Life leads you, one thing to another, one project to another, one person to another.
While I was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT in 2016, I took a photography class with B.D. Colen. I was trying to hone a lifelong passion of taking photographs into something more skilled than just setting the aperture. He pushed us to take brazen photos of strangers on the street, and create a 24-hour time capsule of our lives (the only photos we would be able to look at for the rest of our lives when we were shot into space). We had to get dozens of good shots with the restriction that our subject and our own feet could not move at all once planted (thanks, Lauren Whaley!). He had us document the 2016 presidential election as it unfolded, imploded, and he documented me the morning after the election, when we bagged classwork to watch Hillary Clinton’s concession speech (remember those?) during class.
Photo by BD Colen
And we needed to choose a single topic to dive into for our final project.
Life leads you, one thing to another, one project to another, one person to another. I met Stephen Prothero through Killing the Buddha. I met Onaje X. O. Woodbine through Stephen, who served as his advisor at Boston University. Onaje called him “Prof” as they continued making calls and visits long past the dissertation defense, which was about the religion of South Boston’s basketball courts, a place of healing in a world of violence, and which turned into the book Black Gods of the Asphalt, Religion, Hip-Hop and Street Basketball. You can hear Onaje talking about it on Fresh Air here, or read an excerpt at Longreads, or – better yet – buy the book.
Onaje met Donna Haskins through his work on Black Gods. He calls her the Prophetess, and she held a small role in that book, but it wasn’t enough. His new book is all about her. Take Back What the Devil Stole, An African American Prophet’s Encounters in the Spirit World is just out from Columbia University Press. Here’s how CUP describes it:
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.
I needed a photographic subject, Stephen suggested the Prophetess, and so Onaje introduced me to Donna. She welcomed me, and all the spirits she saw whom I had brought with me — they crowded her small apartment — and then he left us alone. Donna let me into her life, let me follow her and her granddaughter around. I am used to this, as a reporter, and I’m always amazed at how welcoming people can be, accepting the invasiveness that journalism requires. For me, this usually involves a reporter’s notebook, and a tape recorder, and – yes – a camera, and my always inadequate attempt to act like an octopus and successfully use them all simultaneously, while asking questions and capturing their answers verbatim and picking up on all the unspoken sentiments and revelatory surroundings at the same time. It can be exhausting.
With the photography assignment, I could just be present with Donna in a totally different way. I was there to watch. To be silent. To learn her story by using only my right eye, pressed up against the viewfinder of my Fuji XT-1. Ever grateful, for Donna’s openness, for Onaje’s introduction, for Stephen’s idea. Grateful that a class assignment could find it’s way to this little video I made, and to inspire the cover image, Donna, arms outstretched, pashmina scarf draped over her head as she prays.
Life leads you, one thing to another, one project to another, one person to another.
What next?
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