Class differences once divided Protestant denominations. Denominations are less important now, but no doubt class and other qualities still divide churches.
Willa Cather (1873-1947), best known for her novels about frontier Nebraska, in 1940 wrote Saphira and the Slave Girl. It’s set in 1850s Virginia west of the Shenandoah Valley near what’s now West Virginia. Cather spent her first nine years there until her family moved to Nebraska. It’s essentially a recall of her early girlhood and the stories she heard from family. I spend time in this area and am enjoyably recognizing many scenes. Cather’s church still stands, now Methodist but Baptist in her time. It appears in the novel.
In the novel, the mother, Saphira, is from an aristocratic old Virginia family and is of course an Episcopalian. She inexplicably marries a Pennsylvania Lutheran beneath her social class. They wed at Christ Episcopal Church in Winchester, beneath whose floor Lord Fairfax was buried. And then they immediately departed for Back Creek, beyond the great valley, where he runs a mill. Alas:
It was not hard to explain why Sapphira had moved away from her native county, where his plain manners, his calling, vague ancestry, even his Lutheran connections, would have made her social position rather awkward. Once removed several days’ journey from her old friends, she could go back to visit them without embarrassment. The miller’s unbending, somewhat uncouth figure need never appear upon the scene at all.
Their daughter is married and widowed young. She takes her children to the local Baptist church in Back Creek, which is called Bethel. As she explained somewhat defensively to her mother:
I’d never have joined with the Baptists if I could have got to Winchester to our own Church. But a body likes to have some place to worship. And the Baptists are good people.
The ever class conscious Saphira responded: “So your father thinks. But then he never did mind to forgather with common people. I suppose that goes with a miller’s business.”
Saphira’s daughter then reflected to herself: “At times she had to speak out for the faith that was in her; faith in the Baptists not so much as a sect (she still read her English Prayer Book every day), but as well-meaning men and women.”
Mr. Fairhead, the young not yet ordained Baptist preacher, regularly rides out from Winchester to preach at Back Creek and also convenes a school in the church basement. The church is multiracial, with black people in the balcony, including Saphira’s slaves. Many of the Baptists can’t read, confirming Saphira’s assumptions, so Mr. Fairhead sings the words of each hymn first so others can follow.
Saphira’s Lutheran husband, preoccupied by salvation, sometimes privately reads Lutheran books at his mill. She “knew he pondered at times upon how we are saved or lost. That was the disadvantage of having been raised a Lutheran. In her Church all those things had been decided.”
In Back Creek presumably there were no nearby Lutheran churches. So he attends Bethel church with his daughter and grandchildren. Saphira disdains the Baptists and gets to the Episcopal church in Winchester when possible. She spends much of the Easter season with her sister in Winchester so they can worship together and enjoy a loftier social life to which she had been accustomed. As Cather describes:
Even now she was always driven to Winchester in March, to stay with her sister Sarah until after Easter. There she attended all the services at Christ Church, where Lord Fairfax, the first patron of the Virginia Dodderidges, was buried beneath the chancel. With the help of her brother-in-law and a cane she limped to the family pew, though she was obliged to remain seated throughout the service. She was a comely figure in the congregation, clad in black silk and white fichu. From lack of exercise she had grown somewhat stout, but she wore stays of the severest make and carried her shoulders high. Her serene face and lively, shallow blue eyes smiled at old friends from under a black velvet bonnet, renewed or “freshened” yearly by the town milliner. She had not at all the air of a countrywoman come to town. No Dodderidge who ever sat in that pew showed her blood to better advantage. The miller, of course, did not accompany her. Although he had been married in Christ Church, by an English rector, he had no love for the Church of England.
Certainly Saphira would not enjoy the simple Baptist church at Back Creek, a different universe from genteel Winchester:
The church was a forlorn weather-boarded building with neither spire nor bell, standing on a naked hillside where the rains had washed winding gutters in the gravelly slope. It had once been painted red, but the boards were now curling from lack of paint. It looked like an abandoned factory left to the mercy of the weather. In the basement underneath, the country day school was kept. The miller and his daughter went up four warped plank steps and entered the church. Once within, they separated. All the men and boys sat on one side of the aisle, the girls and women on the other. The pews were long benches, with backs but no cushions. There was no floor covering of any kind, there were no blinds at the dusty windows. The peaked shingle roof was supported by whitewashed rafters. Up under this roof, over the front door, was the gallery where the coloured people sat. It was a rule among the farmers who owned slaves to send them to church on Sunday.
There’s a wonderful passage about Mr. Fairhead leading worship with the Baptists:
After the prayer he gave out the hymn, read it aloud slowly and distinctly, since many of his congregation could not read. When he closed his hymnbook, the congregation rose. Old Andrew Shand, a Scotchman with wiry red hair and chin whiskers, officially led the singing. He struck his tuning-fork on the back of a bench and began: “There is a Land of Pure Delight,” at a weary, drawling pace. But the Colbert negroes, and the miller himself, immediately broke away from Shand and carried the tune along. Mr. Fairhead joined in, looking up at the gallery. For him the singing was the living worship of the Sunday services; the negroes in the loft sang those bright promises and dark warnings with such fervent conviction. Fat Lizzie and her daughter, Bluebell, could be heard above them all. Bluebell had a pretty soprano voice, but Lizzie sang high and low with equal ease. The congregation downstairs knew what a “limb” she was, but no one, except Andy Shand, ever complained because she took a high hand with the hymns. The old people who couldn’t read could “hear the words” when Lizzie sang. Neither could Lizzie read, but she knew the hymns by heart. Mr. Fairhead often wondered how it was that she sounded the letter “r” clearly when she sang, though she didn’t when she talked.
Could wé but stánd where MÓses stóod
And viéw the lándscape ó’er
Not Jórdan’s stréam nor death’s cold flóod
Would fríght us fróm that shóre.
Mr. Fairhead is invited to Sunday dinner when Saphira is away. She does not enjoy his rustic company, and he is intimidated by her haughty ironic Piedmont Virginia repartee, causing him to blush. Saphira’s husband appreciated Mr. Fairhead’s earnest and educated conversation.
The main plot focuses on Saphira’s attractive mulatto slave girl whom she wrongly suspects of sexual intrigue with her husband. Saphira invites her husband’s amoral nephew to live with them, and he promptly threatens the slave girl with rape. The slave girl escapes bondage with help from Saphira’s daughter who disapproves slavery, partly thanks to Bethel Church. Her Pennsylvania father is also uncomfortable with slavery but doesn’t share his daughter’s abolitionist views. He cannot find in the Bible an explicit rejection of slavery. But his Quaker friend in Winchester assures him one day the slaves will be free. His daughter is disdained by the community for her role in the escape. The daughter, with help from Quakers and Mr. Fairhead, who has ties to the Underground Railroad, spirited the slave girl into Pennsylvania. After reaching Montreal, the escaped slave creates a comfortable life in Canada and returns to Back Creek after the Civil War to see her mother, generating great excitement.
Cather vividly recalled from her girlhood an escaped former slave woman who returned for a visit, on which she based her novel. Cather’s own father and other family were anti-slavery and pro-Union, entailing danger during the war, but also gaining them federal jobs during Reconstruction. Bethel Church in real life was, I’m told, anti-slavery.
Saphira and the Slave Girl showcases the spiritual, political, cultural and class divisions present in every time and place. Interestingly, Cather when young lost her Baptist attachment but later became an enduring Episcopalian. Maybe she identified with Saphira’s daughter, who appreciated the Baptists as good people but still liked the “English prayer book.”
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