Take Back What the Devil Stole
An African American Prophet's Encounters in the Spirit World
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Ms. Donna Haskins is an African American woman who wrestles with structural inequity in the streets of Boston by inhabiting an alternate dimension she refers to as the “spirit realm.” In this other place, she is prepared by the Holy Spirit to challenge the restrictions placed upon Black female bodies in the United States. Growing into her spiritual gifts of astral flight and time travel, Donna meets the spirits of enslaved Africans, conducts spiritual warfare against sexual predators, and tends to the souls of murdered Black children whose ghosts haunt the inner city.
Take Back What the Devil Stole centers Donna’s encounters with the supernatural to offer a powerful narrative of how one woman seeks to reclaim her power from a lifetime of social violence. Both ethnographic and personal, Onaje X. O. Woodbine’s portrait of her spiritual life sheds new light on the complexities of Black women’s religious participation and the lived religion of the dispossessed. Woodbine explores Donna’s religious creativity and her sense of multireligious belonging as she blends together Catholic, Afro-Caribbean, and Black Baptist traditions. Through the gripping story of one local prophet, this book offers a deeply original account of the religious experiences of Black women in contemporary America: their bodies, their haunted landscapes, and their spiritual worlds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Woodbine (Black Gods of the Asphalt), a philosophy and religion professor at American University, presents a stirring ethnography of a Boston woman who claims to have spiritual gifts. Donna Haskins suffered significant pain and trauma growing up as a Black woman in a rough part of 1960s Boston. She barely survived a fire, struggled through school with an undiagnosed lead poisoning–induced learning disability, and endured several sexual assaults before adulthood. Woodbine interviews Haskins and offers her words to describe, in heartbreaking detail, her subsequent bouts with cancer and abusive romantic relationships: "the devil don't want me here, been using my body to take me out from the beginning." During a low point in Haskins's early 40s, she agreed to attend Morning Star Baptist Church with her sister and began having visions of the spiritual realm—eventually developing what she believes are powers to combat demons which she's used to guide others under her new name of "Child of Light." While readers skeptical of Haskins's claims will remain unconvinced, Woodbine's explanation of Haskins's complicated cosmology builds a rich portrait of her religious life and the ways spirituality has strengthened her. This accessible portrait of Haskins's peculiar spiritualism will appeal to scholars of interfaith theology.
