Dream, Tremble, Fly

Religion and slavery created a central paradox in Southern history. Whereas thousands of white Southerners used Christianity to justify slavery and racism, some dissenters criticized slavery as unholy. Enslaved Black Southerners sought spiritual freedom through beliefs and practices from many traditions. Dream, Tremble, Fly explores the enchanted interior world of visions, prophecies, and sacred memories that enabled Southerners to challenge or survive slavery during the American War for Independence. At a time when 40 percent of Southerners were enslaved, revelation and revolution were joined.

For one white Quaker in North Carolina, a startling dream forced him to alter his own enslaving ways and embrace the moral cleansing of abolition. In lowcountry Georgia, an enslaved Muslim’s body trembled with the Holy Spirit, transcending the profane captivity of the body. And in Piedmont North Carolina, another enslaved man embarked on two parallel spirit journeys—one toward Christianity, the other in metaphysical return to Africa. Each recounted his experience in a unique way, and each story represents an experiment in reconstructing from bare archival fragments the inner sacred landscape of enslaved and other ordinary people, revealing the entwining of religion with slavery and the quest for freedom.