how they wanted to show up as a faith healer or preacher. Mostly, when they do pay attention to the aesthetics of a temple, it’s pejorative. They pay attention to rodents or the insects.

In the fourth chapter, interviewers from the Louisiana Writers Project are interviewing a guy by the name of Prophet Joseph Rajah Lyons in his house church, and there are rodents and insects. Lyons says to the interviewer: y’all should excuse those rats. Those are holy rats. Like to say that they are part of my house church, they are a part of this community in the slums . . . this animal, the rodent, the rat—that largely is a sign of dirt, of filth, of poverty. Joshua Bennett talks about this in his book Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man: the rodent has this pejorative history in African American culture. People like Prophet Joseph Rajah Lyons reclaim that, and I think it’s so powerful. It’s speaking back to a social scientific enterprise that does not understand what Black people are doing.

Bulletin: In reflecting on the practices of Black communities, you reference Joseph Lyons as a religious theorist. It’s also clear that Zora Neale Hurston serves as a key theoretical interlocutor for you, specifically through a number of “visitations,” a term you use throughout the book. In that, how would you describe the influence Hurston has had on your work as a theorist? How does that influence come up for you in your book?

Greene-Hayes: I have been a deep admirer of Hurston’s literary canon, of course. And I don’t think it was until I was being trained in religious studies that I started to think about her ethnographic contributions as well as her field notes, her film recordings, and her audio interviews—all of the stuff that she accumulated. Hurston is a writer and literary genius, but there’s a way in which her identity as a scholar of religion is largely still a muted identity, a muted category for her. I think this gets recapitulated in the sources. And I don’t even think it’s an erasure. It feels like a kind of a dismissal of her as a theorist—the sense that her ethnography was not serious scholarship, a sense that she got too familiar with the people, a sense that she broke all the rules.

Even in the field of African American religious historiography, we can trace some of this back to Albert Raboteau’s Slave Religion. There’s this moment where he has the section, “the death of the gods,” and he references the debate between Melville Herskowitz and E. Franklin Frazier—this idea, on the one hand, that all kinds of Black or African religious culture was obliterated because of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and on the other hand, there are these elements that remain. This was a contentious debate. And Raboteau, interestingly, in Slave Religion, only cites Zora Neale Hurston once. And he spells her name wrong. I think, and I deeply respect Raboteau, I do see that as a kind of symbolic metaphor for where Hurston is in the field—that her contributions to that discourse, to that debate, are not even referenced or cited. But she’s kind of mentioned in passing. I think it gets recapitulated throughout the scholarship. And so here, I wanted to say that before you can sit with me and what I have to say, I want us as a field to acknowledge that Hurston said some of this already, that she was onto something when she was doing her work in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This is a return, a reconsideration or reinterpretation of her.

But then also it is to say that this isn’t a romanticism of her either, you have to sit with the visitation. In the chapters, I’m also reckoning with what she has offered, that she didn’t get everything right, but she did say some things that are worthy of our consideration.

Bulletin: There are many different voices that emerge in your work. Your voice as a narrator often sits in conversation with Hurston’s voice. There’s also an exchange of ideas and words with various theorists as well as your interlocutors from a number of archival records. Here, the present meets the past. In that, what is your understanding of time as it relates to this cacophony of voices?

Greene-Hayes: This is such a timely question because I’m also working on another project about the doing of Black religious history. How do we do what we do? It is a question about what I interpret as a kind of spiritual encounter in the archive and how we decipher those voices, those inner knowings. How do we translate it into scholarship? It’s a project about theory and method in Black religious history that comes out of Underworld Work. Many people have said that when you do a project in New Orleans, you’re never not doing a project involving the dead and spirits and ancestors, and I found this to be the case. Those voices want to be heard. I think it’s the job of the historian of Black religion to amplify the ancestors’ voices—whether the archival ancestors or practitioners in archival holding spaces who are waiting for some scholar to heed their beckoning call.

Many of the people in this book I had never heard of before. I don’t even understand how I came to know some of them. It feels sometimes like they were waiting for me to find them or to meet them. I feel like they gifted me with their stories in letting me find them, especially because so many of them—throughout the course of their lives—were trying to circumvent and flee surveillance and flee captivity. It’s interesting to me that they allowed me some access. I’m really grateful for that, and I felt it was my responsibility to not speak for them when I could allow them to speak for themselves. That’s why you’ll notice that I’m quoting what I believe that they were saying. I want to make sure that people have access to their voice, their beliefs, their practices, their ways of moving through the Underworld and the world as we know it.

Bulletin: Speaking of individuals in archival records who have been waiting to be found, your answer reminded me of a moment in the book where you discuss “Informant 864.” Can you talk about your experience with recovering Informant 864’s story? What insight does that process of recovery offer in regard to approaches to analyzing Black religious history?

Greene-Hayes: This is an individual I stumbled upon. I was at a point where I had done a lot of work with the Louisiana Writers Project during the dissertation phase. I had been in Hurston’s collections working with her field notes. Then, when I was revising from dissertation to book, I realized that I hadn’t spent a lot of time with Harry Middleton Hyatt’s five volumes of Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork. I thought, oh, let me, I’m at a place with resources, so let me get these volumes. I was just skimming through the volumes—and they’re massive. So, my first step was to try to find “New Orleans” in the text. There was quite a bit of material. Just in passing, I came across Informant 864, and was like, whoa, who is this person? Then, as I read the narrative, I just couldn’t believe it. I was like, oh my god, this is fascinating. Granted, I think the way Hyatt talks about them is pejorative. And the social scientific voyeurism, intersexphobia, the transphobia are there. So how do you read beyond that Jim Crow grammar of “enfreakment” (as Ellen Samuels has theorized it) to recover this person’s personhood and religious sensibilities? So, I was going back and forth. I was like, okay, I could really try to do a deep census dive and maybe work through police records and try to find them. They mentioned their grandmother’s name and so I might be able to find her in the census. And there was a moment where I had to stop myself from going further because I felt, having just read the interview where this person was very clear that they didn’t want the details of their identity to be fully known, that I had to stop as a historian but also as a Black person living in America. I had to stop myself from participating in the surveilling of this religious practitioner. And I said, I don’t need to know their name. We don’t need to know their name. They were very clear about that. So how can I honor that while also gleaning what we need to know for this project? And so going by Informant 864 was the way to do that. It felt like a corrective to the problem of intersexphobia, transphobia, a corrective to the issue of pronouns, a corrective to the surveilling, the policing of them.

But then there was a part of me that was like, what does calling them Informant 864 mean for them as a person? Will they just be known by this number? By “informant”—what is that?