Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams (review)

Reviewed by: Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams Br. Chrysostom Christie-Searles O. S. B. Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle by Shannen Dee Williams (Durham and London: Duke University Press Books, 2022. Pp. 421. Paperback, 26. 81. ISBN 978-1-4780-1820-9). Shannen Dee Williams's full history of black nuns in the US is the first of its kind, recording as it does both the protracted disappointments and eventual triumphs in the lives of these women in community and society. How prophetic it is that Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, a black nun and foundress of the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles (at the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus in Gower, MO), who had been buried in a simple wooden coffin in a corner of their property, should have gained the attention of the Church when her body, recently exhumed for transferal to a new interment site in their chapel, was found to be apparently incorrupt. Further ecclesiastical evaluation of the situation is of course required to determine whether Sister Wilhelmina is indeed the first deceased Black American to be incorrupt. But as the Church and a growing number of faithful embrace End Page 116 another first of its kind in this rare occurrence on North American soil, interest in Sister Wilhelmina's story is either a suitable introduction or an appropriate dénouement to Subversive Habits, the scholarly work here under review, which includes the stories of Sister Wilhelmina and other Black American Catholic nuns. The book plots a trajectory of the full history of Black Catholic nuns that vivifies an overlooked aspect of Catholic life in the United States. Its layered pathos and engaging treatment of the subject matter transports readers to an earlier, less inclusive, era in the US. At times Williams' meticulous scholarship creates dense chapters and sections that require attention and commitment on the part of readers. Yet, the payoff is great in the gained understanding of the interrelatedness of the complex stories Williams so expertly intertwines. Black nuns, as Williams relates, experienced opposition and rejection in their initial pursuit of vocations in all-white religious orders in the antebellum US. Williams boldly asserts, "that most white US sisterhoods steadfastly refused to admit African-descended people—on equal terms or otherwise—for most of their histories remains one of the Church's best-kept secrets" (5). Those black nuns who found their way into orders did so through patronage of powerful benefactors or by passing for white. Some of these women were indispensable in caring for the sick in wide-spread epidemics, particularly in Maryland in the 19th century. Others educated generations of black children in preparation for higher education and professional achievement throughout the United States for more than a century after Emancipation. Williams painstakingly documents the vocations of black American nuns that were nurtured to ripeness, those vocations that withered on the vine, and those vocations that transitioned into other vocations, such as marriage or celibate life. Readers will learn about Sister Joyce Ruth Williams, whose admissions requests to the Order of St Benedict in St Joseph, MN, had been rejected on the basis of race. The superior of the order declared that the sisters did not know what the Mississippi native would eat and maintained that there was 'no work in the community' that Williams, a recent graduate of the order's College of St Benedict, could do if admitted (167). Also recounted is the story of Mildred Dolbear, a postulant from Mobile, AL, who was dismissed by the Religious Sisters of Mercy in 1930 after someone from the "former Mobile motherhouse" alerted the Mercy council in DC to Dolbears's Afro-Creole heritage, including a grandmother of "pure negro blood and End Page 117 black in color" (104). She eventually entered Monte Maria Monastery of the Visitation in Richmond, VA, where she successfully passed for white and professed vows as Sister Peronne Marie. Another narrative to be found in this book is that of Benedictine Sister of Chicago Karen Bland who in 1995 became the first black American elected to lead a. . .