A Love Letter to Black Women Preachers

MELANIE R. HILL’S Colored Women Sittin’ on High is a love letter to Black women preachers. “From the cradle, I was surrounded by Black women preachers,” she writes. “Black women who prayed, Black women who preached and prayed, Black women who laid their hands on me and prophesied a destiny full of hope and fulfilled dreams.” For Hill, womanist sermonic practice isn’t confined to just the pulpit. These preachers include the aunts and grandmothers, artists and activists who have “created a healing and restorative space beyond the four walls of the church for the surrounding community and region.”

“When the women preach, they sing our sighs and preach our possibilities.”

Hill, an assistant professor of both global racial justice and American literature at Rutgers, utilizes Alice Walker’s definition of womanism as laid out in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, focusing closely on how womanists are “committed to survival and wholeness of entire people.” She addresses the ways that womanism and Black women’s literature have informed the work of Black women preachers, attending to their voices in what she terms “womanist sermonic practice.” Through this practice, Black women preachers demonstrate how to love ourselves and the Black bodies that we inhabit and how to love others and fight against systems of oppression.

Hill roots her writing at the intersections of theology, literature, and music. The Black women preachers she discusses include ordained leaders, such as Bishop Barbara Marie Amos and Rev. Sharon Smith Riley, but she doesn’t stop there. Hill also includes the “Mothers of the Movement,” who’ve called for justice following the murders of their children. And the gospel and soul singers, “sonic prophets” who create “sermonic spaces in music,” such as Rosetta Tharpe and Jill Scott. And finally, she includes Black women in literature who preach through their testimonies, like Janie in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Hurston’s novel follows Janie’s journey of liberation from societal expectations as she finds love, fulfillment, and herself. These include her grandmother’s assumption and hope that marriage will bring Janie security. Hill’s title Colored Women Sittin’ On High draws from the unfulfilled aspirations that Janie’s grandmother, Nanny, shares with her: “Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me. ... Ah been waitin’ a long time, Janie, but nothin’ Ah been through ain’t too much if you just take a stand on high ground lak Ah dreamed.”

Colored Women Sittin’ On High preaches on Black women’s freedom dreams. Our grandmothers, great grandmothers, and motherly ancestors had dreams that they could not fulfill because they were Black women living in a particular time. We are the embodiment of those freedom dreams, living in ways that at times exceed our ancestors’ imaginations for what we could do.

Black women preachers cultivate spaces of liberation through the preached word and song that inspire us and revive us through messages of self-love, healing, restoration, and transfiguration. This liberation takes us from blues notes that mirror the challenges and struggles we face amid racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression to grace notes that are defined by hope and new life. As Hill puts it, “When the women preach, they sing our sighs and preach our possibilities.”